Yiddish Policeman’s Union

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For those who’ve not heard the premise, the book in question is set in an alternate reality in which, during World War II, Jewish refugees were offered a temporary home in the still-unincorporated Alaskan territory. Seward’s Folly would have served to amend the degree of the devastation of the Ashkenazi population. Also we can assume the federal stage is spared the political rise of Sarah Palin, but that’s beside the point. The seemingly far-fetched Jewlaska was, in its time, quite possible. There’s a salience and interest to the last sixty years rewritten, when we tend to teach history as a series of inevitable causalities rather than what it is: a coalescing of the possibilities of the present.

Like a steak of well-marbled beef, fatty veins of other historical divergences are suggested but not fully described. Delectable traceries slide off the edge of your slice into the imagined coherent, organic whole the piece in front of you suggests. A third Russian Republic, an independent Manchuria, and a bomb-blasted Berlin.

Chabon’s attempt to render the pattering flow of Yiddish in an English text is an act of necromancy. The brusque, restrained, sardonic cruelty of the language is rendered with an unsympathetic nostalgia for what was lost to Ben Yehuda and the long inter-Nicene struggle over forging a common tongue for young Israel. The Yiddish dialogue is lilting and recognizably different from both Chabon’s typical voice and that of the American characters speaking ‘American’—unfailingly the primarily Yiddish speaking characters describe English as the linguistic property of the United States. The recalled dybbuk of mama lochen, unromantic and far from motherly, is half the pleasure of the book.

Like many writers, Chabon’s body of work seems to circle a handful of thematic preoccupations. If your Chabon book does not contain at least two of the following: jews, homosexuals, gangsters; then you have picked up a Jane Austen novel by mistake. Read that, yes, but then come back to Chabon’s faygele gangster Lubavich.

There’s an interesting moment where a character, reckoning with her realization of her son’s homosexuality, tenderly traces the etymology of ‘faygele,’ which is both the Yiddish equivalent of ‘fag’ and an old-fashioned diminutive meaning Little Bird. For those interested in the evolution of the word, from slur to queer reclamation, this article is interesting: http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2006/2006-12/200612-JewishWord.html .

I enjoyed the middle-game of the book, when all was world-building and possibility, more than I did the end game. I don’t so much do police procedurals or spy dramas unless they’re character driven, and thankfully this was. The involvement of the American Special Forces was no more outlandish than the actual intersections between evangelical politics and support for the state of Israel. I haven’t any real problems with the book per se, but once upon a time I was promised by a friend that Chabon was earth-shattering, life-changing, and I have yet to feel as though my world’s been rocked by him. I enjoy him every time, and I found several instances very good indeed. The overall quality of his writing in both conceit and execution is irreproachable. But it’s not a new favorite of mine, and while I’d definitely read more of him I’m not racing to check out Wonder Boys or Kavalier and Clay.