The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Few things reliably make me as happy as a book that feels genuinely custom-made, as if it were specifically tailored to my interests.  I’m pretty sure that when Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) sat down to write The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, he was attuned to some special frequency broadcasted from my head and my head alone.  (If this book doesn’t turn out so well, I’m going to have to pick up a tinfoil hat to preempt further disappointment.)  It’s like he said, “Well, what does Zack like?” Hardboiled dialogue.  Jewy stuff.  Jewy hardboiled stuff.  Oh My God this is perfect.  And then he said, “Well, now I’m just going to throw other things Zack likes in there for the hell of it.”  Hence, Alaska.  I’m going to quote the Amazon.com review from Publishers Weekly (which actually ends up critical, although for reasons I probably won’t share), a work of art on its own terms, and then get back to reading it, because I have rediscovered happiness.

They are the “frozen Chosen,” two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon’s ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it’s no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.  The novel begins—the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America—with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt’s plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book’s timeless refrain: “It’s a strange time to be a Jew.” Into this world arrives Chabon’s Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon’s “Alyeska” is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Yes!