The Yiddish Policemen's Union

[May 2nd, 2007] From the outset of Michael Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union (HarperCollins, 432 pages, $26.95), the Jews of Sitka, Alaska, are in a millenarian mood. Many expect nothing less than the end of the world. It is certainly the end of the alternate world Chabon has created—the Federal District of Sitka, established by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in 1940 as a temporary haven for the imperiled Jews of Europe. As the novel opens, that "temporary" clause has new currency. Alaska is being reverted back to Tlingits and gentile loggers, while Yiddish officials and Orthodox gangsters are steeling themselves for another diaspora. Apocalyptic rumors are flying through the snow: a chicken that prophesies, "the kreplach shaped like the head of Maimonides."

It's appropriate that the dumpling should resemble this particular rabbi. It was Maimonides who in the 12th century wrote the credo that underlies both Jewish faith and Jewish irony: "I believe with a full heart in the coming of the Messiah, and even though he may tarry I will still wait for him." Meyer Landsman, the dissolute cop at the center of Chabon's book, has kept faith with the irony. Warned by a street preacher outside his flophouse that "Messiah is coming," he has a ready retort: "'That works out well,' Landsman says, jerking his thumb toward the hotel lobby. 'As of tonight we have a vacancy.'"

The Zamenhof Hotel is minus one chess-playing heroin addict, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union quickly reveals itself to be a piece of detective fiction—though not without a few quirks. Landsmen and his colleagues all speak in hard-boiled Yiddish, and the patois Chabon works up for them sounds like Philip Marlowe recited by Sophie Portnoy. The style is of a piece with the book's bleak humor.

The trouble is that Chabon isn't especially comfortable with this harsh brand of irony. He's an inherently benevolent writer, and his heart melts even in the coldest climes. His gentleness works best when he's writing about the things he knows—his favorite themes of fathers and sons, sexual identity and the saving love of a good woman all crop up here—but his empathy can be a drag against his imagination. Like the wandering Jew of legend, he takes his identifying traits with him wherever he goes. This is, of course, both a blessing and a curse. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, comprehensive sympathy proves not quite the thing for dealing with the end of the world. I still believe that Michael Chabon will write a novel as tough-minded as it is good-hearted. But he may tarry.