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Loading... The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007)by Michael Chabon
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Best Dystopias (70) » 64 more Jewish Books (19) Nebula Award (6) Favourite Books (537) Best Crime Fiction (69) Best Noir Fiction (16) Urban Fiction (5) Top Five Books of 2013 (1,278) Murder Mysteries (8) Magic Realism (119) Books Read in 2019 (484) Top Five Books of 2019 (245) Top Five Books of 2018 (791) Great Audiobooks (23) Books Read in 2007 (10) Books Read in 2013 (352) Books Read in 2017 (1,442) Books Read in 2016 (4,139) Overdue Podcast (287) Detective Stories (81) Books About Murder (137) Emily's Reviews (1) USA Road Trip (17) Reading 2008 (3) Audio Books (1) Protagonists - Men (22) Speculative Fiction (33) Unread books (509) No current Talk conversations about this book. Meyer Landsman is a bit of a cliched, down on his luck, gruff detective navigating the politics and dangers of the Jewish city of Sitka, Alaska. It was a nice change of pace from my usual science fiction novels and I enjoyed following Meyer on his journey. The setting and side characters were also very well realized. When I started the book I thought it might take me a long time to finish as it was a bit rough to get into a groove with so many yiddish phrases and terms being used and its not a short book by any means. Once I got into a groove and the story got going, I finished it fairly quickly. 4 stars! I tried this book 5 years ago and I was not able to finish it. Now a second try, though still challenging, saw success. This soup is too thick. A stew of historic fiction with black novel with conspiracy theory written by mixing the styles of John LeCarre and the Bronte sisters... If that was too simple, half the book is a pizzicato of 5 pages chapters which introduce 2 or 3 (or 5 or 6) new characters. To blur it more, it is heavily seasoned with Yiddish or Hebrew words that the reader is expected to know. All that makes a bumpy read that requires concentration, but there is where the incredibly masterful prose of Chablon shines. It drags you along, like a hypnotic mantra. What downgrades this book is the inconsistent personality of the characters; not just from an "evolution". One who in a chapter would be like Mike Hammer, in the next would be close to Ronald Mcdonald to become Clark Kent the following one. I reread this one to prepare myself for Kavalier and Clay, but I'm actually so relieved of getting out of Chablon's world that I'm hesitant on stepping in again... I got to page 68 and quit. I don't normally give stars to books I don't finish, but since this was my second try I thought I deserved the right to rate. If there was humor, I didn't get it. In fact, I didn't get a lot of what was going on or being said. And finally, upon reaching chapter 9, I felt the book was becoming disgusting. I wanted to like this book, but I couldn't.
Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. A mobile phone is a shoyfer (perhaps because, like the ram's horn, it calls you), a gun is a sholem (a Yiddish version of a Peacemaker?). Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words. He takes the wry, underbelly vision of the ordinary that the best of noir fiction offers and ratchets it up to the limit. Nothing is allowed to be itself; all people and events are observed as an echo of something else. Voices are like "an onion rolling in a bucket", or rusty forks falling. An approaching motorcycle is "a heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp." Chabon's ornate prose makes Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain. Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it. For the most part, Chabon's writing serves the knotted mystery that is being unravelled, but there is eventually a point where it begins to weary the mind, where the elaborations of things get in the way of the things themselves and the narrative gets sucked under by style. The compulsory paragraph of Byzantine physical description whenever another character arrives on the scene starts to seem an irritating interlude; another over-reaching cadenza. Though it seems churlish to complain about such a vivid talent, a little less would have been enough already. It’s obvious that the creation of this strange, vibrant, unreal world is Chabon’s idea of heaven. He seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction. Some of the pleasures of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union are, actually, distinctly Dan Brown–ish. Mr. Chabon often ends chapters with cliffhangers that might be tiresome in the hands of a lesser writer (say, Dan Brown). Here, they’re over-the-top suspenseful, savory and delicious. More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and byzantine political and sectarian divisions — that the reader comes to take its existence for granted. By the end of the book, we feel we know this chilly piece of northern real estate, where Yiddish is the language of choice, the same way we feel we have come to know Meyer Landsman — this “secular policeman” who has learned to sail “double-hulled against tragedy,” ever wary of “the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque” that can topple a boat in the shallows. This novel makes you think, but it is an ordeal to read. The problem: Chabon has mixed two very dark story lines that jar the reader. There is the real tragedy of Sitka's wandering Jews, and then there is the faux bleakness of the noir genre with its posturing attitude. The central character comes across as a Jewish Humphrey Bogart wannabe, not a three-dimensional character who can shoulder a 400-plus-page novel about exile, fanatics and longing. Is contained inIs abridged inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy. No library descriptions found.
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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I found the writing quite engaging, and the characters interesting in all their flaws and virtues. Chabon has a gift for bringing even mundane scenes to life with his word portraits. He puts you in the scene and it really was immersive, for me. It was one of those books I keep flipping through the remaining pages to pace myself, to save a bit for later, a feeling that a pleasurable feeling was coming to an end.
I very much recommend this to others, and I'll be looking for his other work to compare. (