Northern exposure: Imagining Yiddishland in Alaska
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Sidebar Excerpt: Jewlaska
Michael Chabon's novels explore the unlikely intersections between serious literature, genre fiction, and Jewish themes. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which uses the mythologies of comic books to spin out an ambitious tale of genocide and bloodthirstiness, won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize; now, The Yiddish Policemen's Union relies on the conventions of hardboiled detective fiction to tell the story of an imaginary Yiddish-speaking enclave in present-day Alaska.
Apparently, Alaska was (fleetingly) proposed as a place where Holocaust survivors might build a new life (Madagascar and Uganda were others). For obvious reasons, these alternatives did not capture the Jewish imagination as did the Zionist dream of building a nation in the biblical Land of Israel in the Middle East. Chabon's novel limns a very different scenario: In his version, the Arabs defeat the Jews and the bulk of Europe's Jewish survivors establish a Yiddish-speaking sub-country in sections of Alaska they wrest from the indigenous population. The result looks, at first glance, to be a "what-if" novel along the lines of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (2004). But while Roth is largely interested in speculating about what would have happened had the Nazi-loving Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Delano Roosevelt and become president (which American Jews would have protested this turn of events; which would have accommodated to it?), Chabon has larger salmon to fry: He means to create nearly 70 years of alternative history and, in the process, to take a measure of Alaska's Yiddish speakers against the backdrop of Hebrew and Israel.
In an interview with Todd Hasak-Lowy, Chabon came clean about the origins of his novel. About 10 years ago, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek review of a curious 1958 book by Beatrice and Uriel Weinreich entitled Say It in Yiddish: A Phrasebook for Tourists. In his review, Chabon wondered where it would be that tourists might need such a phrasebook. Beatrice Weinreich, Uriel's widow, wrote him an angry letter(other Yiddishists were equally unamused), and soon Chabon learned why these Yiddish-speaking true believers regarded Uriel Weinreich (who died far too young) as the best hope for their language and culture.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is, at least partly, an act of fence-mending, one that caused the author to greatly increase his grasp of Yiddish (interestingly enough, among the books he used was Uriel Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary). The novel was also a way of positing a counter-Israel that would keep alive the culture that the Holocaust had largely destroyed. What the Yiddish phrasebook and its ardent supporters would not, could not, admit was that Yiddish was no longer a living language. Chabon found this as poignant as it was sad — so he devoted years to writing a novel in which Yiddish was the lingua franca functioning on Alaska's frozen tundra. As he told Hasak-Lowy, "I tried to write the novel as if it had been written in Yiddish by a Yiddish writer of the present day, one as much influenced by American and other literatures as by his own, a quasi-American Yiddish disciple of Raymond Chandler and Isaac Babel and Pete Dexter and Bruno Schulz and Ross MacDonald...."
Enter Meyer Landsman, a partially boiled detective who cares about crime because he can't bring himself to care about anything else. He is, in short, a "disbeliever by trade and inclination." His messy personal life, along with the history of the Jews, has persuaded him that "heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery." What matters, then, is the crime-to-be-solved at hand, the case of a junkie ex-chess whiz who has been murdered, execution-style, in Landsman's hotel.
For those who know a fair amount of Yiddish, it will seem a bit jarring when people refer to "the banging on a teapot," but that's because Chabon insists on rendering many Yiddish idioms into standard English. On the other hand, there are times when his puns are pure groaners — for example, when Landsman's pistol is called a "sholem," which, in the novel, is the word for "piece" rather than for "peace."
Still, as an act of imitation, Chabon has the words and music of hard-boiled mystery fiction down pat. The plot chugs along as Landsman learns that the murder victim is, in fact, the long estranged son of a hasidic rebbe and that the web of conspiracies surrounding his death stretches to Israel and yet another fictional effort to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
The network of Yiddish-named streets and businesses is one of the novel's triumphs. Chabon has done for Alaska's Sitka what Philip Roth, in a more realistic mode, did for New Jersey's Newark. Chabon also sketches wonderful character portraits that do not depend on Yiddish jokes, insider or otherwise. Here, for example, is the paragraph when we first encounter Rabbi Heskel Shpilman:
"... a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the window shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans, who never laid eyes on a man. They clamped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe's frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason though the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe's massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn't make any difference in what you see."
For those who remember the comic juxtapositions that placed a neurotic Jewish doctor in the wilds of Cicely, Ala., The Yiddish Policemen's Union is funnier and more satisfying. First-rate fiction always is — and I say this as one who enjoyed every installment of Northern Exposure.
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