I visit Sitka in an alternate universe

The Yiddish Policemen's Union****
by Michael Chabon

What if the Ashkenazi Jews had gone to a temporary independent state in Sitka, Alaska, instead of Palestine in 1948? And what if they had cops who talked like Sam Spade? And what if some of them were in cahoots with Christian evangelicals, the messianic ambitions of both groups depending on a religious occupation of Jerusalem? Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is speculative fiction, but after the first few pages, you feel right at home. It seems you can shuffle and reshuffle the stew of political and religious players we have now into different times and places, but things will pretty much turn out as they have now: messy, bloody, and sad.

At the very heart of the novel is a very old story--the archetypal legend of the Wandering Jew; on the eve of Sitka's reversion to U.S. control, its residents wonder, "Where now?" There's a lottery that will put some of the Sitka Jews on the track to U.S. citizenship. But many in the Sitka community will have to assimilate elsewhere, and the dilution of their culture is inevitable. But it was inevitable in the 1948 of our own universe, when Ashkenazi Jews ended up in Palestine, trading Yiddish for Hebrew, and borscht for hommus.

 Chabon's accounts of the various factions of Jews living in the Sitka refuge and their relations with another tribal people, the Native Americans (one cannot help thinking of them as doppelgangers of the Palestinians in this universe, though that doesn't seem to be where Chabon is headed) is fascinating and requires deft plotting to pull together into the climax of the book.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel is Chabon's use of language. Yiddish is the official language of the Sitka state, and, though the novel is written in English, there are vestiges of Yiddish in the sentence structure of his dialogue and a rich soup of Yiddish crime slang from "ganef" (criminal) to "noz" (a "nose" or detective) to the Shoyfer telephone.

It's the noir-ish metaphors, however that really jazz up Chabon's prose:

In the seams of the venetian blinds, daylight buzzes like a trapped fly.

Landsman comes scrabbling like a dog on slick tile.

His commanding officer, sitting on the edge of the table, legs dangling, crossed at the ankle, her pointy-toed pumps aiming straight for Landsmen's heart.

Bina looks like hell, only hotter.

She would trash a laddered pair of stockings, shredding them into a pompon of rage before tossing them into the can.

Yeah, it's over the top, but it's part of the stew of this genre-bending (noir, history, speculative) book that makes it endlessly fascinating.