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    The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
    The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
    The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
    Audiobook12 hours

    The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel

    Written by Michael Chabon

    Narrated by Peter Riegert

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    he New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—“an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its…blockbuster superfame” (New York).

    For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a ""temporary"" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.

    Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.

    At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJul 5, 2016
    ISBN9780062640864
    Author

    Michael Chabon

    Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

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    Reviews for The Yiddish Policemen's Union

    4/5

    3,021 ratings231 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A remarkable book; here are some remarks. Is this about a mystery, about love, or about chess? Not entirely clear but I enjoyed every page. Not to say that it was easy reading: each sentence is a workout to understand, not only the pervasive analogies but the language. Oh, yes, so much Yiddish with no pity for us goyim. I have not had so much brain exercise from a work of fiction in a long time.
    • 2/5
      This was a miss for me. I greatly enjoyed “Kavaliere and Clay”, but I just couldn’t keep track of what was going on in this book. There is just too much time spent on gratuitous and rambling descriptions, to the point that by the time he’s finished I’ve lost track of what he was trying to describe. For that same reason, I kept getting lost regarding the plot. I finally gave up, and I very rarely don’t finish a book.

      With all of that said, two important notes: first, I have a graduate degree in American Literature, so it’s not as though I just can’t handle more advanced or more complex writing styles. On the other hand, I listened to the book (a neurological disorder makes reading extremely difficult), and I do acknowledge that the narrator’s delivery contributes to the difficulty in following the narrative, and to no small degree. Regardless, I do believe that I would have trouble staying focused on this book either way.

      One more quibble regarding the narration: while I generally admire Peter Riegert as a voice actor and narrator, I feel he is miss cast here. His somewhat vaguely “New York Jewish” accent is jarring in an Alaskan environment.
    • 4/5
      Lot of plot turns in an alternate world, there Alaska is a refuge for the world's jews.
    • 3/5
      I'm going to start out by saying that I love alternate history. I think it is so fun and so cool to look at the world and think about what could have happened differently so I was intrigued by this book. Unfortunately I didn't love this book as much as I wanted to. There were definitely parts of the book that really sucked me in and I really enjoyed reading about but there were also a lot of times that the story just completely lost me and I got very confused. I think part of the reason that happened was because this book is about a culture where I'm not super familiar with the intricacies of the lifestyle. Also Michael Chabon's writing style also just confused me a lot and it didn't work with me. I did like the characters and the unique setting but because I was kind of confused throughout this book about what exactly was happening, I couldn't love the characters as much as I wanted to. I really didn't hate this book. I still really like the idea of it and I think it was really interesting but something about this book just wasn't for me and I really wish I could have liked it a bit more.
    • 1/5
      I still did not enjoy this re-read of Michael Chabon's “The Yiddish Policemen's Union”. This time around the only redeeming feature was still the clever premise which I had forgotten by now. But that's about it.In the early 1900s, the Zionist Movement did consider a British colonial proposal to make parts of British East Africa (in today's Uganda and Kenya) a Jewish settlement. The Nazi leaders did consider a plan to deport European Jews to Madagascar. Odd as those locations now seem, used as we are to what did actually happen (oh, let's not get into the reality of the reality here), I really applauded Mr. Chabon's inspired, witty leap of thought in making Alaska the location for a Jewish homeland. Not long after reading that book, I happened to read Victor Klemperer's incomparable diaries. Jewish by birth; a converted Christian for marriage; in practice an atheist (if memory serves), Mr. Klemperer's diaries are a rare, searing, intelligently pedantic contemporaneous account of daily life in Nazi Germany.To my surprise, among the whispered rumours he recorded in passing was the rumour that Jews would be deported to Alaska.Incidentally, I am getting used to the fact that a lot of people are eroding the distinction between "alternate" and "alternative" and don't get heat up about it anymore (although I do regret it); even Garner's Modern American Usage (2009) states "Alternate is often misused for alternative", rating it "3" the book's "language change index" (scale 1 to 5), which is glossed as "Widespread but ...". In other words it is not considered really acceptable in careful style even on that side of the Atlantic.
    • 5/5
      Probably my favourite book of all the fiction I read that year.I enjoy a good film noir detective story and this starts out just like so many of the best: our protagonist (Is he a hero? He's the best we'll get) wakes hung-over and miserable in his room at the fleapit hotel, to find his neighbour is dead and now that's his problem to solve. So much, so Sam Spade. But now we find this West Coast isn't LA, it's Alaska - or rather the Federal District of Sitka, in an alternate timeline where this became a Jewish homeland and refuge from Europe. This isn't the Promised Land, it's the Land Grudgingly Loaned and now Uncle Sam wants it back. It's the observed details that make this. Hebrew is a oddity kept for shul and the language of the streets is Yiddish, His partner is one of the few gentiles in town, being from the First Nations. And when there's no food, at least there's chess. Chabon never makes do with one word when he can fit a dozen in there. As much a mensch as his bedraggled and trampled hero.I loved this. Unusually for fiction I'll probably read it again.
    • 5/5
      In Chabon's alternate history, the Jewish country of Israel doesn't exist, and Jewish refugees escaping from the Holocaust are granted the safety and autonomy of a strip of Alaska. Now 60 years later, the Jewish land of Sitka is about to revert back to the United States. That's the background against which a Jewish policeman, living in a fleabag hotel, ends up investigating the murder of another tenant of the hotel.Still reeling from his divorce a couple of years earlier the more recent death of his sister, and faced with an uncertain future after the reversion, Meyer Landsman is a mess, but he's a good detective, determined to find the killer, even if it means disobeying a direct order from his newly promoted ex-wife who is now his boss.In prose full of metaphors and similies, Chabon takes Meyer and the reader into the part of Sitka where the Black Hats -- ultra Orthodox Jews -- live and oversee life in the district. The simple murder of a former chess prodigy/current drug addict is anything but simple. This is a fascinating look at what could have been, as well as a compelling story about a murder, grief, and a community determined to keep surviving all the obstacles put in their way.
    • 5/5
      I've had a hardback copy of this book on my shelf for some time, but kept shying away from it. What a mistake.Part detective story, part alternative history, part romance, part discussion of religious dogma, this enchanting book held my attention like the best suspenseful mystery, so that I read it almost in one sitting. What would have happened if Israel had never taken hold in 1948? What would happen if you gave a whole people a 20 year lease on which to lick their wounds? And what would happen when one kind of hope collides with another? Some of the Jews in the borrowed land of Alaska want to try to win back Palestine, some want to stay, some are fearful of eviction, again, as has happened for millenia. And in the midst of this, a chess wizard is found dead in a seedy hotel, in which a guilt-ridden police detective spends his non-working hours drinking his sorrows. The classic Chandler-esque noir plot melds perfectly with the deeper discussions to produce a book that is very hard to put down.
    • 3/5
      Has it's moments.Well-written, gives us a peek into the Jewish culture in Sitka while keeping us interested in chess, Jewish rabbinical hierarchy, and a sad drunk policeman...
    • 5/5
      one of last books read with Wordies before I moved back North
    • 5/5
      This is such a great book, I pick it up every so often to read it again and every time I am completly drawn into the story.It is especially the little details for describing situations which lets you dive into this universe of alternate reality.
    • 3/5
      I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it kept me going through 5months of reading, on the other hand, it took me five months to read it. Especially the first half feels more like an investment to get at the better second part and the female characters felt more off to me than the noirish tropes and biased POV-character would explain, but then I really like Chabon's way with words and language.
    • 5/5
      Book 5 of Life's Library (John Green's online communal book club). Chabon is one of my favorite authors so I can't really review his work (not that I really review anything), cause its very biased. Its a slightly alternative history/noir crime novel, that the book summary says; "In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy." What's not to love. Here's some quotes that say it better than I ever could....he plays goalkeeper as a squad of unprofitable regrets mounts a steady attack on his ability to get through a day without feeling anything....Landsman has to wonder how he ever could have seen anything in the rebbe's eyes but ten thousand miles of frozen sea. Landsman is shocked, knocked overboard into that cold water. To keep himself afloat, he clings to the ballast of his cynicism.The knot of his gold-and-green rep necktie presses its thumb against his larynx like a scruple pressing against a guilty conscience, a reminder that he is alive.Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.(About Judaism) "Every damn day of my life, I get up in the morning and put this shit on and pretend to be something I'm not. Something I'll never be. For you." "I never asked you to observe the religion," the old man says, not looking up. "I don't think I ever put any kind of --" "It has nothing to do with religion," Berko says. "It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers."9/10 S: 6/11/19 - 6/30/19 (20 Days)
    • 5/5
      This book, apart from assuaging my fears that a madness would overtake Mr. Chabon (see also Summerland then the Final Solution), put together two of my favorite speech styles that I may not be fully able to separate again: slangy Yiddish and hardboiled. Throw in chess, Indians, hope, sad and alone, a pie shop... Strange times to be a Jew. 775/1000
    • 3/5
      Chabon knowingly violates the norms of Noir to suggest larger ideas on Israel and the West.
    • 5/5
      What if the messiah comes, but he doesn’t want to stick around? This question underlies a completely engrossing, brilliantly told detective noir story set in an alternative reality Jewish homeland in Alaska. As a detective story, it’s well done, with a mystery that leads to numerous other crimes and conspiracies, all of which seem plausible in the context of a corrupted, criminal underworld at the edge of the world and the end of time. The situation is a murder in a Jewish homeland imposed on a piece of the world that no-one wants except the Tlingit people living there (a nice parallel for the State of Israel in Palestine). The setting, with its ever-present fog, rain, snow and cold, hemmed in by forests and water, has the same foreboding character that Raymond Chandler would call up if his Los Angeles were 1,500 miles farther north. Also like Chandler, Chabon uses a colourful, hard-boiled style to evoke a tough, cynical and bleak view of the world. His language brings in yiddish slang and similes that fit naturally in the world he has created. It doesn’t feel like a forced pastiche of Chandler to find out that a sholem is slang for a gun (or “peacemaker” in western American slang); or that a latke is a street cop (or “flatfoot”). An artful homage, I would say.Another departure from Chandler, or at least the Chandler novels I’ve read, is that the past of the protagonist Landsman is not hidden. It is revealed slowly, but Chabon does explain how he came to his bleak outlook and self-destructive life. And while the story centres on male protagonists, the women in the story are strong capable individuals who contribute to the plot and the characters. Ultimately, Landsman finds that salvation is not in the messiah, but in his relationship to the woman he loves.The messiah figure is an interesting one, too. He has a genuine gift for bringing contentment into people’s lives, but he can’t bring the same satisfaction into his own life. The contradictions with his ultra-orthodox sect make him miserable and he wants out. His mother wants to protect him, but he flees before she can help him, if that’s even possible in her world. A self-sacrificing messiah this is not, which makes an interesting reflection on the Christian messiah.From the start, though, I wondered what the title referred to, and about page 230, we find that the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a fake: after losing his badge, Landsman uses a union card to pretend to be an active policeman. So I take it that the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a cover for looking at something else. What Michael Chabon is really looking at seems to be a multi-layered view of Jewish-American and Israeli politics, society and personal relations. A key theme in the novel is the expiration of the lease on the Jewish homeland in Alaska, which the Americans won’t renew it, leaving the few million Jewish settlers either searching for a new homeland or in a suspended animation – the existential challenge of Israel and the renewed diaspora of unwelcome Jewish people. To resolve the challenge, a group of Zionists finds a messiah and concocts a scheme to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem and return to Israel. Their willingness to stop at nothing, including genocide, and with the probably ignorant support of wealthy American Jewish sponsors, leads to a scheme that would stir the imagination of anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. Chabon keeps the story from descending to such fantasies, mainly by making the imagined setting so much a part of the novel that the storyline cannot be separated from the city of Sitka and its seedy inhabitants. That and the fundamentalist Christian allies who back the plot.Chabon uses the noir genre conventions to explore literature and society in complex ways, as Chabon’s Cavalier and Clay used comic book conventions to explore twentieth century Jewish life. I like the chess theme, for example, which returns frequently to provide clues to the mystery story, is also a reflection on order and disorder in society, father-son relationships and the ultimate puzzle of life, what to do when you have no good moves. This is a literary novel that is entertaining and a great read.
    • 2/5
      Interesting starting idea, but gets really boring very fast. And way too much Yiddish words in the text actually makes it hard to read. Could not finish this one.
    • 3/5
      The Yiddish Policemen's Union is an alternate-history novel in which the Jewish people have been removed from Israel and relocated to a small portion of Alaska on a temporary lease. The story revolves around a police detective, Landsman, and his dogged determination in unraveling his latest murder case, despite the fact that it's no more important than any of the other unsolved murder cases in his file, he's officially been told to drop the case, and he keeps ending up in harm's way for annoying the wrong people. Of course, the case ends up being related to an international conspiracy. What's remarkable about the book is the atmosphere--the entire Jewish district seems like kind of a slum, complete with Rabbi leaders that are no better than mob bosses, which is added to the looming inevitability of the Americans taking over when the lease is up in several months. The characters themselves are mostly abrasive and irrational--I found it very difficult to identify or sympathize with them at all. While the murder case is resolved by the end, the reader never gets the sense that the overwhelming glumness of the world will ever cease. This one was a bit too depressing for me.
    • 4/5

      Long ago, but not all that far away, I converted to Judaism. I eventually divorced by Jewish husband, and stopped practicing. But I have always been fond of the religion and the culture. For a lot of reasons, I miss being Jewish. I point this out, because it probably explains why I have a bit of a crush on Michael Chabon right now. I just finished reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The first page had me craving the roll and lilt of sung Hebrew, and the rich smells of a Jewish kitchen. Mr. Chabon's Jewish community is deliciously believable.

      Mr. Chabon's writing is very rich, possibly a bit too rich in places. His phrasing is so full at times it can be hard to follow. The Jewish/Yiddish references hit you like an avalanche from the first paragraph, which I loved but may be a bit hard to follow, at least at first, for someone not familiar with Ashkenazic Jewish culture. That being said, this book drew me in and kept me attention to the end. The plot is good, the characters are excellent, and the mystery is believable, and very character driven. The end smacks just a little of deus ex machina, but there's been just enough of a whiff of the miraculous in the course of the novel, that its easy to accept.

      I can easily understand why this was nominated for a Hugo this year. It's a good read, but brings up some very deep issues in the course of the wild ride of the plot, from what motivates people to what it means to have faith. Oddly enough, it never actually addresses where, if anywhere, miracles come from, or even if they exist. Things happen; it's up the the reader if it's coincidence, the hand of G-D, or something else entirely. In the book, some things just happen.

      I highly recommend this book, and not just because I have a crush on the author :)
    • 5/5
      Loved this book once I let myself fall into its world where the world's Jews had all been segregated to Sitka, Alaska. Once you accept that premise, the consequences are marvelously complex. The pretext for the novel is the solving of a mystery but the details are what matters.. Many memorable characters. Highly recommend this one.
    • 4/5
      Well... this book is unexpectedly different. I am not sure if it would be considered good or not by most readers, but I did enjoy it. It is kinda a noir police procedural, but set in an alternate future. Well, the future is exactly like the present, except for the social situation where Jews were relocated to Alaska post world war 2.There is not very much action, occasional swearing and no graphic sex or violence.
    • 4/5
      I loved the premise of this book, the characters, the language, the humor. But the ending happened so fast, I was a bit confused by it. Otherwise I would have given in a 5star rating.
    • 5/5
      One thing is sure, Chabon is a genius writer. After that the things are not so we'll defined. What we are reading? An alternative history story? A detective story? A Jewish messiah story? All of it in one great book thanks to Chabon's extraordinary fantasy and storytelling ability.
    • 3/5
      Loved Kavalier and Clay. Never really got into this one.
    • 4/5
      A quirky, often very funny venture into alternative history and detective fiction from a master storyteller. This novel is set in the fictional Federal District of Sitka, which was established in Alaska by the US as a refuge for Polish and Russian Jews escaping the impending Holocaust (which consequently only resulted in the death of two million Jews). Apparently there actually was a proposal to do such a thing in the late '30's, but it was given a big thumbs down by Alaska's Territorial Delegate to the House of Representatives, so it never became a reality. Chabon solves that problem by having the gentleman run over in a traffic accident.With the subsequent collapse of the infant State of Israel in 1948, Sitka in effect became the long-sought Jewish homeland. Our cast of characters here include ultra orthodox Jews of a villainous sort; police detectives faced with the execution-style death of an unfortunate young man once believed to be the messiah of his generation; and mysterious government agency types whose motives are murky but suspect. In the great Jewish tradition, naturally this Alaskan homeland is turning out to be only temporary; sixty years after its creation, it is scheduled to revert to Native control, and its inhabitants will be citizens of nowhere, with an uncertain future. Orders are that there must be no open cases left on anyone's desk when this occurs, and the preferred means of closing them is to be "effective resolution", a phrase the detectives understand to mean they shouldn't waste their time seeking the truth.Chabon's imagination is really fine; this was an engrossing reading experience, full of wry humor. Not exactly literary fiction, but certainly not your average genre murder mystery either. If it were the latter, it would make a fine first entry in a series-- I would really love to know what the future holds for Meyer Landsman, his ex-wife and current commanding officer Bina Gelbfish, and his half-Indian cousin/partner Berko Shemets.
    • 5/5
      This was an exciting reading. Detective Meyer Landsman is awakened, because in another room of his hotel someone is dead. This is the beginning of an odyssey, with Landsman dealing not only with rival Jews, but also with his own past. You have the feeling that Landsman puts his foot in his mouth, losing everything that once meant something to him. In the course of time, however, one realizes that this kind of investigation will ultimately lead to the goal.I have suffered with him. It was a fast reading and I could not put it aside.
    • 3/5
      (3.5 stars)

      I am not Jewish and yet I enjoyed "The Yiddish Policemen's Union"--though I suspect that if I were Jewish I would have enjoyed it much more. I had a sense there was something akin to a lot of "in jokes" I was missing because I didn't possess a grounding in, basically, Eastern European Jewish culture. Thus while I could read the book as I would if I were reading a science fiction novel set in the alien culture of the planet M'katalun, there was a warmth of familiarity with the material I was lacking.

      And comparing TYPU with a science fiction novel is not inappropriate, as the book takes place in an alternative universe. The attempt to establish a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 failed, and instead, the United States leased a parcel of land in Alaska for a Jewish homeland. Bush pilots and interactions with native peoples are a taken-for-granted part of life, but basically, the municipality of Sitka has become a very Jewish metropolis of several million where Yiddish is spoken as the first language. But crisis is pending: the American government has notified the inhabitants that it will be repossessing the land, to send the Jews into diaspora again. There are rumors of a messiah. And in the midst a murder happens, which brings our protagonist to the fore, a homicide detective with the Sitka police department.

      So a lot goes on here. A murder needs to be solved. There's political intrigue as everyone is maneuvering to find a place to their advantage once the Americans take over. The tensions raise religious hopes and fanaticisms. Are all these things related? Of course! You wouldn't invest yourself in a book like this unless you expected all the strands to find a common weave in the end. What you want to know is HOW they all relate.

      I credit Michael Chabon with great imagination in creating this universe. And his prose is fine. But probably because I was a Gentile stranger who required some time adjusting to his world, I have to admit it took me about halfway into the book before I warmed to the characters.

      And it happens that because of travel and academics, I know a bit about Jewish history and culture. A reader who doesn't possess even that might give up well before that.
    • 2/5
      some clever writing along the way. I guess I don't identify enough with the Jewish/Yiddish thing to really get this. Some brilliant descriptions and brif spurts of inspired prose.

      Not really about plot and not even about characters, but about mood and setting.
    • 2/5

      It took me a while to get into this novel.  Even though the murder happened in chapter one, it still felt like the plot dragged on forever.  Then the main character got so caught up in governmental conspiracy theories it seemed like he forgot to solve the murder.  Then it felt like he chose an unexpected killer just to prove how smart he was.  The ending just didn't make sense to me.  The premise was really good and I think if Chabon had remembered to keep it simple, I would have enjoyed the book a lot more.

    • 5/5
      A beautifully written detective mystery that looks at Jewish displacement.