The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) by Michael Chabon

I love to read, but I am not big on detective stories or mysteries. I scare way too easily. But when I heard that Michael Chabon was going to release a new novel, I knew I had to read it. I loved “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and was thrilled that his new novel would also be about Judaism, because I felt like I learned a lot about Judaism from Kavalier and Clay.

“The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” is a typical detective story, and while I was reading it, I felt like The Maltese Falcon music should have been playing in the background. And I am happy to report that it wasn’t scary at all. There were no surprise twists and turns, and I didn’t have nightmares from it. But it was still a very interesting read, and had great meter and pacing.

The story takes place in the real town of Sitka, Alaska, but it is the fictionalized location of the Jewish quasi-state after World War II. In the book, the Jewish homeland of Israel never got off the ground, and instead Jews were allowed to move to this particular region of Alaska, where they would be allowed to live for 60 years and then send back into the diaspora. We come into the story just weeks before this deadline, and as many characters say in the book, and as it has always been in the world, “It’s a strange time to be a Jew.” Our main character, a secular, Yiddish-speaking Jewish detective is investigating a murder, and in the course of the novel, learns more about his community, his family, and himself. There isn’t a happy ending here, as there never has been for the Jewish people.

I did learn a bit more about Judaism from the novel. The book is peppered with Yiddish words and phrases, some of which were familiar, though the majority of which weren’t. Any reader, Jewish or not, will be able to figure out the usage of the words though from their context. It’s funny the way that the Yiddish words are used in detective speak, such as the cops calling a gun a “sholem,” the way cops in Americans would call it a “piece,” and a phone is a “shoyfer,” the way Americans would call it a “horn.”

The story also deals with a concept in Judaism that was unfamiliar to me, that of a “messiah of the day,” that in each generation, a possible messiah is born. It was really neat to learn more about that, just as I learned about the Golem in Kavalier and Clay.