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Loading... The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)by Michael Chabon
I think Chabon is the best writer when it comes to writing with humor and wit. I cannot enough of his twists of phrase and usually anti-heroes who are most of the time, addicted to something and failing at others but still engage the reader . What if the Ashkenazi Jews had gone to a temporary independent state in Sitka, Alaska, instead of Palestine in 1948? And what if they had cops who talked like Sam Spade? And what if some of them were in cahoots with Christian evangelicals, the messianic ambitions of both groups depending on a religious occupation of Jerusalem? Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is speculative fiction, but after the first few pages, you feel right at home. It seems you can shuffle and reshuffle the stew of political and religious players we have now into different times and places, but things will pretty much turn out as they have now: messy, bloody, and sad. Read the rest at my blog: http://thegrimreader.blogspot.com/2013/04/i-visit-sitka-in-alternate-universe.ht... Some books you love because the worldbuilding is amazing, some because the story is compelling or the characters are riveting, and some because the language itself is so beautiful or intricate. This book is all of that. nearly dropped it, it was so jewish, but persevered and absolutely loved it
Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. A mobile phone is a shoyfer (perhaps because, like the ram's horn, it calls you), a gun is a sholem (a Yiddish version of a Peacemaker?). Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words. He takes the wry, underbelly vision of the ordinary that the best of noir fiction offers and ratchets it up to the limit. Nothing is allowed to be itself; all people and events are observed as an echo of something else. Voices are like "an onion rolling in a bucket", or rusty forks falling. An approaching motorcycle is "a heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp." Chabon's ornate prose makes Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain. Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it. For the most part, Chabon's writing serves the knotted mystery that is being unravelled, but there is eventually a point where it begins to weary the mind, where the elaborations of things get in the way of the things themselves and the narrative gets sucked under by style. The compulsory paragraph of Byzantine physical description whenever another character arrives on the scene starts to seem an irritating interlude; another over-reaching cadenza. Though it seems churlish to complain about such a vivid talent, a little less would have been enough already. It’s obvious that the creation of this strange, vibrant, unreal world is Chabon’s idea of heaven. He seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction. Some of the pleasures of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union are, actually, distinctly Dan Brown–ish. Mr. Chabon often ends chapters with cliffhangers that might be tiresome in the hands of a lesser writer (say, Dan Brown). Here, they’re over-the-top suspenseful, savory and delicious. More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and byzantine political and sectarian divisions — that the reader comes to take its existence for granted. By the end of the book, we feel we know this chilly piece of northern real estate, where Yiddish is the language of choice, the same way we feel we have come to know Meyer Landsman — this “secular policeman” who has learned to sail “double-hulled against tragedy,” ever wary of “the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque” that can topple a boat in the shallows. This novel makes you think, but it is an ordeal to read. The problem: Chabon has mixed two very dark story lines that jar the reader. There is the real tragedy of Sitka's wandering Jews, and then there is the faux bleakness of the noir genre with its posturing attitude. The central character comes across as a Jewish Humphrey Bogart wannabe, not a three-dimensional character who can shoulder a 400-plus-page novel about exile, fanatics and longing. Is contained in
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For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:37:45 -0500)
In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlinget partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.
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However, while I sucked down the other one (The City and the City) and decided it was my favorite book out of the last hundred I've read, The Yiddish Policeman's Union took me forever to read and I never felt more than lukewarm about it. All the elements were things I SHOULD have enjoyed, but something about the prose just slowed me down and made reading feel like a chore.
I can't even point to anything specific to explain why I had to slowly chip away at this book 10 pages here, 15 pages there, in order to get through it. Usually I'm able to say something a little more constructive about why something didn't work for me, but all I'm left with after finishing it is a bit of murky confusion. (