Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
"n Chabon’s alternate world Russia collapsed and World War II ended with a 1946 U.S. nuclear strike on Berlin. What we call the Holocaust was known as the Destruction, and it killed only two million. More Jews perished in 1948, when Israel was destroyed within three months of its creation, its Jewish population murdered or driven into the sea. A few of the survivors made it to Alaska, and in 2007 the population of the Jewish portion of Alaska has reached 3.2 million. But not for long. In 2008 comes the Reversion, when the stateless Jews who live in their piece of Alaska will lose their right of residence and the Sitka district will return to the Tlingit Indians, who were pushed aside when the Jews began to arrive in the early 1940s. Very few of the Sitka Jews can discern what their fates will be in a few months. A small minority have papers that will allow them to remain on U.S. territory after the Reversion, and rumors claim that as many as 40 percent may receive the right to live somewhere in the United States. But those rumors are worthless, which is all anyone knows for sure.
Most of Sitka’s Jews live by fishing and logging, speak Yiddish rather than English, and remember and possess tastes and political views from the world Hitler destroyed. The Alaskan salmon they catch are at one point called “aquatic Zionists,” for they seek to return, at a terrible cost, to a place of which they know almost nothing. It is an apt phrase, for in the face of the Reversion an apparently hopeless Zionism grows up in Sitka, along with other forms of despairing Messianism.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union can be read as either anti-Zionist or powerfully pro-Zionist. On the anti-Zionist side, the Jews of Sitka are land-hungry and have in the past massacred some of the Tlingit, who to some degree stand in for the population pushed aside by the Jewish immigrants to Palestine in real history. Most of the Alaskan Jews who come Meyer Landsman’s way are criminals. The Sitka equivalent of the Mafia is run by the Verbovers, a Hasidic sect Chabon has invented, who, like the rest of the Jews of Sitka (the “frozen chosen”), have a richly Eastern European culture fused with that of Chandler’s mid-century Los Angeles and set on a real and harsh frontier. It is fascinating to be plunged into Chabon’s invention of a thriving 2007 Jewish culture that is neither Israeli nor American. All these people are very, very far from Israelis or modern American Jews. The differences are in some ways very appealing; the Eastern European Jewish part of them is something that in reality successful Zionism, and successful Americanization, helped destroy. Chabon undoes that destruction.
However, on the pro-Zionist side, the major work of destruction was done not by Zionism or assimilation but by Hitler’s Germans, in this alternate history as in the real one. Many of the Jews of Chabon’s Sitka are pretty tough, but having no state of their own, they are wholly defenseless in ways most modern American Jews have entirely forgotten. The United States no longer wants Chabon’s Alaskan Jews, and the vast majority of them have nowhere else to go, a very bad situation that recalls the core of the Zionist argument. It is not a problem that preoccupies Meyer Landsman, though; he refuses to think about it and instead stubbornly insists on finding out whodunit
while his world collapses around him."
“My mother, when she saw this item in the Post, she was kvelling. She said, ‘Now you know you’ve arrived as a Jewish-American writer. When you’ve been condemned by other Jews as an anti-Semite,
you know you’ve made it.’”
"Freedman writes:
Speaking personally, I read the book with so much pleasure that only after the fact did I begin to struggle with its seeming message. No writer’s creativity should be censored for political reasons, and literary fiction of Chabon’s high caliber can and should resist being pinned to the corkboard of real-life parallels. Unlike the Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner film Munich, which portrayed and interpreted actual events to deliver a clearly anti-Zionist moral, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union traffics in fancy.
Yet the fancy has an undeniable point of view. One of the running gags of the novel is the absurdity of shtetl life transplanted into Alaska. Yiddish-language newspapers, slivovitz toasts, a hotel named for Einstein and a street for Nordau — all are meant to laughably underscore how inorganic, how extrinsic Jews are to this land. The unspoken inference is that it is just as unnatural for Jews to have plopped themselves down in a Middle Eastern desert. And when Chabon refers to the Sitka Jews having pushed out the indigenous Tlingit Indians, his metaphor needs no footnote to be understood.
In conclusion, Freedman throws down the gauntlet, contrasting Chabon’s satirical take on the Jewish predicament unfavorably with those of Philip Roth and Anne Roiphe and suggesting that Chabon is “apparently imbued with the belief that Israel is a colonial, imperialistic oppressor.”"
"By the time the Temple Mount turns out to play its rather large role in the story, he’s carved room for himself to explore the explosive debate constantly rumbling in that Dome’s shadow from an angle that gives the less fundamentalist voices in Jewish culture the upper hand. The Zionists in the book are fanatics, mobsters and thugs opportunistically exploiting messianism and seizing onto the bête noir of the Promised Land out of sheer political necessity. They’ll do anything – slaughter their own people, destabilize the world – in order to get what they want.
Chabon lays it all out late in the book while Landsman and his boss and ex-wife (and the only woman he’s ever loved) Bina Gelbfish discuss the possibility of the U.S. Government’s secretly supporting these radical Zionist factions in Sitka:
…they think the idea of a bunch of crazy yids running around Arab Palestine, blowing up shrines and following Messiahs and starting World War Three is a really good idea.
Strong stuff. "
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