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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. TheBoltChick | Jul 7, 2009 |   meh. (  )bumpish | Jul 5, 2009 | 1  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. (  )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 | 0.087 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
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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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. (