The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
by Michael Chabon
HarperCollins, 432 pp., $26.95
Michael Chabon, the best writer of English prose in this country, and the most interesting novelist of his generation, is expressing amusement at the idea that anyone would think his new book might be anti-Semitic. Calling him an anti-Semite, Chabon says, would “be like calling Groucho Marx anti-moustache.”
That’s a pretty good crack until you remember that Groucho Marx painted on his moustache with bootblack.
Chabon’s new novel is called The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and even those readers bowled over by the capacious inventiveness of his Pulitzer Prize-winning opus, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, are going to be amazed at how inventive Chabon can be. This mash-up of two pulpy genres–speculative science fiction and hardboiled detective story–is set in an alternate version of the present in which Israel did not survive the 1948 war of independence.
Instead, in Chabon’s imagining, the post-Holocaust Jewish remnant was settled in Southeastern Alaska, about three hours north of Vancouver, where they have spent six decades building a teeming, crazy metropolis called Sitka, where Yiddish is the native tongue.
As the novel begins, this Jewish city of 3 million is about to revert to Alaskan sovereignty the way Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty. The Jewish experiment with self-rule is over. The Jews of Sitka are about to become a homeless, rootless, diasporic people again.
What Chabon has done here is extraordinary. He does not lay out the alternative history or the geopolitics in a neat preface. He merely presents us with Sitka in 2007 and along the way we glean and gather how the city came about and how it will end. We follow a disappointed, depressed, drunken cop named Meyer Landsman as he wanders through the city’s redoubts to solve the mystery of a chess player who was murdered in a Sitka flophouse–the same flophouse where Landsman has come to reside following the collapse of his 15-year marriage to the formidable Bina Gelbfish.
Landsman finds himself in the middle of a gigantic conspiracy involving a grotesquely obese Hasidic rebbe with unlimited financial resources who runs a vicious crime syndicate, a tortured and saintly junkie homosexual with messiah-like powers, and a bunch of crazed goons who want to start a holy war in Jerusalem by blowing up the Dome of the Rock and placing a third Temple on the site. They are aided and abetted by an unnamed evangelical president of the United States who wants to hasten the end times by bringing Armageddon to the biblical Israel.
Since Chabon is a serious writer who uses the conventions of pulp fiction, I think we should do him the honor of taking him seriously. His Sitka is plainly a metaphor for Israel, complete with the political clashes that characterize the Jewish state–including the dependence on, and the subsequent uneasy relationship with, the United States.
The logic of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is this: Gather Jews together in any mass, and they will let loose messianic havoc on the world, either because of their own messianic hungers or because dispensationalist Gentiles wish to use them for this purpose. Jews are the authors of clannish conspiracies–the nonbelievers, especially–while the believers are themselves susceptible to conspiracies that flatter their conviction that the Jews are of cosmic importance.
Landsman’s pregnant cousin-in-law sums it all up after the Jews destroy the Dome of the Rock: “All those people rioting on the television in Syria, Baghdad, Egypt? In London? Burning cars. Setting fire to embassies. Up in [the Hasidic district], did you see what happened, they were dancing, those f–ing maniacs, they were so happy about all this craziness, the whole floor collapsed right onto the apartment beneath. A couple of little girls, sleeping in their beds, they got crushed to death. That’s the kind of s–t we have to look forward to now. Burning cars and homicidal dancing.”
In other words, the Jews who change the world in Chabon’s novel are nothing more than reverse-image fanatic Muslims, Palestinian suicide bombers in black hats. According to Chabon, his mother crowed when she heard he was receiving some (pretty muted) criticism of his novel’s perspective: “Now you know you’ve arrived as a Jewish-American writer,” she said. “When you’ve been condemned by other Jews as an anti-Semite, you know you’ve made it.”
In fact, the condemnation to which she was referring came from my colleague Kyle Smith at the New York Post. Smith isn’t Jewish. But it’s interesting that Chabon’s mother instantly assumed he was. She was clearly referring to the treatment accorded Philip Roth in his early years, when Roth’s no-holds-barred and unsentimental portraits of postwar Jews sent many of his contemporaries into frenzies of rage. The critic Marie Syrkin spoke for many when she said that Portnoy’s Complaint was “plain unadulterated anti-Semitism . . . right out of the Goebbels-Streicher script.”
Syrkin was wrong, since Portnoy’s Complaint is not an expression of Jewish self-hatred but rather an acidic portrait of Jewish self-hatred. Chabon is a very different case. There’s no Jewish self-hatred in him because he excludes himself from the deep contempt he feels for those Jews whose religious convictions or Zionist beliefs he does not share.
“I love my Jewish heritage,” says Chabon. “I’m so proud of it. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t write about it, and I feel that I don’t need to prove that to anybody.” He need prove nothing. Trust the tale, not the teller, D.H. Lawrence once said. Chabon’s tale speaks for itself. Like all those who express a great sentimental love for their “heritage,” Chabon loves his just so long as it’s in the rearview mirror.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
