The Bottom Line
- Fully-realized culture and place
- Multiple hard-boiled characters
- Dark, striking humor
- Empathetic love story
- Oh, the names and places you will try to pronounce in your head...
- ...if you don’t know Yiddish, at least familiarize yourself with some basic terms and colloquialisms
Description
- Detective Landsman is an alcoholic detective living in a beat down hotel.
- Quickly closed case - The murder of a drug-addicted chess player who everyone seems to know, but no one wants to talk about.
- Despite the warnings of his partner and his boss (who happens to also be his ex-wife), Landsman doesn’t let the case go.
- The reader follows the detective through the Jewish Alaskan underground.
Guide Review - The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon - Book Review
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.
