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Loading... The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novelby Michael Chabon
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Busifer | Jul 3, 2009 |   Did you know that Sitka Alaska was a Jewish enclave? Well, maybe it isn't really, but it is in this book! Chabon writes an entertaining mystery set in Sitka, beginning with a dead man, no less, and has all the twists and turns you want from a great mystery. Lives are intertwined in many ways over many years and our hero has to follow the thread to the past to unravel the present crime. Oh, and twine has a very special use! Fun! But, not up to the Wow! of Kavalier and Clay. (  )lwobbe | Jun 28, 2009 | I had trouble getting into this book, even though I did think it was well-written. What I liked least: all the Yiddish expressions. I wasn't sure if they were "real" (i.e. people who knew more about Judaism would recognize them) or if they came completely from the book's own world.What I liked most: little glimpses of how the book's world was different ("Marilyn Monroe Kennedy's pink pillbox hat"). (  )MNMom | Jun 27, 2009 | Just could not get into it. (  )WinonaBaines | Jun 24, 2009 |  Michael Chabon's alternative Sitka, Alaska exists in a world where the Jewish state of Israel folded in 1948 and where the US offered the survivors of the Holocaust a temporary refuge. Now, nearly sixty years later that refuge is reverting to the US, and the Jews will all be forced to move on. Against this backdrop a burned-out policeman is presented with a dead body in his flop-house hotel and his ex-wife returned as his boss to shut down the Sitka police department. As the story unfolds it is equal parts study of Meyer Landsman, disillusioned, downfallen seculer yiddish policeman, noirish murder-mystery, and alternative history cum-political commentary. The community of Sitka is fully realized with neighborhoods of secular and religious jews of all types and its own rich history and language. The language part yiddish slang that you may already recognize, and part created fresh just for the story. In both cases there is a short but helpful glossary at the end. In an interview Chabon said that he had to write shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs than he ever did before to make the story work. But it does work. And his wonderful prose is as readable and evocative as ever. One that particularly struck me was his description of a estranged father and son meeting up: "It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is." If you like a well told detective story, or you've enjoyed Chabon's other novels, you'll enjoy this one. Don't the the idea of an alternative history put you off - there is nothing SF about it and you'll recognize the world you know just shifted a very little bit. ( )grizzly.anderson | Jun 14, 2009 | 1  0.146 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0007149824, Hardcover)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 revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. But 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. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, 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 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I do not care for crime stories told in the hard boiled vein and so had a bad start on this story. Something, though, dragged me in, and once there I was hooked - I just had to know how things turned out.
Maybe not the most revolutionary book ever written, but witty, entertaining and very well crafted. I can recommend reading it. (