Touching on History and Destiny

...The Sitka community is said to number over 3 million Jews, most of whom are portrayed as swindlers, schemers, thugs, thieves, or religious fanatics involved in shady deals...

...Chabon’s narrator adds, in “story...

...Inasmuch as such ideas are bound to seem crazy to readers of his novel as well, Chabon would have done better to keep them from emerging in such blunt and obvious ways...

...And readers drawn to alternate history will be interested in the author’s detailed elaborations of Jewish life in an imagined place called the “Federal District of Sitka,” a temporary Alaskan refuge established by the Roosevelt Administration in 1940 for Jews fleeing Hitler’s Europe...

...I have legs”—words like Landsman’s signify a strong ideological commitment to diaspora existence...

...Chabon’s main character is no Steinerian intellectual and never gets around to formulating a philosophy of life that favors wandering over rootedness...

...Where, then, might Jews find a future...

...The local Jews are therefore beset by feelings ranging from anxious to apocalyptic...

...Apart from his determined sleuthing, Landsman deals with this strangeness by consoling himself with cigarettes and slivovitz...

...some have already taken off for Australia and Madagascar...

...It’s only for talking to God...

...As a novel of ideas, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is light fare and makes no sustained or programmatic statements of a philosophical or political kind...

...Landsman, “a disbeliever by trade and inclination,” a mocker of “black-hat Jews” and their Christian fundamentalist supporters, stands against these apocalyptic notions and actively works to impede their realization...

...and like much else in this ersatz Israel, the Sitka police force is full of Jews...

...reconnecting amorously with his formerly estranged wife...

...To remedy those disputes, some of Sitka’s Jews do something contemporary Israelis have been harshly criticized for: They put up an “electrif ied fence...

...With the help of his half-Jewish, halfTlingit partner, Berko Shemets, and his ex-wife, Bina Gelbf ish, who has become his police supervisor, Landsman discovers that the dead man was actually Mendel Shpilman, the precociously gifted but wayward son of Heskel Shpilman, the Verbover rebbe—the head of Sitka’s powerful Chassidic group...

...The Zionists fought fiercely to preserve the Israeli Hebrew they brought with them into exile “but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster...

...innumerable reflections on the identity and possible arrival of the Messiah...

...Rabbi Shpilman’s collaborator in the messianic enterprise is a U.S...

...In his employment of a faux-Yiddish as well as in the artifice he makes of recent Jewish history, Chabon reflects this exhaustion more than anything else...

...IN THE WRITINGS of someone like George Steiner–“I am not a tree...

...It is also vaguely a product of the noirish atmosphere of the novel itself, and of the often repeated notion that “these are strange times to be a Jew...

...A well-made fence, a stark fence...

...In 2008, for instance, Jewish-occupied Sitka will mark its 60th year—precisely the age of the Jewish State of Israel...

...But he does not, and the effects are not good...

...But apart from the use of awkward-sounding phrases like “banging me a kettle all day long” and some two dozen Yiddish words, many of which by now have become part of colloquial American English (ganef, maven, momzer, shtetl, etc), the prose of this novel hardly resembles Yiddish at all...

...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University FANS OF detective fiction are likely to be intrigued by Michael Chabon’s latest book, which adds a quasi-Yiddish inflection to the familiar murder mystery tropes popularized by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, et al...

...It is now approaching the end of 2007...

...But if, following the narrative trajectory of this novel, the story is merely a variant of the tale of the wandering Jew, then it is an exhausted one...

...One sees them in the language of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union...

...and affirming that, while more pious Jews may dream of a return to Zion, “my homeland is in my hat...

...There he nurses a sour mood and cynical thoughts while investigating the execution-style murder of a young heroin addict who had been living in the same hotel under the alias “Emanuel Lasker...

...Cashdollar’s conviction that “Jerusalem and the Holy Land have to belong to the Jews again...

...plans to remove the Muslims’ Dome of the Rock in order to restore the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem—all of these and more point unmistakably to the aspirations of some of today’s most impassioned Christian and Jewish zealots...

...Landsman says in his “hat” and in his ex-wife’s “tote bag...

...Some are planning to settle in Jerusalem...

...Although stories of crime and its detection make up the narrative core of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, more is at play...

...WITHIN THE allohistorical terms of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the failure referred to here is far more than linguistic: The entire Zionist project is said to have ended “with savage finality in 1948...

...Rather, much of it echoes the tough, cynical talk of detective fiction and the vulgarisms of the street...

...Jews have been tossed out . . .” Sitka will accommodate the remnant that survives the Arab massacre of the Israeli Jews, as it did those who survived the Nazi massacre of the German Jews, but only provisionally: As of January 1, 2008, the Jewish claim on this small piece of the Alaskan panhandle will be up, and there will be “no future here for any Jew...

...These concerns are intruded intermittently and do not develop into a coherent argument or unified subtext...

...In fragmentary and sometimes furtive ways, Chabon touches on issues of history and destiny, exile and redemption, morality and identity—especially as they arise in debates today about the real Israel and its role in contemporary Jewish life...

...and some are dispatched to an early grave...

...Such people need policing...

...Nevertheless, they comprise an interesting, if understated stratum of a novel that otherwise is too intent on entertaining to engage ideas in any serious way...

...A sinister, repellent figure, he has extensive gangland ties and draws on them to advance a scheme for the return of the Jews to Israel that will require, among other things, the sacrifice of a red heifer and blowing up one of the mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount...

...the quest to breed a perfect red heifer whose sacrifice is necessary to purify the land...

...In a reversal of what actually took place in the language wars between Yiddish and modern Hebrew in Palestine, the Yiddish-speakers are said to have won out when these same wars are fought in Sitka: “Hebrew is never employed for human conversation...

...Fora writer being widely praised as a possible successor to Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, this lack of intellectual depth is glaring, particularly given the weight of his ostensible subject here: the fate of what remains of the Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the demise of Israel...

...Chabon’s novel is predicated on that fantasy: “Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles...

...I do not have roots...

...To him, whether the concern is Jesus coming back or “really all about oil,” “the idea of a bunch of crazy yids running around Arab Palestine, blowing up shrines and following Messiahs and starting World War Three” is simply crazy...

...Meyer Landsman, the book’s weary protagonist, is a chain-smoking, harddrinking, hard-talking homicide detective...

...Their task is urgent, because only two months remain on the 60-year settlement rights of the Sitka Jews...

...Still, if only in piecemeal fashion, the novel embeds a touch of political allegory that evokes recognizable parallels with events currently unfolding in the Middle East...

...It gestures in the direction of Yiddish, said to be the dominant language of the new Jewish homeland...

...government official named Cashdollar, a Christian Zionist intent on fulfilling “the divinely inspired mission of the President of America” to bring on “the end times” by moving “some Arabs out and some Verbovers in...

...In 1948 those Jews were joined by others routed from Palestine when the Arabs defeated the nascent Jewish state...

...A brutal gesture for Jews to make on Indian land, and one that has no precedent or license...

...The motive for Mendel Shpilman’s murder is never made altogether clear, but it is somehow related to undermining the religio-political scheme that his crooked father is cooking up with the American Christian Evangelicals...

...The territorial conflict with Alaskan natives over certain “disputed areas,” of course, resembles Israel’s conflict with the Palestinian Arabs...

...After that the Alaskan refuge is to revert to its original native inhabitants...

...After a recent divorce and various other troubles, he lives alone in the seedy Hotel Zamenhof...