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Calling Michael Chabon’s fourth novel a murder mystery conveys far less information than does labeling CRIME AND PUNISHMENT a crime novel. Readers who liked Chabon’s earlier homage to Sherlock Holmes in his novella THE FINAL SOLUTION (2004) will probably enjoy THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION even more. Readers who like a good police procedural should look elsewhere. Yes, a man is found murdered in the hotel where the Jewish detective Meyer Landsman has retreated after his marriage to a fellow police officer unraveled. The most prominent clue is a chess problem set out beside the dead man’s bed. Yes, Meyer and his partner, his half Tlingit cousin Berko Shemets, struggle against much opposition to discover the perpetrator. But the mystery constantly gets lost amongst other matters that interest the author just as much, perhaps even more. The least important but sometimes the most interesting plot thread is Meyer’s continuing feelings for his ex-wife. His marriage began to fall apart when a chromosome abnormality in their unborn son led to a decision to abort the fetus. Meyer retreated into alcoholism, while Bina Gelbfish went on with her career and is now his commander. They fight once again when she is willing to go along with higher authorities who want to bury the case, but the attraction between them remains strong. Though the setting is a place one can find on maps – Sitka in the Aleutian Islands – the reader is thrust into an alternate history: one in which the American government, after the fall of the nascent state of Israel to the Arabs in 1948, has permitted Jewish refugees to settle there. Now 60 years later the specially created federal district is about to return to Alaskan authority. Many Jews fear that after the Reversion they will be expelled again, and – we learn late in the novel – a locally based militant group, who thought the murdered man was the Messiah, wants to try once more to reclaim Israel. In creating his fictional history the author curiously displaces actual contemporary events, stands them on their head so to speak. In the Federal District of Sitka there are tensions between Jews and Tlingits akin to the real tensions between Israelis and Palestinians; in this fictional Palestine the terrorist group plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock is would-be Israelis. In both Sitka and Palestine the American government and the CIA play devious games that have parallels with what is going on today in the Middle East. Meyer by virtue of his family is witness to much of the intrigue. It may even have claimed the life of his sister, who inexplicitly flew her plane into a mountainside on a perfectly clear day just after she had provided taxi service for the murdered man. Meyer’s uncle, who fathered his partner and then abandoned him and his Tlingit mother, seems always on the periphery of various machinations. Under Hoover, Hertz Shemets headed the FBI’s counterintelligence program in the district but ran his own con game against the Americans. Ultimately it is Meyer’s family that connects the murder mystery to the political machinations. Numerous critics have compared Chabon’s novel to the work of Chandler and Hammett. In Chapter 35 the author himself mentions in passing a "Yiddish translation of Chandler," and in Chapter 37 a government agent named Spade shows up briefly. It is difficult, however, to take either reference as significant in a novel where Inspector Willie Dick has shown up just slightly earlier. But some critics have gone so far as to compare Chabon’s prose style to that of one or the other of his predecessors. Let me take a passage (from Chapter 12, chosen completely at random by opening the book and pointing) so you can decide for yourself whether you hear echos of either: "Then they catch sight of Berko’s yarmulke, and a flutter of fine white fringe at his waist from his ritual four-corner, and you can feel all that giddy xenophobia drain off the crowd, leaving a residue of racist vertigo. That’s how it goes for Berko Shemets in the District of Sitka when he breaks out the hammer and goes Indian. Fifty years of movie scalpings and whistling arrows and burning Conestogas have their effect on people’s minds. And then sheer incongruity does the rest." Meyer’s search results in many stories being told, and readers learn a great deal about Jewish culture as viewed through Chabon’s lenses. But none of these elements is germane to the detective’s investigation. Noir-like violence occurs. But only towards the end does the novel begin to behave like a true murder mystery. Till then readers are wiser to approach the work in the same spirit they would come to one by Philip Roth (who too has published his own alternate history, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA). By the way, the reason for Chabon’s novel being so titled escapes me. In Chapter 27, Meyer, having been suspended from the force by Bina, uses his membership card for the Yiddish Policemen’s Union in lieu of official identification, but his ploy would ordinarily go unnoticed. I have a sneaking suspicion the significance of the title is that it has no real significance.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, July 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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