Ten years ago, in Harper's, Michael Chabon told the fantastic true story of how he was inspired to write the book that would eventually become The Yiddish Policemen's Union."" It's a story that sounds, well, straight out of a Michael Chabon novel. And unfortunately, it's far more interesting than anything his actual new work of fiction has to offer.
Chabon explained that in an Orange County chain store, he came across a single copy of a book, buried deep on a shelf of language books, called ""Say It In Yiddish"": an implausible, yet apparently un-ironic, book for travelers to Yiddish-speaking lands.
""I've never seen 'Say It In Swahili,' ' Say It In Hindi' or 'Say It In Serbo-Croatian,' nor have I ever been to any of the countries where one of them might come in handy,"" Chabon wrote. ""As for the country in which I'd do well to have a copy of 'Say It In Yiddish' in my pocket, naturally I've never been there either. I don't believe that anyone has.""
Chabon's idea for ""The Yiddish Policemen's Union"" is to go there. What if, he postulates, Hebrew-speaking Israel collapsed, a weaker, bleaker Jewish settlement was established in Alaska and the Yiddish language (and culture) survived the Holocaust on a large scale?
It's an intriguing concept, but Chabon fails to match its imaginativeness with effective plotting, well-drawn characters or even a satisfying exploration of the idea.
With the ""Federal District of Sitka,"" Chabon attempts to produce a pop Jewish fantasia, uniting every miserable element of Jewish cultural history - the Zionist longings of Europe, the organized crime of America, the factionalist disputes of Israel, etc. - into one ultra-depressing arctic metropolis.
A big problem here is that Chabon just doesn't want to tell us as much as we want to know about this place.
Chabon continually mentions that the
protagonist, the Sam Spade-like Meyer Landsman, drinks out of a ""1977 Sitka World's Fair"" shot glass.
As well as evoking one of the most transcendent scenes from Chabon's brilliant ""The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"" - involving the abandoned grounds of the 1939 New York World's Fair - the idea is rich with possibilities: Was this World's Fair Sitka's one chance to establish its legitimacy on the world stage? How did it (inevitably) fail?
We never know. Chabon prefers instead to stick with Meyer's uninteresting relationship with his ex-wife and a noirish detective story that, despite entertaining depictions of Orthodox mafiosos, throws some messianic gobbledygook at the reader and ends up completely silly.
But the biggest problem with ""The Yiddish Policemen's Union"" is that Chabon is simply not an author who is built for the alternate history genre.
Having made a big alteration to history to begin with, Chabon - who has always had a keen eye for wistful nostalgia - can't help himself but change whatever he feels like, for no apparent reason.
Case in point: a few references are made to Meyer's favorite film, ""Orson Welles' 'Heart of Darkness.'"" In the real world, Welles' abandonment of the ""Heart of Darkness"" project has been well documented. There's no logical reason that this, or even more significant differences like a premature collapse to the U.S.S.R. or the United States dropping nuclear bombs onto Germany, should have happened in this universe.
The effect is disorienting. Chabon is at his best when he takes a mystical approach to history, but when he changes history to the degree he does in ""The Yiddish Policemen's Union,"" he seems like little more than a bland fantasy writer. The idea hatched from ""Say It In Yiddish"" was inspired - but hopefully next time Chabon can get the execution right, too.
