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Michael Chabon. Photo by Stephanie
Rausser |
Imagine, if you will, that there was
no state of Israel. Not now. Not ever. And certainly not
after 1948. Instead the Jews were given a sliver of the
Alaskan panhandle called the Sitka District and told to call
it a homeland.
The added
catch: After 60 years said sliver would revert back to the
United States, and its residents left to fend for
themselves.
Such was
part of a proposal put forth by then-Secretary of the
Interior Harold Ickes back when Hitler was running rampant
in the world. Okay, so there wouldn’t be an expiration date,
but it damn sure would be a place where the displaced Jews
of the world could live free of persecution.
Or would’ve
been, anyway, had not American xenophobia and a little thing
called World War II colluded to kill the idea.
In Michael
Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(HarperCollins, $26.95), the above-mentioned fairy tale
comes to life and gives the Jews a whole new promise, not to
mention a whole new Promised Land.
The land of
the Frozen Chosen.
Of course
Chabon’s not content merely to create a speculative city on
a tundric hill and imaginarily save untold thousands of
lives. We’re talkin’ ’bout the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay here,
one of the Wonder Boys, who not only revealed The
Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but went deeply serial with
“The Gentleman of the Road” and spectacularly animated in,
ahem, Spiderman 2.
In other
words: a wordslinger to whom genre is just another term for
everything to encompass. Union is no exception. In
fact, future generations might make of it a rule. Equal
parts noir, fantasy, high lit, it’s the kinda hard-boiled
alt-history modern storytellers would write if they weren’t
so afraid of being left outta their pigeon holes.
And what a
story is told: Like all good noir, it begins with murder and
is propelled by mystery. In this instance it’s a junkie
chessman who’s dead and a bottom-dwelling detective who’s
not so hot on the case. Compounding the confoundedness of it
all is the pending Reversion, when now swingin’ Sitka is set
to go back to the indigenous Alaskans, and a menace of
Orthodox gangsters called the Verbovers.
Yes,
there’s a dame, and, yes, there’s intrigue and subterfuge
and dramatics galore. Mostly though, it’s a high-stakes game
of check and mate where the very fate of a people lies in
the moves of a master crafter. It’s epic, it’s preposterous
and it’s dynamite. Kinda like life. And that we’ve come to
expect so much from Chabon doesn’t at all mean we’re not
always terrifically surprised by his muchness.
Read him
and reap.
Michael
Chabon reads from
The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union at 8 p.m. Friday at Books & Books, 265
Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Admission is free. Call
305-442-4408.
Comments? E-mail
letters@miamisunpost.com.
Hood is online at
www.therealjohnhood.com.
