The Yiddish Policeman's Union is the latest award-winning novel from the Pullitzer Prize-winning author of Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon. Published by Harper Perennial (ISBN 978-0007149834, 464pp)
The Yiddish Policeman's Union
There's a corpse in room 208 of the Zamenhof Hotel in Sitka, the eponymous capital of the boomerang-shaped island just off the coast of Alaska. The night manager of the Zamenhof rousts one of the other guests, Homicide Detective Meyer Landsman, who's been living at the hotel ever since he separated from his wife Bina.
Meyer is convinced that it's a gangland execution, maybe by the Russians, but when he starts to investigate, the case leads him up against the local gangsters, he is quickly warned off the case by his new commanding officer. That's bad enough, but the really bad news is that the commanding officer is...his ex-wife. Things go from bad to worse: Landsman is shot, knocked out, and has to flee through the snow in Alaska. And he's racing against time as well, for he has only two months, until Reversion.
Michael Chabon
Because in two months the frozen Jewish homeland of Sitka, where the Jews have lived since 1940, will revert to American sovereignty. In Michael Chabon's brilliant Nebula award winning novel, a real-life plan to offer the European Jews a sanctuary that was defeated in Congress passed in Landsman's world. Berlin was (atom) bombed in 1946, and the infant nation of Israel died all but still-born after three months.
Chabon has created an alternate society stuffed full of dialect and larger than life characters; Berko Shemets the half-Indian half-Jew, and Bina Geldfarb. The plot is tangled and complex, but believable, and Sitka is as real as any town in our world. The book is stuffed full of wonderful laugh-out loud moments, such as the night spent in his sister's bed with his two nephews:
The Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of manouevres, a kung-fu of slumber that drives Landman to the very limit of the bed. (p192)
Wonder Boys
For the last decade or so Chabon has been something close to a one-man publishing industry. He sprang to fame with Wonder Boys, which was filmed with Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire. In 1999, he won the O. Henry Prize for his story 'Son of the Wolfman,' and in 2001 the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the story of two young men on the eve of World War Two who create a comic-strip about a Nazi fighting superhero, but who are desperate to do something in real life to save their doomed brethren in Europe.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union is something else again, a wonderful marriage of genre and the literary that has been recognized by sci-fi fandom with this year's Hugo and by the SFWA with the Nebula. If Chabon is marginally better at depicting the micro rather than the macrocosmic, that is merely a reflection of his literary roots.
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