Finding Zion in Alaska

Imagine a parallel universe, one where the Jews were driven out of Israel in 1948, only to re-settle in the federal district of Sitka, Alaska, a town where “the wind carries a sour tang of pulped lumber, the smell of boat diesel and the slaughter and canning of salmon.” Here black hat orthodox Jews share the streets with Russian gangsters, the citizens speak Yiddish with a smattering of American thrown in for color, roughnecks and assassins frequent chess clubs, bums are named Elijah and even the chickens proclaim the coming of the Messiah, in Aramaic no less. Such is the setting for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, an anatomy that co-opts the detective noir genre as it seeks to examine the themes of homeland, shared identity, and faith in an original and comic manner.

Michael Chabon seems to delight in re-casting popular pulp in literary avatars, while managing to shed some light on the Jewish experience along the way. His Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was homage to the world of comic books as much as it was an exploration of impotence, escape and the desire for revenge. His novella The Final Solution, featured none other than Sherlock Holmes as the protagonist, and pulled off a range of nifty tricks, such as a sudden and abrupt shift into the perspective of a kidnapped parrot. Chabon’s prose is vivid and precise, his metaphors surprising and yet apt, and his sense of narrative pace is impeccable, which is probably why his books make for such compelling reading.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union opens on a crime scene and proceeds swiftly from there, the quest to solve the mystery providing an easy and logical vector for the plot. There is more at stake here though than the solution to a homicide. Detective Meyer Landsman, the protagonist, is a hard-boiled cop with some surprisingly soft edges—he’s afraid of the dark for one thing. Landsman is still recovering from the recent death of his younger sister, a pilot who crashed her plane into a mountain under mysterious circumstances. When he isn’t working he spends his time in an alcoholic daze, contemplating suicide. There’s also the shadow of his failed marriage weighing on him, further complicated by the fact that his ex-wife, the love of his life, is now his new boss. Added to all this is Landsman’s general sense of apprehension about the near future, an apprehension that is shared by all the Jews of Sitka—in less than a month the district, after sixty years of independence, is going to revert back to Alaska, losing its autonomy and its distinctly Jewish identity at the same time. These are indeed “strange times to be a Jew,” a refrain that is echoed by multiple characters over the course of the novel.

When a heroin addict bearing the name of a famous chess master turns up dead in the same hotel that Landsman now calls home, he enlists the aid of his partner and cousin Berko Shemets. Shemets is a practicing Jew whose mother, a Tlingit Indian, was killed in the infamous Tlingit-Jew riots—Chabon’s none too subtle way of illustrating the fact that even in Sitka the Jewish quest for living space has met with marked resistance. Together they follow a chain of clues that lead them to some rather disconcerting discoveries— that the dead man is the estranged, possibly gay, son of a rabbi / underworld don, that he was said to have performed miracles, that many believed he was in fact the Messiah, and that some very powerful interests were involved in his murder.

Landsman and Shemets soon find themselves ordered off the investigation by Landsman’s ex-wife, who is anxious to have all open cases at Sitka Central “effectively resolved” before the yanks take over. Predictably, Landsman can’t let it go, especially when he discovers that he’s personally connected to the mystery in multiple ways. What follows is an action-packed ride, straight from the pages of a Robert Ludlum thriller, with an interesting, if somewhat fabulous, twist at the end.

Chabon’s narrative motor sure has plenty of thrust, and it follows a clearly defined path, with good solid waypoints to anchor it as it goes. The question is whether the momentum comes at the expense of a certain degree of complexity. There’s not much time spent dawdling over Landsman’s relationship with his sister—we’re left to fill in the gaps. His relationship with Bina Gelbfish, his ex-wife, is given weight primarily due to the fact that they almost had a baby together, but had to abort when a scan showed the fetus had deformities. One wishes more had been made of these opportunities. Then again, too much emotional layering would probably have slowed things down, and taken away from the narrative’s hard-edged, tough, linear nature.

Where the novel succeeds is in its careful creation of an alternate world, and an alternate history for the Jews. The characters are believable and likeable, the premise is interesting, and the commentary on current world affairs is witty without being didactic. There’s a touch of the absurd in these pages too, especially when we reach the rather implausible solution to the mystery. It’s this absurdity, this reveling in the ability of people to act in unusual and unexpected ways that makes Chabon’s style truly refreshing.

Fathers and their estranged / lost sons are an important motif in the book. The game of chess plays a prominent role too, symbolizing as it does a struggle for space, the quest to conquer the board and kill the other king. Ultimately though the book is about faith—what happens when you have too much, what happens when you have too little, and what happens when others put ( rightly or wrongly) their faith in you. In this it moves beyond the political and the religious, and touches upon something very, very human.

Chabon likes to keep his characters alive beyond the pages of his fiction. After the success of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay he wrote and released a series of comics that had supposedly been created by the protagonists of the novel. One wonders what trick he has up his sleeve next. Perhaps a graphic novel about the escapades of Landsman and Shemets? Perhaps a collection of Yiddish songs from Sitka, with lyrics about black hat Jews in sleighs? Who knows? Whatever he chooses to do, Chabon is bound to keep his readers on their toes.