The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Sitka is a remote Alaskan island where the author imagines that a community of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe has settled. Relations with the native population have proved difficult enough to prompt the United States government to relocate most of the Jews to other countries. In a situation suspended in uncertainty, Landsman—a skeptical, disillusioned Jew, a solitary alcoholic police detective abandoned by his wife—becomes embroiled in the murder of the son of a powerful Jewish sect leader. Despite the obstacles raised by the police authorities themselves, Landsman doggedly pursues the killers, only to discover an international conspiracy to blow up the Grand Mosque of Jerusalem. > Times have always been strange to be a Jew, just as they have always been for a chicken . This sentence encapsulates the book, whose fundamental motif is the isolation of Jewish society, increasingly locked into eschatological visions: the search for the promised land, the awaiting of the Messiah, the allure of magical and esoteric symbols. Yet in reality, money and power also reign supreme. The novel’s opening is promising, as the author effectively captures the figure of the protagonist and the cold, harsh Alaskan setting, while successfully generating the suspense typical of a detective story. The plot’s emphasis on chess—the victim was a great champion—introduces a stimulating element, raising expectations tied precisely to the tactical patterns of the discipline. Then the book devolves into a hodgepodge, crowded with the most predictable narrative tropes of high-octane pulp fiction: an overabundance of characters, increasingly convoluted family dynamics, terrorist groups, secret services, and ultimately an improbable international plot. The book’s other motifs are the Yiddish language and the historically pursued ideal of a promised land—not necessarily in Palestine—where Yiddish could be used as an official language. Yet are the “yids” capable of coexisting with others? To this question Chabon offers a negative answer: there is no happy ending to the diaspora. The novel’s brilliance, but also the sheer difficulty of reading it, lies in its language. The author upends English by imposing an idiom of his own, particularly in his diction. Suffice it to consider, for example, that Chabon uses “shalom” for a gun; but “shalom” in Yiddish means peace (in English, *peace*), whereas slang uses “piece” for a gun. It is a clever play on meanings, demanding considerable linguistic knowledge and close attention from the reader. Why not read it? It is an overblown potboiler, prolix, where the author’s intellectualism overwhelmingly prevails, alongside his existential angst regarding the Jewish people to whom he belongs.
You, Me & other People
Having struggled to finish this book, I find myself asking: are we men such narcissists that we think only of ourselves even when declaring our love and begging for forgiveness? At the novel’s conclusion, faced with the self-victimizing grievances of Adam, the feckless husband (my parents “didn't love me enough, and lately, neither did you”), Beth, the betrayed wife, takes his hand and declares, > I loved you with all my heart. (...) The problem was never how much, or whether, I loved you. It was the way you returned that love. You put yourself first, not me . Betrayals, secrets, and lies run through the entire narrative. Beth has discovered that Adam had been cheating on her for some time with another woman, younger and endowed with great erotic allure. She throws him out of the house: Adam despairs, yet does nothing to win his wife back, nor does he abandon his mistress. Adam had an affair many years earlier: by his account, a fleeting encounter which nevertheless resulted in a child. He saw no reason to tell his wife because, as he claims once uncovered, the child’s mother wished to raise him alone. Leaving aside the fact that this woman is the primary client of his investment fund (hardly a casual affair, then!), Adam is forced to disclose the secret: the boy has leukemia, and only a bone marrow transplant from his half-sister (Adam and Beth’s daughter) offers any hope of survival. Adam had always told his wife that his parents died in a car accident: naturally, this is not true; they committed suicide. Let us recap: he betrayed Beth, concealed the fact that he had a son, and hid the truth regarding the real reasons he was orphaned. As if that were not enough! Beth decides to sell the marital home; while moving, she finds photographs and gifts for the boy among her husband’s belongings, proving that Adam had followed his son’s life all along. Yet another lie! And there are still more, which we shall spare the poor reader! Alongside Adam’s secrets and lies are the stories of other characters, beginning with Beth’s experiences and emotions. While the others evolve and change, freeing themselves from the past and finding new paths, Adam remains stagnant: he proclaims his love, takes forgiveness for granted, and is astonished not to be welcomed back. And Beth? True, she has built a new life, yet she turns her ex-husband away with maternal gentleness, almost with a sense of guilt. And so I wonder: could it be that we men are simply made this way—fatuous, self-centered, fragile, and ever eager to elicit pity, because women's affection for us is boundless? The plot is excessively cluttered with events, many of them implausible, at the expense of psychological depth, leaving the characters repetitive and predictable. The structure weighs the novel down considerably: the chapters alternate the first-person perspective—Beth in one, Adam in the next, and so on throughout the story. This literary device, ostensibly original, fails to generate narrative momentum; furthermore, dialogue dominates, amounting essentially to soliloquies in which the interlocutors serve as mere megaphones for the narrating “I.” It almost seems as though the author was incapable of analyzing the characters or the context (which is utterly deficient) and defaulted instead to conversation: a mode that cannot sustain narrative prose, unlike the theater, where flesh-and-blood actors lend vitality to the characters. Why avoid reading it? An implausible and superficial story, a tedious narrative pace, a prolix tale.