The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (YPU) is set in an alternate reality, much like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America which assumes that Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer, was elected President of the US, only it took me longer than it should to understand what kind of alternate reality. After reading a Publisher’s Weekly review of the YPU, I have come to discover that apparently “Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle.” This was obviously never followed through with, but Chabon pretends that it did and thus YPU is born. I had understood that there was a large settlement of Jews in Alaska, but I could not have told you why. Was it implied somewhere at the beginning of the book? I have no idea.
What I can tell you is that YPU is a really dense detective story that I would have enjoyed if a) I had an easier time catching on to the Yiddish that was interspersed throughout (which was quite upsetting since I’m the only Irish girl I know who says she’s shvitzing instead of sweating), and b) I paid more attention to the insane amount of rambling details throughout its 400+ pages. Not that I didn’t know what I was getting into. Last summer I had struggled through Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and vowed to finish it during my Pocono retreat vacation. While it ended up being one of my top ten favorite reads of last year, it still required a constant effort to concentrate and get through the heft. I admit I was more interested in Kavalier and Clay’s story than YPU, but I was interested all the same.
Because I like a good mystery. I recently rediscovered this when while visiting for Christmas, Nick’s grandmother was struggling with the puzzle of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, which is absurdly hard. It took us four hours to get the woman’s dress and arm together. I consider a puzzle like a mystery because you’re trying to find where the pieces it. I realize that this is partly my OCD shining through, but I really needed to get that puzzle together. The last time I checked, it was still sitting unfinished on Nick’s dining room table.
So one morning Meyer Landsman, a detective in Sitka (the Jewish settlement) is awoken by his landlord to investigate a murder that occurred overnight a few floors down. Soon afterwards enters Landsman’s cousin/partner, a half Jewish, half Tlingit (which I actually recognized after reading many books set in Alaska as of late: Into the Wild, If You Lived Here I’d Know Your Name, and pieces of Assassination Vacation, which I believe is the source of my knowledge about the Tlingit people) detective. And then all of these things started to happen and I wasn’t really sure where the story was going, but parts were exciting and made me want to read more, so I continued. And then I got so far into the book that I couldn’t justify giving up on it, so I labored on and forced myself to commit to the back 200 pages and when the plot got resolved it wasn’t very satisfying. And I’m obviously not satisfied with the effort it took to read the 400+ pages when I didn’t really get anything out of it.
This could be for a number of reasons; one being I never really understood the motivations of the characters. Landsman is an absolute mess, having been (relatively) recently divorced from his wife. The only theme I recognize throughout the entire thing is one’s destiny, but even that is weakened by strange plot twists that either happen outside of the pages or I was so distracted with anything else around me (weird people on the train, the depressing man in the neurologist’s office who said he never reads anymore because he has the History channel, Beans (my cat)) that I missed it on the page. It was funny at times but not as often or as intense that its hilarity alone carried the book. I smiled to myself a few times but never broke out into the kind of laughter that leaves my co-commuters reassured that I am, in fact, insane. Hopefully the book that I got for Christmas that Chabon edited is more enjoyable.
Up Next: Migraine by Oliver Sacks
Also, this hilariousness is what the boyfriend has been up to. (Great pic!) And this.
