{"id":1457,"date":"2009-04-14T20:39:24","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T04:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=1457"},"modified":"2009-04-14T20:39:39","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T04:39:39","slug":"the-yiddish-policemans-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=1457","title":{"rendered":"The Yiddish Policeman’s Union"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was excellent Passover reading, for reasons I’ll explain. The book is set in a counterfactual present where secular Yiddish culture wasn’t crushed by the Holocaust. Instead, it migrated to a gritty frontier district in Alaska with yiddish-speaking cops, crooks, lowlifes, idling chess-players, dissolute klezmorim, pork-loving secularists and insular hassidim. According to a review at the Yiddish Book Center website<\/a>, “the entire project actually began life as an essay from the late 1990s about a phrasebook called Say It in Yiddish, which seemed to Chabon to be a guidebook to a land that has never existed, where one needs to know how to say \u201cWhat is the flight number?” and \u201cI will call a policeman” in mameloshn.<\/p>\n

In the book’s fictional world, Sitka Alaska becomes the refuge of millions of Jews after the Holocaust when the Zionist settlement in Israel was crushed. The refuge was temporary, the 60-year agreement is about to expire, and most Jews are facing deportation once more. The irreverent homicide detective hero is estranged from his ex-wife and nurses his alienation in a worlds-fair shot glass of slivovitz. The villains of the piece are a secretive chassidic sect who operate an organized crime ring and conspire to bring about redemption with a violent Messianic plot. The book explores classic Jewish themes of exile and redemption from thoroughly secular antimessianic perspective, making for tasty Passover reading.<\/p>\n

The book was heavily advertised as the adventure of a literary author in the wilds of genre fiction. I was concerned that I’d find it over-written (for example, I hated Everything is Illuminated). But Chabon did a fine job of translating Chandler. His figurative language is apt. A few examples culled by a NYMag review<\/a> Landsman\u2019s ex-wife \u201caccepts a compliment as if it\u2019s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken.\u201d A pretentious, overly formal journalist speaks Yiddish \u201clike a sausage recipe with footnotes.\u201d An awkward father-son hug \u201clooked like the side chair was embracing the couch.\u201d The neoyiddish slang is entertaining – a cellphone is a shoyfer and handgun is a sholem.<\/p>\n

I had only two quibbles. The book has a characteristic of many mystery-thrillers – the plot climax is convoluted and cartoonlike; I stop caring, skim, and then read back to parse what is supposed to have happened. I care about the resolution of the characters and themes, but the plot to destroy the world, whatever. I’m glad to see that the book is getting a film treatment by the Coen brothers, and you can read the wannabe movie scenes in the vehicle chases and underground escapes. <\/p>\n

The other quibble is a bit of political correctness. Spoiler alert, if you haven’t read the book yet and care….
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\nThere are two key characters who die; one is a closeted gay man, and the other a macha bush pilot described as “lesbian in everything but sexual preference.” I thought we were 30-40 years past the date when people with sexuality off the center of the bell curve needed to meet a tragic end. It was entertaining that the woulda-been messiah was a gay ex-chassid junkie who tied off with tefillin, but I wished that he had found a nice boyfriend somewhere along the line.<\/p>\n

I strongly recommend the book. Chabon has written a fun translation of Chandler into “Jewish”, does a great job with language, setting and atmosphere, a decent job with character and theme, and adapts the traditional plot in an entertaining manner. If you haven’t read it yet, enjoy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was excellent Passover reading, for reasons I’ll explain. The book is set in a counterfactual present where secular Yiddish culture wasn’t crushed by the Holocaust. Instead, it migrated to a gritty frontier district in Alaska with yiddish-speaking cops, crooks, lowlifes, idling chess-players, dissolute klezmorim, pork-loving secularists and insular hassidim. … Continue reading “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-nv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1457"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1464,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions\/1464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}