by Pa Rock
Reader
Sometime around thirty years ago I came across Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, at a bookstore, and after flipping thought it and reading snippets, decided to purchase the book and explore the talents of the new author. I was not disappointed. I was also pleased a few years later when I discovered his second novel, Wonder Boys, and read it as well. Both of those early Chabon novels made it onto the big screen, with Wonder Boys drawing a big name cast that included Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, and Robert Downey, Jr.
Chabon's third novel was really going to have to be something special if he was going to top his two previous efforts - and it was. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I also read, not only knocked it out of the literary ballpark, it also picked up the Pulitzer Prize for Literature along the way. Clearly the young author that I had stumbled upon quite accidentally had achieved a level of success that few contemporary writers could ever hope to obtain.
But Michael Chabon, now a college writing professor and married to a fellow novelist, did not stop there. Recently while digging through the shelves and stacks at Powell's Bookstore at the airport in Portland, I came across his fourth major novel for adults, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and decided it was time to reconnect with this old friend.
I began reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union with absolutely no foreknowledge of the plot or setting. It started off as a standard noir detective story with both the protagonist and the corpse making their appearance on the first page. As I began working my way into the story, I discovered that the seedy hotel in which the crime took place was located in Sitka, Alaska. I had been to Alaska for my first and only visit a couple of years earlier, but unfortunately our cruise ship did not stop in Sitka, so I suspected that Chabon might be preparing to expand my knowledge of the 49th state.
I was wrong about that.
Several things seemed to tug for my attention as I read through the opening pages. The detective, Landsman, mentioned a shot glass that he had which celebrated the Sitka World's Fair thirty years before. Wow, here I am a world traveler who has taught geography in high school and at the community college level, and I did not even remember that Sitka had hosted a world's fair. Then there were references to the city's large Jewish population, again something I must have forgotten, and finally a glancing reference to the city's three million inhabitants. Even that slid by me for another page or so until I finally had a mental jolt and realized that the whole damned state of Alaska has less than a million people!
At that point I hit the internet to learn more about the discrepancies between Chabon's Sitka and the actual Alaskan town with its population of about 8,700 hearty individuals.
Chabon's fictional Sitka had its roots in the 1946 (fictional) turmoil in Palestine in which the Palestinians literally drove its Jewish invaders into the sea. The United States opened an area of Alaska including Sitka and the surrounding district for temporary Jewish settlement. This new homeland had a time limit of sixty years, and as the novel opens the time of the "reversion" was at hand. All of Sitka's three million or more Jews were under a deadline to find new homes and move on.
Chabon's narrative of the troubled times focuses on Meyer Landsman, a drunk of a police detective with a host of personal issues that includes his lingering love for his ex-wife who happens to become his boss during the unfolding of this tale, a murder victim who was reputed to have been a healer and one of a multitude of temporary messiahs who had come to earth over the past two millennia, and an intricate web of very secretive and powerful Jews who were orchestrating a plan to once again take over the Holy Land. And the only thing standing in the way of the reestablishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine is Detective Meyer Landsman.
The real magic of this book is in witnessing Michael Chabon's ability to create strong, believable characters at work in a completely invented setting as they struggle to change a history that never really existed. Chabon's writing is powerful - as always - and the scope of his imagination is breathtaking!
The Yiddish Policemen's Union will take you where you've never been before. Michael Chabon is a master at that.
Reader
Sometime around thirty years ago I came across Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, at a bookstore, and after flipping thought it and reading snippets, decided to purchase the book and explore the talents of the new author. I was not disappointed. I was also pleased a few years later when I discovered his second novel, Wonder Boys, and read it as well. Both of those early Chabon novels made it onto the big screen, with Wonder Boys drawing a big name cast that included Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, and Robert Downey, Jr.
Chabon's third novel was really going to have to be something special if he was going to top his two previous efforts - and it was. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I also read, not only knocked it out of the literary ballpark, it also picked up the Pulitzer Prize for Literature along the way. Clearly the young author that I had stumbled upon quite accidentally had achieved a level of success that few contemporary writers could ever hope to obtain.
But Michael Chabon, now a college writing professor and married to a fellow novelist, did not stop there. Recently while digging through the shelves and stacks at Powell's Bookstore at the airport in Portland, I came across his fourth major novel for adults, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and decided it was time to reconnect with this old friend.
I began reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union with absolutely no foreknowledge of the plot or setting. It started off as a standard noir detective story with both the protagonist and the corpse making their appearance on the first page. As I began working my way into the story, I discovered that the seedy hotel in which the crime took place was located in Sitka, Alaska. I had been to Alaska for my first and only visit a couple of years earlier, but unfortunately our cruise ship did not stop in Sitka, so I suspected that Chabon might be preparing to expand my knowledge of the 49th state.
I was wrong about that.
Several things seemed to tug for my attention as I read through the opening pages. The detective, Landsman, mentioned a shot glass that he had which celebrated the Sitka World's Fair thirty years before. Wow, here I am a world traveler who has taught geography in high school and at the community college level, and I did not even remember that Sitka had hosted a world's fair. Then there were references to the city's large Jewish population, again something I must have forgotten, and finally a glancing reference to the city's three million inhabitants. Even that slid by me for another page or so until I finally had a mental jolt and realized that the whole damned state of Alaska has less than a million people!
At that point I hit the internet to learn more about the discrepancies between Chabon's Sitka and the actual Alaskan town with its population of about 8,700 hearty individuals.
Chabon's fictional Sitka had its roots in the 1946 (fictional) turmoil in Palestine in which the Palestinians literally drove its Jewish invaders into the sea. The United States opened an area of Alaska including Sitka and the surrounding district for temporary Jewish settlement. This new homeland had a time limit of sixty years, and as the novel opens the time of the "reversion" was at hand. All of Sitka's three million or more Jews were under a deadline to find new homes and move on.
Chabon's narrative of the troubled times focuses on Meyer Landsman, a drunk of a police detective with a host of personal issues that includes his lingering love for his ex-wife who happens to become his boss during the unfolding of this tale, a murder victim who was reputed to have been a healer and one of a multitude of temporary messiahs who had come to earth over the past two millennia, and an intricate web of very secretive and powerful Jews who were orchestrating a plan to once again take over the Holy Land. And the only thing standing in the way of the reestablishment of the Jewish homeland in Palestine is Detective Meyer Landsman.
The real magic of this book is in witnessing Michael Chabon's ability to create strong, believable characters at work in a completely invented setting as they struggle to change a history that never really existed. Chabon's writing is powerful - as always - and the scope of his imagination is breathtaking!
The Yiddish Policemen's Union will take you where you've never been before. Michael Chabon is a master at that.
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