The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon - Book Review

Michael Chabon may be the best author today at making vivid his most wild, and personal, imaginings. Who else could take readers to a post-World War II where Jews have migrated to Alaska and created a society that is darkly fantastic and devastatingly real – and then make it a fine detective novel with a Jewish Bogart with his own Maltese Falcon in the form of the dead body of a drug-addicted chess player who may just be the Messiah? This description is not even the genesis of how bizarrely fantastic this novel is.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union marks the return of Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Chabon’s to adult fiction. The fact that his return is Pulitzer-worthy and that he brings the reader to a place completely unique should solidify him as a 21st century favorite.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a Jewish detective yarn set in Sitka, Alaska; this frustratingly intoxicating tale is not only chock full of the Chabon’s masterful witticisms and descriptions, but is a mind-rattling fiction of noir and prophecy mixed with a healthy dose of black humor.

Chabon strings together this web of intersecting storylines and characters with the metaphor of chess and how people move the pieces of life and death to fulfill desires and prophecies as if theirs were the hand that could make it all work. But Chabon knows the limits of humanity and the more the pieces are moved by the players (detectives, rabbis, government officials, friends, enemies, etc.), the more sad revelations and tragedies pile up.

The tale isn’t as sharp at the end as it is in the beginning, but that’s only because Chabon tackles so many questions and there are only so many answers. He doesn’t presume to know how to really come to terms with the big thoughts – like the promise the Messiah and Zion – and, like Detective Landsman, I’m not sure it’s his heart’s desire to know (at least for now). Chabon’s more interested in the home of the individual rather than the home of a people and the salvation of one soul rather than many.

With his humanistic compassion snugly in place, one can only begin to wonder where this author’s imagination will take his characters – and his readers – next.