Jews on ice

Michael Chabon talks about Jewish identity, Chassids as hobbits, his love of Barack Obama and the joys of writing a Yiddish-Alaskan detective novel.

By Sarah Goldstein

Read more: Books, Israel, Interviews, Judaism, Michael Chabon, Authors, Books Interviews, Barack Obama, Ayelet Waldman

May 4, 2007 | In an essay about the 1958 travel guide "Say It in Yiddish" in Civilization magazine, Michael Chabon contemplated a country where "I'd do well to have a copy of 'Say It in Yiddish' in my pocket." Of course, not only had Chabon not found such a place but, he pointed out, "I don't believe anyone has."

Chabon, it seems, couldn't get this phantom Yiddish-speaking nation out of his head, and now he's gone and created the place himself. Welcome to Sitka, Alaska, the setting for his new novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," where the only "American" spoken is swear words. In this imaginary world without Israel, Sitka plays temporary home to Big Macher department stores, a thriving Chassid mafia, and some 3 million very cold Jews.

If less epic than "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," for which Chabon won the Pulitzer in 2001, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is no less ambitious. In addition to being a Chandleresque murder mystery, it deals with the Messiah, a secretive cabal not unlike the apocryphal Elders of Zion, Jewish-American relations and the perennial question of what it means to be a Jew. If all this sounds like too much, you may be right. But, as is the case in most of Chabon's novels, it is his characters, at once absurd and entirely familiar, that hold the story together. Here we have Meyer Landsman, a secular policeman with a bad case of the shakes, whose favorite daydream is to imagine the many ways he could take his own life; and his half-Indian partner Berko Shemets, a hammer-wielding gumshoe more devout than most of Sitka's Yids. "These are weird times to be a Jew" is the refrain of those in Sitka, and so, one feels, has it always been. Coming from Chabon, it is perhaps unsurprising that a fiction set in a fantastical place, told in a dying language, poses some of the most poignant, difficult questions about the Jewish homeland.

Salon caught up with Chabon in New York, a place he still fancies as "'Kavalier and Clay' land," where he spoke about why he likes being called anti-Semitic, what it's like being married to another writer, and why he's obsessed with Barack Obama.

The book is set in Sitka, Alaska, which you have made the temporary home to Yiddish-speaking Jews, in a world where Israel doesn't exist. Why make it a detective story on top of all that?

I wanted to find a way, narratively, to range as freely as I could across the whole of this place and every level of this society. I just kind of felt it as an intuitive leap that a detective, a policeman with a badge, would be able to go everywhere, see everything. He would be informed, he would understand how the world operates -- the written and the unwritten rules.

Some moment around the time that I was conceiving of this book I reread Isaac Babel's short stories and I just felt like there was a stylistic link there between Babel and [Raymond] Chandler. Isaac Babel was a hard-boiled writer; he was tough and deliberately so. He almost wore his hardness as a badge of honor in a way that I felt like I recognized also from Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett. And he was writing around the same time as Hammett and Hemingway; it just didn't feel like a totally ridiculous comparison to make.

I was also reading a lot of Ross Macdonald while I was writing this and I noticed not only did he have short chapters but he would sometimes break a scene right in the middle into two chapters, right on a line of dialogue.

Which you do throughout the book, and which is oddly fitting with the Yiddish dialect -- the interrupting, and the economy of speech. What is your own relationship with the language? Did your grandparents speak Yiddish?

Yes, I grew up hearing it. My grandparents both spoke Yiddish on my mother's side and their siblings spoke it as well, my grandmother's siblings, and my great-aunt got the Daily Forward in Yiddish. I heard the language all the time. I wasn't intended to understand it and typically they would use it when they didn't want us to know what they were saying. It was like Navajo Indian code talkers. [Laughs] So there was always this air of mystery and secrecy about the language.

You are perhaps the last generation to be familiar with the language.

I think the living native speakers of Yiddish who aren't ultra-Orthodox, who use the language every day, are an ever dwindling number. I mean, it already had that quality for me of something a couple generations removed and I was sort of transfixed by the survival of it. Like when I was a kid they still had pneumatic delivery in department stores and pneumatic tubes that would deliver mail and things like that. They're these almost antique but fully functioning systems that are still in use in little pockets of the world here and there, and when you encounter them you're always struck by how well they function and you wonder what happened to them and why we don't still use them. For me, Yiddish had a little of that quality.

You get at this idea, the otherworldliness of Yiddish, in the original essay you wrote about "Say It in Yiddish." You wonder where this fantastic or magical place is where one would speak Yiddish. Now you have your place.

Yes. Sitka is a kind of fantasy land in a way. When I was a kid, what it meant to write books was to make maps and create chronologies and I was really into "Lord of the Rings," for example; that was all about chronologies and charts and maps, and this novel is sort of my Middle-earth.

That's a good way of looking at it -- the Verbover Chassids as hobbits. Another analogy that's been made is to "The Plot Against America," an example of another Jewish-American writer -- and we can talk about that title in a second -- writing a counterfactual story of the Jews. Is there something about Jews and Jewishness that makes the "what if" story so appealing?

I don't know. Certainly it's hard to think of something that would be more focused simultaneously on the past and on the future than Judaism, because Judaism is all about history and what happened to us and how we got where we are. The patterns of our history and the crucial moments -- the destruction of the temple, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht, these key moments, these dates that both seem to change everything and yet merely were repeating, in some way, the last time.

And yet at the same time Judaism, in its truest form, is very focused on the future, on the coming of the Messiah, on the redemption of the world. To have that sort of simultaneous sense of looking backward and looking forward -- I think it does definitely lend itself to the kind of speculative, hypothetical thinking of the counterfactual novel. You're looking at history ... and asking, "Where are the moments where things changed, where history forked and it could have gone this way?"

And even the whole "Next year in Jerusalem" refrain.

Absolutely. I mean, in a way the Messiah story is kind of the ultimate science fiction; it's kind of a prediction of this brave new world that is always yet to come.

Next page: You haven't arrived as a Jewish-American writer until you've been attacked for being self-hating