Book Review
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by
Michael Chabon
Winner of the 2008 Hugo Prize for
Best Novel
While perusing the list of books
that are up for this year’s Hugo Award (for Science Fiction, a genre I have
been reading since I picked up my first Ray Bradbury collection as a child), I
came across the title of Michael Chabon’s latest work, “The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union”. This seemed a little incongruous, given that I recalled the work having
been reviewed in several newspapers and programs that don’t normally take the
time to review works of what is deemed “paraliterature”, which is to say, genre
literature. As a matter of fact it had been reviewed quite favorably on NPR,
and from what little information was provided, it seemed a work that didn’t fit
the profile of those works that typically are up for consideration for Hugo or
Nebula awards. Which is not to say that I don’t have a bone to pick with the
way that science fiction has typically been viewed, despite the affirmations of
writers such as Stanislaw Lem who had excoriated the genre as one populated by
charlatans.
It was with these concerns that I
undertook to read the novel, and quickly was able to confirm that the work was
structured along the lines of one of the time-honored formulas of the genre,
that of the alternative history. If the protagonist in H.G. Wells’s influential
novel “The Time Machine” posited that time consisted was in reality a Fourth
Dimension, one that could be traversed at will, then this opened up new
landscapes that, by compressing the passage of time, would allow for the
presentation of a variety of new scenarios. It also opened up the possibility
of time paradoxes, namely, one in which a time travellor could journey into the
past and murder his or her father before having been sired, which was resolved
by the conception of multiple time lines and multiple universes, a conception
that has proven fruitful and has even been incorporated by theoretical
physicists in the form of the “Many Worlds” inaugurated by Hugh Everett III. It
was exploited in novels such as the “Time Ships” by Stephen Baxter, the
alternative histories of Harry Turtledove and the recent novel by Stephen King,
11/22/63 (which was published in 2011). It was also mined by acknowledged
masters of the science fiction field such as Phillip K. Dick in his seminal
“The Man in the High Castle”, a novel which posited the defeat of the Allied
Powers in World War II and the consequent dismemberment of the United States.
Curiously enough, that novel also won the Hugo Award, in 1963.
Michael Chabon’s novel posits as
well an alternative ending to World War II, one in which the Holocaust didn’t
succeed in killed off such a large proportion of Europe’s Jewish population. It
is based on an actual project that was proposed during the 1930s but was never
carried out, in which a temporary homeland for many of these Jews would be
carved out in Alaska. It is an intriguing concept, although it only serves to
underscore the fundamental obstacles that this population encountered both in
Europe as well as in the Americas, one in which the European shtetls would be
reproduced on this continent. But the premise, however dispiriting (and many of
these alternate histories envision scenarios that are much worse than the ones
that prevail), it is one that is also based on whimsy, and reflects a certain
nostalgia for the life of these settlements, and a wish that at least part of
these communities had been saved.
The verbal creativity in this
novel, relayed in an English that captures the awkward structure but also the
creativity of Yiddish, is at once familiar to the American reader. It is the
language we associate with Eastern European immigrants to the United States, a
language that is inflected with humorous inversions and a self-deprecating wit
that that quickly moved out of the Borscht Belt and into the mainstream. It is
the language that entreats offenders to “Go crap in the Ocean!”, a language
with a directness but also a stimulating visual imagery that lends it, as
always, a certain poetic quality. It thus evokes the culture we associate with
this community, with dialogue that is snappy and crisp, and with situations
that could well recall the lower east side of Manhattan during the 1920s, if it
had been transported to the almost barren wilderness of Alaska. Which is not to
say that things would have gone smoothly. The novel honestly posits the
possibility of conflict with native Indian communities that would have felt
displaces, but at the same time, of intermediate characters, those bewildering
new hybrids that combined elements of both cultures, like the Jewish Gauchos of
Argentina, to cite a real-world example.
Here we have memorable characters
such as the physically immense and somewhat lugubrious figure of Rebbe
Shpilman, the leader of a Jewish conservative clan know as the Verbovers who
have shaped the district with their own mix of apocalyptic devotion (they are
ever-awaiting signs of the impending arrival of the Messiah) and petty crime,
and others such as the half-Indian, half-Jewish policeman known as Berko
Shemets (who we could almost imagine as a stolid and taciturn figure born out
of the depths of Eastern European literature, the bureaucratic schlub who
carries out his duty with a certain placidness if it weren’t for the fact that
this façade is broken by his periodic emotional outbursts, ones which give
expression to his deep-seated empathy, his anger and his sense of isolation. It
is almost as if we have a character type from the early Yiddish theater of the
past century, and it represents another point of continuity, in addition to the
linguistic expressions, that help to provide elements of familiarity.
And we have other characters,
figures such as Bina Gelbfish, the no-nonsense, well-grounded Police Chief and
former wife of the protagonist, detective Meyer Landsman. There is little
acrimony here in this relationship, but much that lends itself to an almost
sitcom scenario, and it is the reference to these genres (ones that hark back
to a formulaic structure that was pioneered by figures such as the classical
writer Menander, he of the “New Comedy”) that provides much of the humor for
the novel that is whimsical but also deeply affecting precisely because we know
that it is based on a premise that was never enacted, one of saving a
considerable portion of Europe’s Jewry that perished in the Holocaust. Bina,
indeed, exudes all the sexual heat and gravitational pull of a minor star, a
substantial woman with presence but also mass, one that brings to mind the
stocky women who are fetishized by free-spirit cartoonist Robert Crumb. In
fact, almost all the characters seem to incorporate a sense of scale and primal
essence which can’t help but evoke situations and tastes that are
out-of-proportion, that are exaggerated and memorable precisely because that
are suitable for popular dramas, and this novel at times seems like this, a
story told by a doting grandmother of ethnic background, about life in the old
country, or in this case, in an alternate world that might have been.
Since this book is also a murder
mystery, the dialogue of this Yiddish shammes (detective Landesman) is appropriately
dry, evincing the world-weariness of detective figures who are forced to
confront their own cynicism and need for redemption (which is in part
occupational, and in part existential) as they seek to craft the “stories” that
will help them to solve crimes. Yes, violence is a part of human existence, as
is murder and mutilation and thievery, but there is a grander pageant in
evidence as well. With the backdrop of 3,000 years of Jewish suffering, what
better way to underscore this paradigmatic human condition than to enact in the
many ways in which these characters love (and hate), lie and cheat but also
nurture and protect one another, domestic conflict that allows one to forget
for a minute the grander historical predicaments, the historico-political
dilemmas that are in evidence even here, in this backwater of Alaska?
Other readers have found the language
of Chabon’s other book ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and
Clay") perhaps a little uneven, but in the case of this novel, the
metaphors and visual imagery was, as referenced above, very true to how we tend
to perceive the cultural mileaux of Yiddish immigrant culture. We’ve been
enriched so much by these linguistic contributions, and by the incorporation of
Yiddish idioms into everyday language, where expressions abound such as the verbs
“schlepping” and “kvetching”, exclamations (“Oy, vey”) and in the very rich and
funny language of vituperation (“schlemiel”, “tucchus” and “schmuck”), and
expressions (“Go crap in the ocean!” exclaim several of the characters), an
evocation that takes on a hint of nostalgia.
The murder mystery (which is
explained in part through the medium of chess, and is filtered as well in the
cultural references to Jewish mysticism and the belief that the murdered son of
Rebbe Schpilman might have been the messiah) is fascinating, but what proves to
be more engaging is the simple human story of compassion and the need for
redemption that is felt by this Yiddish detective, one who has also experienced
his own loss and leaves him yearning for a son who, if he had come to term and
been born rather than been lost to miscarriage, would have been named Django.
Thus, in the end, I found this
book more satisfying from an emotional rather than intellectual standpoint, and
as with all good and memorable literature, enjoyed the use of formulas that, as
is the case with so much paraliterature, capture the potential to tell old
stories in new ways that prove emotionally satisfying not because they are new,
but because they embellish on old and familiar stories, those evident, for
example, in the epics of old. What could have been, if things had turned out
differently? It is all details. The grander pageant would, perhaps, have
remained the same: people trying to love one another, trying to carve out safe
existences, trying to find happiness, but also carrying around their own
torment, and like detective Landesmann, having to see the woman they couldn’t
love, and being unable to forget the child of their heart that might have been.
It would have been more of the same.
Oy, vey!
Copyrights ORomero 2013
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