The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
Posted in Science Fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 26 September 2009
Harper Perennial, 2008. 411p
Meyer Landsman is a homicide cop in the Jewish reservation of Sitka – in Alaska. This is a world in which the Soviet Union seems never to have existed, the atom bomb was dropped on Berlin in 1946 and Jews decisively thrown out of Palestine in 1948; after which they were granted limited rights to live in the northern US province. As a result these settlement Jews are known in some quarters as the Frozen Chosen. Along with his partner – a half-Jewish half-Tlingit Indian – Landsman is investigating the murder, apparently during an unfinished chess game, of the son of a local gang boss who is also a chief rabbi. To complicate matters Landsman’s ex-wife has just been installed as a replacement for his immediate boss.
The book contains a torrent of Yiddish words and phrases. So much so that the effect is a bit like being battered around the head with Jewishness. Enough already. In this context it is just as well that Chabon has a Jewish background as the frequency of the appearance of the epithet “yid” is astounding. This is casually racist language which I suspect no non-Jewish author would nowadays feel comfortable in using.
The book is certainly a page turner but I am slightly puzzled as to why it has received quite so much acclaim. (Not so much the SF awards and nominations; the genre has what can seem a desperate desire for validation from outside and leaps at the chance to reward mainstream writers who stray within its bounds.) Yes, the writing is fine and the characterisation effective, there is abundant Jewish wisecracking and a knowingness about the noirish elements. (Chabon was deliberately echoing Chandler.) But.
It’s a police procedural which morphs into a conspiracy thriller. Landsman is a maverick cop with a drink problem, a failed marriage and a cavalier attitude to standard procedures. So much so familiar from the average TV cop drama. Landsman even has his badge removed. This confiscation leads to him at one point relying on his membership of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union as he is forced to produce his “Sons Of Esau” card when questioning someone. This incident did, though, allow me to hope that the fear I had that the book’s title meant that Landsman and Gelbfish would get together again by the book’s end may have been unfounded. (In this regard the title The Frozen Chosen would have removed any such temptation from the author.) There is, too, the rather clunkingly named government agent Cashdollar and the fact that the conspiracy Landsman uncovers is more than a little far-fetched. The mind-set of the US government depicted – eager for the fundamentalist end times – will be more familiar to American readers but seen from the UK it’s a piece of not-even-half-baked lunacy. (It is possible that noting such ideas only encourages them, Mr Chabon.)
A minor thread running through the book is the chess references. Landsman’s father had been a keen player but managed to destroy any appeal the game might have had for Landsman himself. Nevertheless he is still familiar enough with its practices to recognise the game at the murder scene as important.
One curiosity. I’d never seen flautist rendered as flutist before.
Even with my predisposition to altered histories the scenario and setting didn’t really ring true to me. Would the inhabitants of such a settlement really be so despised? Be looked down on so much by mainland USA? They are still, after all, Holocaust survivors. And would Sitka society have evolved the way Chabon depicts?
Despite these caveats I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is excellent stuff.
Tags: Alternate History, Alternative History, Science Fiction