A police procedural murder-mystery which takes place in a fictional Jewish settlement in Alaska. I couldn't get into it; the writing wasn't horrible but there was just something missing in the storytelling. Plus there was a lot of Yiddish which I couldn't understand, so I felt like I was missing a lot of the story. ( )

A creative alternative history set in Sitka, Alaska. Chabon's gorgeous prose is well-represented in this novel. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Is Michael Chabon possibly our nation's greatest living writer? Oh, wait, I already know the answer to that rhetorical question -- yes, yes he is. And that's because, more than almost anyone else working today, Chabon has the ability to elegantly enfold the elements of literature most revered by academes with the elements most sought by the beach-and-airport crowd -- or in other words, he is able to find a magically perfect balance in his books between an exciting plot, deep character development, and a sophisticated personal style, and by "magically perfect" I mean that it's almost impossible to determine how exactly he pulls it off, even when you're sitting there actually reading the book in question. And so it is that Chabon is one of the few authors in America right now to have novels that regularly receive prestigious award nominations (and in fact even a Pulitzer win once, for 2000's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) even while being hugely popular bestsellers at the same time.

Take for example 2006's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which I recently got a chance to read through the new "Netflix for books" service BookSwim.com (from whom I recently received a complimentary two-month membership, in exchange for writing about my experience here after it's over; that write-up will be coming in early December), a book so insanely popular that I've been searching for vain for a spare copy within the Chicago Public Library system for two entire years now. And that's ironic, because the book is in actuality a science-fictiony "alternate history" tale, and in fact is one of the few books in history to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards in the same year, the two most prestigious awards in SF and with highly competitive committees that are loathe to give it to the same book -- turns out that in Chabon's fictional universe, World War Two wasn't actually won until 1946, a much harder fight than what happened in real life (in his version, for example, Germany actually beats the Soviet Union), and that only ended after the US dropping a series of atomic bombs on Berlin. As a result, then, the very real Jewish experiment in establishing a unified Israeli nation in those same years was in his universe a dismal failure, due to the US's backing military support being so diverted by the war; prompted by liberals in Congress, then, as a conciliatory gesture the US establishes a new federal district in a large stretch of southern Alaska just for Jewish refugees (something actually contemplated in real life, which was the main inspiration behind this entire book), which over the decades swells into a major metropolitan area of over three million, comprising Jews from all over the world and of every persuasion, from mystics to militants and everything in between.

Whew, yeah, I know! And in fact, apart from the actual storyline itself, a major reason for this book existing is simply for Chabon to create a convincingly complex history for this "Sitka" that never was, using the incidental passages of this 400-page novel to leak out a massively complicated timeline: from the first generation of Mid-Century Modernist "Polar Bear" settlers, promised a fertile farmland paradise by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes as an enticement to move there in the first place, just to discover upon arriving a half-frozen wasteland and hostile Indian natives; to the World's Fair the district hosts in 1977, considered by most to be Sitka's cultural height; to the establishment of the "Jewish mafia," a particularly hardass clan of rural Russians known as the Verbovers (or slangily as simply "the black hats"), almost extinguished as an ethnic group during the war and with them never forgetting this fact; al the way up to the early 2000s of our story, with Chabon presenting us a crumbling, past-its-prime Sitka, just waiting out its last few months before officially reverting back to Alaskan territory (and with all three million residents getting kicked out at that point, and with no one quite sure where they're all going to go), with more and more of these soon-to-be exiles turning these days into trigger-happy Zionists, convinced that the Great Reversion of 2008 is a sign from God that it's time for them to march right back into the Holy Land and try taking over Jerusalem again, whether the Muslims currently there f-cking like it or not.

And let's face it, that just this alone would've made for a fine book, although one probably with only a limited appeal among mere genre enthusiasts, but this is where Chabon is truly brilliant -- because in reality, everything I've just described serves as background dressing only to the murder mystery making up the actual main plotline of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. And not just any murder mystery either, but a noir murder mystery, full of wisecracking alcoholic detectives and tough-as-nails dames, dangerously close-lipped gangsters and all the rest; in fact, Chabon has gone on record in the past about this, confessing that he meant this novel to partly be an homage to such pulp-fiction writers as Raymond Chandler and the like. And the reason this is brilliant is because an environment like this surprisingly turns out to be perfect for telling a noirish pulp-fiction story; because believe me, you've never heard sparkling rat-a-tat dialogue until you've heard it from the mouths of a couple of bitter, Yiddish-speaking Jews. It's the element that really earns Chabon his chops, and what elevates him way past the usual genre author; because while most writers would be exhausted merely from the effort of putting together this fantastically original and complex history of a frozen Holy Land tucked away in the Arctic Circle, Chabon himself essentially starts over from scratch at this point and instead asks, "Okay, now what can I actually do with this environment I've created?"

And this isn't even the end of the inventiveness; because on top of everything else, the book turns out to have a political message too, with George Bush in Chabon's made-up universe still managing to be President in the early 2000s, despite the fantastically fictional half-century of alternative history that precedes him. Although I won't reveal any of the actual plot developments regarding the last half of the novel, let's just say that it's important to the story that Bush is President, and that by its end The Yiddish Policemen's Union turns out to be yet another early-2000s scathing indictment of the neo-fascist, superstition-obsessed times we all lived through back then; and in fact, the ending of this book is not going to be very well received either by hardline Israelis and other militant Zionists, a surprising element in a novel where nearly every single character is Jewish.

Any of these elements on their own are just fine, and alone would make for a perfectly serviceable if not eventually forgettable book; combine them all into one tale, though, and you suddenly have an explosive game-changer that will literally blow your head right off your freaking neck. This is the power of Michael Chabon, and why more and more people each year are going absolutely nuts for his work; and I admit, now that I've read three of his novels myself (the other two being the aforementioned Kavalier & Clay and his early hit Wonder Boys, adapted in 2000 by Curtis Hanson into an equally great movie starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire), I too am rapidly becoming one of these Chabon fanatics, and am even thinking now of reading his new book of essays regarding the struggle among perpetual-childhood Gen-X males to grow up (Manhood for Amateurs), even though the very subject usually makes me want to claw out my own f-cking eyes. As you can tell, The Yiddish Policemen's Union comes with a giant recommendation today, and now stands in my eyes as easily one of the top ten post-9/11 novels so far in history. ( )

I admire this book more than I like this book. I like the premise. I sympathize with the main characters. And yes, Chabon can really write. So what's not to like? One, I suspect that I'd get more out of this book if I was Jewish. Two, I'd like to know more about the wider world in which such a political entity could exist, though I can see how that would undercut the lived-in quality that Chabon has given this novel. As for the bigger pay-off in the end, absurd enough events have happened that it's no weirder than anything else. ( )

This was good, but not as good as Kavalier and Clay. The mix of Yiddish slang and Alaskan/Native American terms and atmosphere was surprisingly natural. ( )

This was good, but not as good as Kavalier and Clay. The mix of Yiddish slang and Alaskan/Native American terms and atmosphere was surprisingly natural. ( )

Chabon's obviously a good writer. But this alternate history has too much bitterness and not enough joy; too much homage to detective stories, and not enough good detective story. ( )

What if in 1948 the newly established state of Israel collapsed? And what if the Alaskan panhandle(named Sitka) became the home for 4 million Jews instead? And what if, after 60 years, this "home" reverted back to the Alaskan Indians and left those Jews looking for a place to live? This is the premise of Michael Chabon's fascinating novel.

The protagonist, Meyer Landsman, is a police detective with a drinking problem, an estranged wife who has suddenly become his boss, a moral compass that prevents him from going with the flow and no idea what will become of him when the reversion is complete. He is half-heartedly trying to solve the mystery surrounding the murder of Mendel Shpilman, a flophouse junkie, who just might be the Tzaddik Ha-Dor,that individual who, according to the Hsaidic concept, is a special, saintly person, born once in a generation, who could become the Jewish Messiah if conditions are right in the world. "Landsman feels a profound ebb in his will to pursue the matter of the dead yid in 208. What difference will it make if he catches the killer? A year fron now, Jews will be Africans, and this old ballroom will be filled with tea-dancing gentiles, and every case that ever was opened or closed by a Sitka policeman will be filed in cabinet nine."

There is so much action and so many characters to keep straight, and so much history to these characters, everything sprinkled with lots of Yiddish vocabulary that it takes a good hundred pages to begin to appreciate Chabon's genius. The alternate history has you second guessing your own knowledge of the past and the character development, especially of Landsman and his wife, Bina is so thoughtfully done that you empathize with them completely. And you root for them! Oh do you root for them because what they're up against is so much bigger than a murder.

At one point in the story, after Landsman has been interrogated for over 24 hours, the author gives us this: "The night is a cold sticky stuff that beads up on the sleeves of his overcoat. Korczak Place is a bowlful of bright mist, smeared here and there with the pawprints of sodium lamps. Half-blind and cold in his bones, he trudges along Monastir Street to Berlevi Street, then over to Max Nordau Street, with a kink in his back and an ache in his neck and a sharp throbbing pain in his dignity. The space recently occupied by his mind hisses like the fog in his ears, hums like a bank of fluorescent tubes. He feels that he suffers from tinnitis of the soul." Wow. Beautiful language is the name of the game throughout. Highly recommended. ( )

I'm throwing my two cents in. This is a spectacular book with beautiful writing. It's one of my favorite Chabon novels.

Highly recommended. ( )

Michael Chabon comes up with these quirky interesting premises for his novels. Comic book authors, for example. I thought that I would really enjoy "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," but when I tried to read it the book never got started. Maybe I should try again.

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is an alternate history novel in the Philip K. Dick, "The Man In The High Castle" tradition. In this novel, European Jews have been resettled in Sitka Alaska during and after World War Two. There apparently was an actual proposal to do this at the time, which was never acted upon. The district of Sitka, given to the Jews for a period of sixty years, is about to revert to the ownership of the state of Alaska when the novel begins. Oddly, no one seems to have given any thought as to where all these people are going to go, but they can't stay in the US without green cards, which are not forthcoming.

The central character is a police detective in Sitka, trying to solve the execution style murder of a junkie in the residential hotel that the detective lives in. The book is a crime novel on one level, a science fiction novel on another and a book about millennialism, Jewish folklore, American immigration policy, evangelical politics and Tlingit Indian culture.

I am not going to give away any spoilers. There is a lot going on in the book. It's really about us, here in the current version of the 21st century.

I'll Never Forget The Day I Read A Book!

I was impressed with the creativity and comprehensiveness of Chabon's writing of an alternate history --of a homeland in Alaska for the Jewish people. Unfortunately, that's where the positive elements ended for me. I found the plot and characters really difficult to follow and the writing often very forced and cumbersome. ( )

Admittedly, I haven't finished reading this book yet, though I'm really liking the structure of it, as well as the use of present tense and the zingers at the end of chapters. I'm fearful about the ending, though. [author: Michael Chabon]'s endings tend to leave me unsatisfied. ( )

In an interview at the end of the audio-book version I listened to, Michael Chabon explains that the inspiration for this book originated with Uriel & Beatrice Weinreich's Say it in Yiddish. After coming across this "phrase book for travelers," Chabon started to imagine a world that would call for such a phrase book. (Yiddish is nearly a dead language. Most of the communities in which it was spoken were wiped out during WWII. Where, then, would a traveler go to put these Yiddish phrases to use?) Chabon shared some of these thoughts in an essay, and found that people were quite offended. From this response, the idea for a story grew.

Not knowing this background as I was reading, I found it incredibly difficult to fathom the justification for creating such a complex and contrived story world. The Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place in Sitka, Alaska -- an island settlement that had been set aside for Jewish refugees following WWII. (Chabon drew his inspiration for this location from a failed plan by the U.S. government to actually create such a settlement.) Written in the present tense, the story is happening today, sixty years after the Jews' settlement in Sitka. The settlement is about to be dissolved, re-appropriated into the U.S. In the backdrop of all the characters' interactions is the looming threat of dissolution and recurrent diaspora.

My main criticism of the book is that there's just too much going on. For one thing, the entire pretext of the book's setting is a fabrication. This is fine, but it inevitably leads to the necessity of additional explication as the plot progresses. On top of this, the characters find their lives controlled, to varying degrees, by both Talmudic and secular law. And since not all characters follow the same sets of laws, it becomes a bit difficult to follow who is adhering to what system. (I highly recommend a rigorous education in Talmudic law before attempting to analyze this part of the story.) On top of all that is the plot of a murder mystery, which is almost completely overshadowed by the sort of situational difficulties the Sitka Jews face in this story.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not usually a huge fan of murder mysteries, but in this case I felt that the murder mystery is almost tangential to the real story, which (in my opinion) should focus more directly on the relationship between Meyer Landsman and his ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish, as well as their various friends, relatives, and associates. That alone would have been enough of a story, especially as Landsman and his ex-wife navigate the guilt of having decided to abort their unborn child Django when they learned of a potentially devastating problem in the baby’s chromosomes. [It would have been particularly interesting to see greater focus on this point, given Chabon's personal experience in the matter -- he and his wife, author Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother, 2009), once made a similar decision.]

It was certainly an interesting story, but I found it rather tedious and a bit hard to follow. I think a re-read would be helpful, but I don't know what I cared enough about the characters to warrant it.

This one has been gathering dust on the shelves for far too long. For some reason I just never quite got around to picking this one up, even though I've really enjoyed everything Michael Chabon ever wrote. I finally got around to it for the "Reading Globally" challenge, as it's set in Alaska and July's theme was polar regions. (Everyone else seemed to be reading histories of polar explorers, I did feel a little left field!)

Picture if you will, an alternative reality: the nation of Israel failed, leaving the Jewish people still scattered across the globe in their diaspora. In Sitka, Alaska, there is a Jewish community but they are about to be scattered again as their 60 year lease is up and Sitka is about to be re-integrated into the rest of Alaska. Our protagonist, Meyer Landsman, is a recently divorced cop who is called in when one of the neighbours in his seedy hotel is murdered. While the pressure is on to just rubber-stamp all outstanding crimes before re-integration, Meyer is compelled to find out the truth in this case.

And I found it a complete page-turning, rip-snorting, funny, hard-boiled, dry-humoured masterpiece. I can't believe that he could think such a reality up, and then make it so believable.

It's about family, friendships, Judaism, politics, gangsters, murder, dispossession, life, drugs, chess. And it's written as a page-turning hard-boiled whodunnit. And it has Yiddish puns in it. (Oy vey. And he doesn't use "oy vey" until page 168. I was amazed by his restraint, because I started using that phrase as soon as I hit the first Yiddish word in the book.)

It's really quite marvellous, and I love this author for his audacity and talent and ability to pull this one off. ( )

Interesting story, rather meandering though, and the end is a bit disappointing. Full review here. ( )

I ordered this book because my boyfriend loves this author. I mean, every time I turn around it seems like he's gushing about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is a lovely book, I'm sure. But I haven't got a copy of that book, or any other book by Michael Chabon. When I saw this one pop up on Bookmooch.com, I grabbed it. I didn't know a thing about it other than the author wrote a book my boyfriend loves.

Of course, had I bothered to learn anything else about the book I might have realized there was a problem. I don't really care for detectives or film noir stories, and of course this book is a major tribute to the genre. Mysteries usually aren't my favorite reads. I never think of a book's "Jewishness" as potential to prevent enjoyment - and if one reads Chabon one must expect it, even I know that - but I'm not Jewish, so I always have a sneaking suspicion I'm missing something important to the culture as I read. (I get the same feeling with Song of Solomon and Toni Morrison.)

Love the wordiness, and the constant similes and metaphors (although at times they were so torrential a downpour I thought I'd drown in them) were a wonderful use of the English language. I can see why people love Chabon's writing. But the plot, the story? Eh. It was OK. I just didn't care, and felt so detached from the characters. ( )

A very interesting book, but not one I am interested in rereading. It is a very unusual parallel-universe premise where the state of Israel is never created. Instead, the United States offers temporary residence to Jews up in Alaska. They have their own bureaucratic territory with their own law enforcement and so on, much like our current reservation system for Native American tribes. However, the expiration date for this Jewish territory is fast approaching, reminiscent of the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. This is a noir murder mystery complete with the requisite broken-down police detective, bleak atmosphere, run-down motels for transients, ex-wife cum superior officer, run-ins with street thugs, and on and on. Chabon's prose is very evocative and lyrical in an ugly and angular sort of way. I have not read any of his other books, so I don't know whether his descriptive artistry always has such an unpleasant tang, or if it is a function of the genre he is portraying. His dialogue and characterizations were spot on. I could just hear the Yiddish and see the hands waving in classic form as portrayed in endless movies and TV shows. He weaves all of the characters together into a well-rounded plot brought to a fairly neat and tidy end, yet without resolving any of the bigger issues facing the people in the story. ( )

This novel took me a ridiculously long time to finish. I had to push myself to read to the end. Ugh. It took me some time to figure out why I didn't like the book, and I came up with a couple of reasons:
1. Landsman is intensely shallow. He is afraid of the dark! (Which, by the way, was about the only laugh I got from this book.) He is always playing games with his ex wife Bina, which got really annoying. I just didn't view him as a good main character.

2. Not a lot of dialouge. (That's just a personal thing. I like dialouge. It keeps things moving.)

3. All the Yiddish! I had no idea what this words meant!

4. Bad ending. Very cheesy to me.

Waste of time! The only reason it got 1 and a half stars was because of the scared of the dark thing, and Berko, Landsman's sidekick. ( )

The first few pages kept me for reading it for a while, since they were very bleak. But once stated I felt in love with his language, with the expression he used.
Wonderful. ( )

This book was extremely disappointing. I did feel the need to finish reading it, though, as it had come to me highly recommended by several people whose reading taste is similar to my own. It was a book of Jewish interest. Less important but another reason I made it through to the end was that it was a murder mystery. I felt I should at least discover the solution to the crime.

I can't pinpoint the exact reasons for my dislike. In the past, I've read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and liked that book very much. The experience of reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union was particularly grueling to me. I never had the sense of a nicely flowing story. It felt more as if I had been catapaulted into each chapter. I felt disoriented trying to figure out where I was and who the annoying characters around me were.

The sholem and the Shoyfer. Are those real words? Are they Yiddish? Was I supposed to know them? I didn’t.

The similes and metaphors made me absolutely beserk!! Agreed that they were clever, but in a story that was hard for me to follow, I didn’t need distractions.

Maybe the real reason I didn't care for this novel was simply its genre. I’m not usually a fan of murder mysteries nor of alternative histories. However, I thought there would be something more appealing about this particular book. I guess I had been mistaken. ( )

I've never quite seen the point of alternative history as a literary convention: this book has done nothing to change that. As a reader, I would expect a writer who has gone to the trouble of designing a whole "might-have-been" culture and society ought to be using that perspective to tell me something profound and original about the culture and society we actually have. In Chabon's case, all he seems to be doing is showing off a lot of clever linguistic fireworks and concealing an implausible thriller plot behind a pastiche 1940s detective story. If you suspend the rules of realism, there should be more to it than word-play and a few cheap gibes at Zionists, American imperialists, and followers of orthodox religion.

Having said that, it is undoubtedly an entertaining and clever book: not as funny as I was led to expect, but nicely done. Just as in real noir detective fiction, the best bits are those scenes where the detective has been shot, hit on the head, is faced with some intellectual challenge while trying to recover from a hangover, or has been locked up by the bad guys. The book is perhaps long enough for the reader to get a bit bored with extravagant similes and the present historic tense, but the Yiddish language-play does help to liven things up a bit. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, but not until I listed to the audiobook version. Last year I bought this book, and though I tried twice to read it, I just couldn't get past the first few chapters. There were so many Yiddish expressions it made me work too hard to get to the story. (This is more a criticism of my laziness than the author!)
This year I found the book was in audio form, and picked it up right away. I am so glad I did. I listened to it in my car on my commute, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The story is set in an alternate "what if" reality. What if Franklin Roosevelt had been taken up on his proposal that the Jews from post WWII be colonized in Alaska? That is the world that is imagined in this novel.
The story is amusing and engaging. The hard-boiled detective novel stays true to its genre, while adding a great humor with the turn of the phrase.
Here is an example of one of the funny conversations that occur throughout the story:

“Look at the head on the sheygets, the thing has its own atmosphere,” Landsman says. “Thing has ice caps.”

“Indeed the man has a very big head.”

“Every time I see it, I feel sorry for necks.”

I am going to give it 4-1/2 stars. ( )

meh. ( )

We follow homicide detective Meyer Landsman, and we find him when he's at his absolute bottom; living in a flea hotel, with a drinking problem, and as the world is turning a fellow unlucky is found murdered in another room a few floors down. As the story unwinds we get to laugh, to sigh, and get a waft of that precious 90's X-files feeling as we zap through a few days on the Alaskan coast, in an imaginary near future where a lot of things turned out in another way, with a small part of that frozen country a jewish enclave.

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. ( )