Meeting venue: The Ring-O' Bells, Widcombe, 7th October 2021
This is a book which is set in an alternate universe – one where the State of Israel lost the May 1948 War of Independence, and hence where Israel was overrun, causing a humanitarian crisis which of course relatively immediately followed the crisis caused by the Holocaust, and leading to the USA offering a portion of Alaska as a temporary homeland, leased to the Jews in a similar way to Hong Kong being leased to Britain, with the contract specifying a date on which it would be returned. That date is a few months away – the ‘Reversion’. In this Universe, this ‘Jewish State’ is policed by a Jewish police service, and the ‘hero’ of the novel is a detective in that service. The book tells the story of his investigation of a murder.
Richard chose it because a (non-Jewish) friend of his highly recommended it.
Although as is usually the case many could see both positives and negatives within this book, the BBBC split into three over it.
On the one side were three of us (ChrisW, Richard, ChrisB) who felt that despite some drawbacks, it was essentially a very good, or even an excellent book (scoring two ‘8’s and a ‘7’); on the other, there were three (MarkT, Steve, Willm) who actively disliked it (scoring a ‘3’ and two ‘3.5’). And finally there were three (John, MarkW, Andrew) who liked elements of it but were neither as positive nor as negative (scoring 5.75, 6 and 6.5).
In sum, the negatives revolved around: hard to follow, slow to get into it, too difficult to get into this alien world (You can't participate in the game if you don't know the rules), not really gripped by the characters, not than interested in a Chandler pastiche, the language and syntax and Yiddish slang words.
The positives revolved around: the language, the style, the fact that it was a Chandleresque detective story, the themes, the fact that it was an alien world (customs, traditions, language) into which one could get transported, the characters and the relationships – its enjoyability and entertainingness.
The Negatives
Two BBBC members who actively disliked the book did not complete it. The third found many positives, but still ended up actively disliking it.
Willm: I have a contrast in view to those who liked it. I didn’t get on with it at all. Clever turns of phrase, but why? Why write a book: a pastiche of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. The movies are great but why write a book? The Jewish material just passed me by. I gave up after 45 per cent.
MarkT: I agree with all of the negatives. I liked the bit from Tess of the D’Urbervilles but it was such a relief to stop after 100 pages.
Steve: The author creates immediate impact through a Raymond Chandler-like downbeat voice and applies similar laser-sharp wit; sometimes the humour is almost Wodehousian. In fact, there was masses of powerful, in your face imagery, although sometimes I felt that he was maybe just trying too hard. Chabon’s ‘reality’ is presented so matter-of-factly, unarguable, it’s as if he believes he doesn’t really have to explain himself. Instead, the back story is drip fed, so while you get (some background) early on in the book, you don’t get other key background context until later. So you gradually get to fill in some of the yawning gaps in one’s understanding, but that’s still being fed in right up to the end. In a way one experiences a more acute form of the frustration that you sometimes experience when a writer is withholding information from you simply to spin the story out - which obviously happens with any fiction, but some pass it off better than others. I really wanted to know where I stood with the background story so I could get properly stuck into the actual plot. There were too many distractions fighting for attention. For example, for all my life the word ‘Yid’ has been considered an unpleasant insult, but there must be degrees of subtlety here that I’m missing. However, I was sometimes transported wholesale into this surreal world Chabon creates. Sitka is a real place, in Alaska, near to where Jonathan Raban sailed and wrote Passage to Juneau which we read a few years back. Also Snow Falling on Cedars. Interesting that that book centred around the true story of Japanese immigrants and refugees. So I could visualise the landscapes, even if much of the detail was outlandish. The (to me) alien world of Orthodox Jewish life stands as a barrier to more complete understanding - the passage involving the visit to the ‘boundary maven’ for example was so loaded with ‘specialist’ information that I was learning for the first time, much of it involving string, that it was very difficult to decide what to hold in one’s head as important detail for the sake of the story and what to treat simply as simpler background context. The significance of the painted red heifer completely passed me by, for example. I fought a sense of inadequacy, that I should know and understand more. And I experienced, as already mentioned, a frustration that there were too many questions raised at every corner - that this unnecessary complexity got in the way of a good story. And of course this was compounded by the embedding of the story in the world of chess, a game I have never mastered – though as it turned out, knowledge of the game wasn’t as critical to an understanding of the outcome as the understanding that for some people it’s a matter of life or death.
I don’t often check on the web to see what other people thought of it. On this occasion I did, and found a review by Adam Mars Jones in The Guardian, from 2007, who sums up one of my main issues with the book well: ‘The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It's an unwritten rule of the genre that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence... …No such establishment of a baseline is possible with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Two million European Jews were slaughtered in the 1940s, rather than six, and there's no reference to Hitler or any other political figure (the current American President is referred to only in those vague terms). No doubt Chabon has compiled a little dossier or chart of his world, but there are readers who would like a peek, too. You can't participate in the game if you don't know the rules.’
So in the end, the only thing I felt really drove me to finish the book was a desire to find out if Naomi really was dead, or if she’d manage a miraculous resurrection (stranger things happened in the book). So I had to mark it down because of the disappointment. In a sentence: mercurial flashes of brilliance but too self-indulgent and free with the in-jokes to carry a gentile like me wholeheartedly along with it.
The Positives
ChrisB: A rollicking detective story, very Chandleresque, very enjoyable, a neat style. I liked the story, the pursuance of the “who murdered …” theme, and the back-story – his relationship with his father, his candidature to be his generation’s messiah. Not sure I understood why Mendel Shpilman got killed. There were some amazing turns of phrase: “he fears he suffers from tinnitus of the soul”.
Overall, rather a fun book despite its heaviness. A book I will remember.
Richard: I liked lots about the book: it became more about chess and about history, and I love both of those; it started to appear to me as an interesting and a complex book, with complex characters, many of who I could like, and even understand; I found a lot of aspects of the book interesting: the politics, the idea of what might have happened if Israel had lost the War of Independence, the relationships with the USA, the desperate yearning by the Jewish people for a permanent home, and then on top of all of that, a murder story and a detective story, and then chess, and add in complex Jewish sects, and then the style. I thought the main characters were quite strongly drawn – Meyer Landsman, Berko Shemets, Bina Gelbfish, - even Frank (“Mendel Shpilman”) starts to come across as a strong character. And there were a host of more minor characters that also stood out strongly – Willy Dick, Rebe Shpilman, many others. The politics are really interesting: the issue of a Jewish Homeland was such an important one for so many generations, and it is interesting to see how relatively less important it is now that Israel is a (relatively) unassailable fact. So this story postulates a situation where the Jews are still searching for a homeland, and the issue of what will happen after ‘the Reversion’ is a burning one. The way that modern Hebrew was thought about in the book. And I thought that the style was rather marvellous. His use of words and metaphor and simile was simply superb – almost every page had on it something that was striking and unusual, and sometimes beautiful. I found them really clever, unusual and apposite.
ChrisW: agree with Richard and ChrisB. A weird book: I had two reinvent invent my understanding. I loved this introduction into a different world, very Germanically Yiddish. I’d bought into the film noir, the seediness, damp, cold rainy environment, the intensity of religion and the deals. I found the relationship with his wife very touching and well explained, the implications of the reversion, the USA involvement. His command of words, very funny, all these customs, the enlightenment into Yiddish-ness, and into a different locality and culture. I liked it, very entertaining, I wanted to go to bed to read it.
The in-betweeners
Andrew: There were many positives. Chabon captured well the New York cop writing style and world-weary, harsh dialogue; The book read Like Philip K Dick transplanting the “frozen Chosen” into a Raymond Chandler detective story; Chabon is great at painting quick pictures; and great descriptions – particularly his use of metaphor - and the terrific description of Rabbi Shpilman – like clay lumped together by blind orphans etc. However, it’s quite a complicated writing style which often gets in the way of flow; there is a huge cast of characters (with the main ones well-drawn and interesting but not particularly compelling or making me care, except perhaps for Berko); and I spent too much time looking up words and translating from Yiddish which spoiled the flow. I thought that it had a great start with the very first sentence: “Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered”, there was the clever twist of Landsman finally telling his dad he hated chess in a letter and his dad killing himself 2 days later: Landsman then has 20y of guilt before he finds the letter again – unopened! But it was overcomplicated and knotty at times and I got bogged down a few times in the first quarter until it took off once we’d met Mendel and then his parents.
I thought the book was far too long until I got to halfway and realised that a big worthwhile story might be unfolding and how pleased I was that there was still half the book to go rather than just a couple of chapters of wrapping up and denouement - finally felt part of the world of the story …. at the same time as feeling pissed off that it had taken half the (very long) book … but in fact although the scope of the story soared to include global events, it never sang and whizzed along, always dragging a bit and for me slowed down by looking up too many words I didn’t know.
Overall, enjoyed the plot and Landsman and some of the other characters; I enjoyed the writing and the way Chabon saw people and things and his descriptions of them; but it was too long and too slow; there were no characters to care about; and it never zipped along like Shuggie or A Gentleman in Moscow - a bit like cycling on cobbles … But with some sharp writing.
Mark W: Another book that I found really hard getting into. This time I really struggled with the first fifty pages or so but, for some reason, the chapter where Bina returned as Landsman’s boss was a bit of a turning point, perhaps because it gave an additional element to the narrative (the relationship between these two) that sustained my interest to the end of the book. In fact this element, rather than the whodunnit and whydunnit elements was for me the most interesting part of the book, probably because the rest of the characters were pretty uninteresting, apart from the partner Berko. Having said that, I still found the narrative pretty hard to follow but I’m not really sure why that was, possibly because I struggled with some of the language and syntax, and not just because of the plethora of Jewish slang words thrown in. The story seemed a bit confusing to me, and the revelation at the end when the murderer was revealed was a bit of an anticlimax. The idea of this Jewish community in deepest Alaska was an interesting one though and there were some interesting ideas, notably the rabbis acting as all powerful mafia style bosses. Whether there is any element of reality in this would be interesting to know. All in all, not bad after a slow start but difficult to follow and a fairly far-fetched whodunnit. Preferred Tulayev and Sympathiser.
John: I really liked the premise that the book is based on – an alternate history in which the Jews were expelled from the new state of Israel in 1948 and forced to make settlements in other parts of the world. Many of the Jews of Europe finding a refuge of sorts in a cold corner of Alaska - Sitka. This apparently was a makeshift solution as it was expected that Europe would in due course take them back, but now this District itself is about to revert to America. A source of much consternation and which seems to be backdrop to this story. I think I followed the story, but it was hard - what with the complex mix of characters and the variety of cultural, religious and linguistic hoops to hop through and around. All sorts of digressions and detours that added to the confusion – the murder of Landsman’s sister, a fake drug treatments centre in the middle of no-where with a suspicious red heifer which will help Jews to reclaim Israel, and the arrival of US Federal Agents who block the investigation in order to help bring about the “return” of the Christian messiah. Wow…… all very complicated and often hard work. It was not an easy read partly because of its complexity and partly the rather world-weary tone it was written in – a homage to Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett I assume. But there were moments when the story took off at a pace and gripped you. It would then seem to get bogged down again in some arcane detour. As one reviewer noted this book was at various times everything from an elaborate joke to an unwieldy bore. But there some wonderful lines that stood out from the melange.
Almost everyone (even those who did not like the book as much) had interesting quotes which they brought, to demonstrate this author’s way with words; and there were so many to select from that in all of the quotes people brought, there was only one overlap!
Some choice quotes were:
• like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of the Diaspora
• In drafty, tin-roofed huts and barracks, they underwent six months of intensive acclimatization by a crack team of fifteen billion mosquitoes working under contract with the U.S. Interior Department.
• A trace of a double chin that Landsman puts down to a vanished life as a fat boy.
• They leave Brennan standing outside the Front Page, with his necktie smacking him on the forehead like a remorseful palm
• the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.
• He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker
• The round tables that crowd the stage wear overturned chairs like sets of antlers
• Rain tossed in vandalistic handfuls at the windshield.
• Bina accepts a compliment as if it’s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken.
• Mrs. Kalushiner comes back, dragging the great leg iron of her life.
• In a narrow window opposite the cot, metal-slat blinds leak the disappointed gray of a November afternoon in southeastern Alaska. It’s not light oozing through so much as a residue of light, a day haunted by the memory of the sun.
• Landsman is at the wheel of a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport, which he bought ten years ago in an access of nostalgic optimism and has driven until all its secret flaws seem indistinguishable from his own
• Ahead of him rise the tower blocks of the Shvartsn-Yam … huddled in the darkness like prisoners rounded up with a powerful hose
• and a bunch of bohemian semiprofessionals who like the atmosphere of ruined festivity that lingers in the neighborhood like a strand of tinsel on the branch of a bare tree
• “You,” she says, making a face like she just tasted earwax on her fingertip”
• Several inches remain in the bottle when he is through, but Landsman himself is filled top to bottom with nothing but the burn of remorse
• Girls hobbled by long skirts go along braided arm in arm, raucous chains of Verbover girls, as vehement and clannish as schools of philosophy
• His full ashy beard flutters in the wind like bird fluff caught on a barbed-wire fence
• He’s too superstitious not to see this as a bad omen, but when you’re a pessimist, all omens are bad
• Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve
• It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is
• As it happens, I told Chief Inspector Vayngartner how you had just been shot.” “And he said?” “He said that in light of this fresh evidence, he might have to reconsider long-held atheistic beliefs.”
