The Yiddish Policemen's Union (5)

I just finished reading Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I don't want to plant major spoilers in this blog, so I will say that there are two major mysteries solved in the end: the nature of the monstrous conspiracy engineered by Litvak, and the murder of Mendel Shpilman. And the subplot of the relationship between  Meyer Landsman and his ex-wife Bina Gelbfish (now Meyer's boss in the police department) assumes a major role in the end.

As to the leading forces behind the conspiracy, there is a true believer, the cynical manipulator Litvak, and perhaps the most powerful faction which in the real world would correspond to the Christian Zionists. But here is what Litvak thinks (p. 345):

In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millenia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game--the survival of the Jews.

As Landsman comes face to face with the key player in the American government who facilitates the plot, he is disgusted with the whole game (p. 368):

"Fuck what it written," Landsman says. "You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what it written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hair-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

He sits down. He lights another cigarette.

"Fuck you," Landsman concludes. "And fuck Jesus, too. he was a pussy."

On page 372 you will find an account of Landsman's dream about Einstein, chess, Landsman's sister, and the destiny of the Jews.

Bina, like Landsman, realizes the extent to which she is only a pawn. Omitting egregious spoilers, I'm quoting part of what she says to Meyer (p. 375):

"God damn them all. I always knew they were there. Down there in Washington. Up there over our heads. Holding the strings. Setting the agenda. Of course I knew that. We all knew that. We all grew up knowing that, right? We are here on sufferance. Houseguests. But they ignored us for so long. Left us to our own devices. It was easy to kid yourself. Make you think you had a little autonomy, in a small way, nothing fancy. I thought I was working for everyone. [.....]"

A little later Landsman ruminates (p. 280):

Landsman considers the cohort of yids who arrived with his father, those who were not broken by suffering and horror but rather somehow resolved. The former partisans, resisters, Communist gunmen, left-Zionist saboteurs--the rabble, as they were styled in the newspapers of the south--who showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls and fought with Polar Bears like Hertz Shemets their brief, doomed battle for control of the District. They knew, those bold and devastated men, knew as they knew the flavor of the tongues in their mouths, that their saviors would one day betray them. They walked into this wild country that had never seen a Jew and set about preparing for the day when they would be rounded up, sent packing, forced to make a stand. Then, one by one, these wised-up angry men and women had been coopted, picked off, fattened up, set against one another, or defanged by Uncle Hertz and his endless operations.

That's about all I can reveal of the plot. As for my overall evaluation, I have come to admire Chabon's fictional achievement. It really does take a lot to write a novel like this. I am not so taken with the nature of the apocalyptic conspiracy that forms the linchpin of the plot, but perhaps that reflects the prevalence now of the theocratic fascism that threatens to destroy the world. Ultimately, this is a meditation on the precarious nature of Jewish identity, which, in the confines of this scenario makes sense, whether or not it would be my main preoccupation in the real world. Chabon's style is quite rich, and he does successfully create a noirish evironment, in which the authenticity of his own Yiddishisms doesn't matter so much.

When you are finished reading the novel, think again about the title.

In addition to the installments of this review, if you follow the subject "Michael Chabon" on this blog, you will find meditations about alternative history and historically oriented novels in general, Jewish and otherwise. I rarely read novels, but before this, I read Ned Bauman's Boxer, Beetle, which featured a seedy lower class Jewish milieu in the East End of London in the 1930s. I don't have much to go on to posit a trend, but I can speculate.

If there is some trend of writing Jewish historical fiction and alternate histories--the ones I know are those in which Esperanto and Zamenhof pop up--it must mean something about an attitude toward the present, as if there were past potentialities according to which things might have turned out differently. But I don't know enough about any of the authors to know their minds, and while I know why Jews and others would be disillusioned with American society or the contemporary world as a whole, I am too far removed from specifically Jewish concerns and their corresponding milieu to know what Jewish authors think about Jews, if generalizations are supportable.

As you know, the whodunit begins with a burned-out, alcohol-besodden detective investigating the murder of a chess-playing junkie in the run-down Hotel Zamenhof in which they both reside. In the end there's a bit of redemption for Meyer Landsman, though not for the society in which he lives. I haven't researched enough of Michael Chabon to know whether Hotel Zamenhof is so named in order to contrast the shabbiness of the reality with the utopian ideal. Zamenhof was a pioneer of the Zionist movement in its earliest stages and renounced it by the time it was becoming a real project, favoring a universalist humanistic project even while still working on the problem of adapting East European Jewry to the modern world. Zamenhof only gets brief mention in the novel as a putative ghost. Perhaps whatever redemption there is must be covered in the grime of hard experience. Perhaps there is at least a reminder of the possibility of redemption in our Hotel Zamenhof?

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (4)

The actual novel Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union comprises 411 pages, including the prefatory quote:

And they went to sea in a sieve -- Edward Lear

But there is also back matter, consisting of a glossary, author's note [acknowledgments] , bio of the author, "The Frozen Chosen" by Patricia Cohen, "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts" by Michael Chabon, blurbs about Chabon's other fiction, advert for the CD audio of the book performed by actor Peter Riegert.

Cohen's essay, originally published in The New York Times, gives us a portrait of Chabon in the real Sitka, Alaska, along with his thoughts about the construction of his fictional universe. Apparently, in reality Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, actually in 1940 did support opening up the Alaska territory to European Jews. Chabon got in hot water for his essay triggered by his reaction to the 1958 phrase book Say It in Yiddish, and started thinking about an imaginary Yiddishland. Cohen describes the real Sitka and its Jewish and other inhabitants. From the interview with Chabon, we learn that Chabon found an affinity between Isaac Babel in English and hard-boiled detective fiction. Also about Chabon's approach to style:"I felt like I had to invent a whole new language, a dialect." He explains the creation of his own slang as well as his approach to the characters and detective fiction generally.

Cohen was motivated by the themes of destiny and chosenness, and wondering what the world would be like minus the state of Israel. "How mad it seems that this tiny little scrap of land [would be central in global geopolitics] . . . . I have a very strong feeling of complete ambivalence about a world without Israel . . . . I didn't come in with a point to prove or an agenda."

Chabon's 1997 essay on Yiddish, which appeared in Harper's magazine, is reprinted in the book. He takes Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's Say It in Yiddish as an exercise in futility. As Yiddish had been abandoned by Israel for Hebrew, leaving surviving Yiddish speakers stranded in limbo, the actual application of Yiddish to contemporary situations--booking a plane flight, for example--to be fantasy. Hence Chabon fantasizes about an alternative Yiddish-speaking homeland. Would its denizens be as rough and tough as Israelis? And here is the germ of his future novel. And then he wonders what Jewish Europe would have been like had it been spared the Holocaust.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (3)

I've now read 40 chapters, about 360 pages, with six chapters (about 50 pages) to go.

Occasionally my attention has strayed and I lost the thread of what was going on, but it always picked up again and stayed glued for a long while to this whodunit. As a crime novel with pseudo-Yiddishkeit, this is a great read. What its meaning or message is eludes me, but perhaps that too is part of the whodunit.

The plot revolves around detective Meyer Landsman's unrelenting, unauthorized drive to resolve the murder of Mendel Shpilman (a.k.a. Emanuel Lasker) at their common home, the Hotel Zamenhof. The Hotel Zamenhof, born of high ideals, is a seedy, degenerated dive. Perhaps this contrast was intended by Chabon?  Landsman is an unlikely hero, and Shpilman a dodgy candidate for the role for which he was groomed. The Jewish settlement of the Sitka district of Alaska, temporarily reserved for Jewish refugees with its own governing structure but now facing Reversion to Alaskan control, is now endangered. The Jews are not only unsettled by this prospect, but their entire existence is askew, uncomfortable, damaged and wounded, far remote from ideals or utopian visions, compromised not only by their difficult circumstances but by their internal politics and their relations with both the indigenous people and the American government. The worst among the Jews are the ultra-orthodox, who wield illegitimate political power and harbor a gangster element among them. And the manipulation of their religious fanaticism could prove to be the world's undoing.

Perhaps I am not the only one tempted to draw parallels between this alternate history and real history.  But I have no real clue as to Chabon's intent.

There is a history of struggle between the Jews and the Tlingit, with multiethnic offspring and antagonistic friendships in the mix, as one would expect. Here is an extract from one colorful exchange illustrating the situation (p. 283):

[....] "Johnny the Jew," he says. "Well, well. Beanie and all. Clearly you haven't had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut."

"Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget."

"Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer."

In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the snow.

"Go shit in the ocean," Dick says in flawless Yiddish.

They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. [....]

There's more to this priceless dialogue. Dick also has more to say about his boundless suspicion of Jews (285).

There is more to the linguistic mix as well, as Jews of different social origins have different linguistic peculiarities.  Here is an example of something new to Landsman (p. 286).

"Hebrew?" Berko says. "Mexicans speaking Hebrew?"

"That's what it sounded like to me," Landsman says. "Not synagogue Hebrew, either." Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It's only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls.

I have no idea whether these graphic analogies are apt for any variant of Hebrew or Yiddish. They do in any case illustrate Chabon's vivid style, and they are suggestive of the social/political realities associated with these languages. Note also the reversal of the fates of Yiddish and Hebrew. Remember that in this alternative history the fledgling state of Israel is destroyed, and the Yiddish-speaking Jews dominate the Jewish settlement in Sitka.

The generation that settled in Alaska found a great disparity between the imagined fables of Alaska and the reality found there. Its songs mark this disillusionment. (291)

Two million Jews got off the boats and found no rolling prairies dotted with buffalo. No feathered Indians on horseback. Only a spine of flooded mountains and fifty thousand Tlingit village-dwellers already in possession of most of the flat and usable land. Nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style of Vilna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior--snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail.

Just a story, or is there more behind Chabon's fictional creation?

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2)

I've now read 22 chapters of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, approaching 200 pages.The plot moved quite slowly as the overall scenario of the Jewish colony in Alaska was in the process of being laid out step by step. Chabon's use of language is quite adroit, and his capacity for description is quite rich. Note that the narrative is written in the present tense, rather than in the past tense as is customary in the English language. I cannot comment on Chabon's dialogue, except for noticing some clever turns of phrase, as I am not conversant with Yiddish culture to judge how he re-creates it in his alternate universe.

The novel is heavily sprinkled with yiddishisms, which I do not understand. The characters, particularly the main character Landsman, always refers to Jews as 'yids'.  Whether or not this is a derogatory term in context I do not know, but it does not sound very flattering.

There are references to real-world Jewish public figures. There is a Max Nordau (pioneer Zionist) Street and a Peretz (I. L. Peretz, Yiddish poet) Street. There is an Einstein Chess Club. The murder victim who is the focal point of the plot is pseudonymously known as Emanuel Lasker (named after a chess champion, who also wrote about other games, e.g. Go).

The Jewish society we see here is not very attractive. There's a low class seediness about it, that begins with the run-down Zamenhof hotel, and the vista of crudity spreads out from there.The orthodox fanatics are referred to as 'black hats'. The Verbovers have their own island, and regard Landsman, who is there investigating the murder, as an interloper, and there is no love lost on his part either. They have inordinate political influence, and there is a fraction of them involved in organized crime. The Jews' relations with the Indians, i.e. the indigenous Alaskans, is none too friendly, either. The overall picture is not pretty. Other than storytelling, if there is a thematic purpose to Chabon's narrative, I do not know yet what it is.

Landsman is divorced, but his ex-wife Bina becomes his boss in the police department. Word comes down to scotch the murder case, but he can't leave it alone.  The Jewish settlement faces Reversion, which presumably means the loss of the Jewish franchise of the colony, which means a certain percentage of the Jewish residents will have to disperse.  Israel itself was destroyed in 1948. An interesting alternate history scenario, to be sure.

There is only one place so far where we learn more about the political factions that once were part of the fabric of the colony (p. 76):

For forty years--as Denny Brennan's series revealed--Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI's surveillance program  to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties  to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Here Shemetz's brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other. Starting in the late sixties, Hertz was turned loose on the nascent radical movement among the Tlingit, and in time he pulled its teeth and claws, too.

As much care as Chabon takes to delineate this society, I found my attention flagging after a while, until, while visiting the Verboters, Landsman confronts the rebbe with the death of 'Emanuel Lasker', whose real identity has just been uncovered. From there I've been riveted to the narrative.

Now on to the Esperanto references.

'Elevatoro', an Esperanto word which appears twice so far, does not really mean 'elevator' in the sense of transporting people: that would be 'lifto'. An 'elevatoro' is more like a winch that lifts cargo.

Hotel Zamenhof is a centerpiece of the narrator. As for Zamenhof the man, he is thought to be a ghost:

"You know what Kohn says," says Tenenboym. Kohn says we got a ghost in the house." Kohn is the day manager. "Taking shit, moving shit around. Hohn figures it for the ghost of Professor Zamenhof."

"If they named a dump like this after me," Landsman says, "I'd haunt it, too."

"You never know," Tennenboym observes. "Especially nowadays." [pp. 12-13]

Much later, while Landsman is on forced leave while recovering from a bullet wound, his ex-wife Bina visits his hovel in the Hotel Zamenhof:

She wades through pieces of Landsman's gray suit and a bath towel and stands at the foot of the bed. Her eyes take in the pink wallpaper patterned with garlands in burgundy flock, the green plush carpet with its random motif of burn spots and mystery stains, the broken glass, the empty bottle, the peeling and chipped veneer of the pressboard furniture. Watching her with his head at the foot of the pull-down bed, Landsman enjoys the look of horror on her face, mostly because if he doesn't, then he will have to feel ashamed.

"How do you say 'shit heap' in Esperanto?" Bina says. She goes over to the veneer table and looks down at the last bedraggled curls of noodle pudding lying in the grease-streaked clamshell. [pp. 163-164]

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (1)

Opening sentence of Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union:

"Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered."

The hotel of course is named after L.L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, whose 153rd birthday is coming on December 15. So in honor of Zamenhof's birthday, I begin reading this alternate history novel. Is alternate history good for the Jews?

"Landsman puts his hand on Tenenboym’s shoulder, and they go down to take stock of the deceased, squeezing into the Zamenhof’s lone elevator, or ELEVATORO, as a small brass plate over the door would have it. When the hotel was built 50 years ago, all of its directional signs, labels, notices, and warnings were printed on brass plates in Esperanto. Most of them are long gone, victims of neglect, vandalism, or the fire code." [p. 3]

Omaĝe al la venonta naskiĝtago de Zamenhof, mi komencas legi ĉi tiun ukronian romanon (La Jida Policana Sindikato/Unio), en kiu situas Hotelo Zamenhof.

Alternate history, Jewish cognitive dissonance, & the Yiddish revival

Two State Dissonance
Gershom Gorenberg | The American Prospect, June 11, 2010

Meyer Landsman lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. Landsman is the hero of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in which the Jews lost the 1948 war in Palestine and have taken refuge in a Jewish autonomous region of Alaska. The run-down hotel is named for L.L. Zamenhof, the Russian-born Jew who invented Esperanto in order to bring world understanding and peace. In other words, Landsman's residence is a liberal Jewish dream that has seen much better days.

The turn to alternate history fiction is seen by Gorenberg as the outcome of cognitive dissonance among frustrated liberal Jews who can't see themselves in today's Israel.

What strikes me as I listen to the family fight between the hawkish Jewish establishment and other American Jews—the pro-peace Zionists, the furious anti-Zionists, the "don't ask me about Israel" non-Zionists—is that they're all dealing with a shared family problem: They have a hard time fitting Israel as it actually is into some of their deepest assumptions about the world. The easiest way for me to explain runs through Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union.

While most Jews repress the disparity, Roth and Chabon make it very clear—by describing the world as it would be if the facts lined up with the beliefs. Roth describes an America that fits the assumption that Jews are at peril everywhere. Chabon invents a world in which the Jews are still weak and homeless. On one level these visions are dystopian—but on another they are somehow comforting, homey, because the gap between different things we "know" is gone.

I'm not going to comment on the rest of Gorenberg's political meditation. The non-religious Yiddish revival belongs to a different mental universe from what has become of the revival of Hebrew, itself a remarkable accomplishment, now associated with a powerful state far removed from the shleppers who might have once fantasized about it.

See also:

Yiddish is no joke
Antony Lerman, The Guardian, 5 March 2010

"The revival of this death-defying language shows that Zionism has failed to consign other forms of Jewish life to oblivion"

The Zionist movement was no friend to Yiddish, but now Yiddish is making a comeback. There's one comment on Zamenhof, Yiddish, and Esperanto.

Steampunk / Vaporpunko

First, introductions via Wikipedia & Vikipedio. While I have encountered manifestations of what is now called Steampunk, the term--the named genre--is new to me. Back in the 1960s I watched the TV series The Wild Wild West, an obvious precursor or example of the genre. (And, a few days ago, I made it halfway through the ineptly executed film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) Someone had to name the confluence of science fiction, the historical novel, and alternate history scenarios into a single concept. It's a new focal point for elements that are not so new. Yet I suspect it fits into the self-reflexive character of our time.

I wrote about the increasing profile of self-referential cultural artifacts in a 1993 essay:

Cultural Sophistication and Self-Reference on American Television: Seeds of Hope?

Owing to the acceleration of social and cultural change, it becomes obvious how drastically basic social assumptions are different now than from decades past, which has long been a device pursued by TV series, most recently the runaway hit Mad Men. Also, I've long held the view that all the avant-gardes have done their work, that we have reached the end of the line, and what's left to us is retrospective engagement, combined with a recombinant orientation towards cultural elements, also a long-standing feature of avant-gardes. Combining all this with alternative history, it makes sense that writers would add to the mere possibility of alternative outcomes for critical historical/political events (the Civil War, World War II, assassinations of heads of state, etc.) alternative technological, cultural, and aesthetic developments, as an extension of a retrospective, self-reflexive orientation. This becomes yet another manifestation of an all-encompassing artistic ars combinatoria.

Given that the Steampunk era coincides with the rise of artificial languages as a mass social phenomenon, I would naturally be interested in the intersection of Steampunk with Volapük and Esperanto, and less likely, other artificial languages.

I have already blogged about Andrew Drummond's novel A Hand-Book of Volapük, which is in the neighborhood of steampunk, a genre admired by Drummond. See An interview with Andrew Drummond (2006).

Note also Michael Chabon's popular Yiddish Policemen's Union, which also pays homage to Zamenhof and Esperanto. See The Grad Students Who Mocked Michael Chabon's Science Fiction by Charlie Jane Anders.

Volapük is featured also in Spook Country by William Gibson, godfather of cyberpunk.

But here's the pay-off for you super-nerds: you can join . . .

League of Steampunk Esperantists (GVE), a unit of The Steampunk Empire.