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Product Description
For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in a Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" protected breakwater combined in a arise of a Holocaust and a intolerable 1948 tumble of a fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of a Sitka District have combined their possess small star in a Alaskan panhandle, a colourful and challenging limit city that moves to a song of Yiddish. But now a District is set to return to Alaskan control, and their dream is entrance to an end.
Homicide investigator Meyer Landsman of a District Police has adequate problems though worrying about a arriving Reversion. His life is a shambles, his matrimony a wreck, his career a disaster. And in a inexpensive hotel where Landsman has cleared up, someone has usually committed a murder—right underneath his nose. When he starts to examine a murdering of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that a box is to be forsaken immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all a absolute army of faith, obsession, evil, and shelter that are his heritage.
At once a retaining whodunit, a adore story, and an scrutiny of a mysteries of outcast and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel usually Michael Chabon could have written.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #18968 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-01-24
- Released on: 2012-01-24
- Format: Kindle eBook
- Number of items: 1
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Jess WalterThey are a "frozen Chosen," dual million people living, failing and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, a proxy homeland determined for replaced World War II Jews in Chabon's desirous and interesting new novel. It is—deep exhale now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so maybe it's no warn that, in a behind half of a book, a relocating tools turn unwieldy; Chabon is sophistry account chainsaws here.The novel begins—the same approach that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America—with a fascinating chronological footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt due on a eve of World War II, a proxy Jewish allotment had been determined on a Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's devise went nowhere, though Chabon runs a suspicion into a present, back-loading his story with a vivid history. Israel unsuccessful to get a foothold in a Middle East, and given a Sitka resolution was usually temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to remove their cold homeland. The book's undying refrain: "It's a bizarre time to be a Jew."Into this star arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a inebriated brute patrolman who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of intrepid imagination, some-more justification of a mountainous talent of his prior genre-blender, a Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.Eventually, however, Chabon's loyalty to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of poignant tough-guy chaff and too many of a kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires prolonged explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can positively write noir—or whatever else he wants; his new Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if a New York Times Book Review sniffed a warn that a poser novel would "appeal to a genuine writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything reduction than a genuine writer, this book offers new justification of his unequaled storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as dark as a page of commentary" and severe voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a plain opening that would have been even improved with a small some-more Yiddish and a small reduction police. (May)Jess Walter was a finalist for a 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and a leader of a 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for Citizen Vince.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a multiplication of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Does The Yiddish Policemen's Union live adult to Michael Chabon's challenging reputation? There is no consensus: some critics called a novel a devout successor to a Pulitzer Prize?winning Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); others suspicion it a unsatisfactory aberration. As in Kavalier & Clay, Chabon explores issues of identity, assimilation, and mass culture, though he also pays loyalty to a noir investigator novel—with churned results. The New York Times called Landsman "one of a many appealing investigator heroes to come along given Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe," while a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette felt that a work "came nowhere tighten to creation a cut of a Raymond Chandler novel." Critics likewise disagreed about a writing, a involved plot, a symbolism of a Jewish-Native American conflict, and a argumentative use of Yiddish slurs and caricatures. If not a intense success, The Yiddish Policemen's Union nonetheless illustrates a singular talents and creativity of a author.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Like Haruki Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and a End of a World (1991), Chabon plays with a conventions of a Chandlerian private-eye novel, though that's usually one part in an epic-scale alternate-history tale of Jewish life given World War II. The grounds draws on an problematic chronological fact: FDR once due that Alaska, not Israel, turn a homeland for Jews after a war. In Chabon's telling, that's accurately what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn't left as planned: a U.S. supervision now has enacted a process that will exude all Jews though correct papers from Sitka, a core of Jewish Alaska. In a midst of this nightmare, browbeaten military investigator Meyer Landsman investigates a murder of a heroin-addicted chess expert who happens to be a ashamed son of Sitka's many absolute rabbi. No one wants this box solved, from Landsman's trainer (his ex-wife, Bina) to a FBI, though a Yiddish Marlowe keeps digging, uncovering canon in a making. Chabon manipulates his prominent tract masterfully, though what creates a novel soar is a amusement and humanity. Even though rapacious all a Yiddish wordplay that seasons a tasty prose, readers will tumble uncontrolled into a swap star of Chabon's Sitka, where black amusement is a kind of antifreeze required to support life. And when Meyer, in a end, contingency "weigh a fates of a Jews, of a Arabs, of a whole unpurified and homeless planet" opposite a guarantee done to a lamentation mother, it's transparent that this together star smells a lot like home. Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ran a book-award list in 2000, and this one usually might be a equal. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Customer Reviews
Most useful patron reviews
171 of 191 people found a following examination helpful.
"[W]hen we have shaped a sounds
By Leonard Fleisig
said a difference out shrill those who had insincere Yiddish was a denunciation of a past only, unexpected felt it had been revived. . . . It seemed to be observant `khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. we am not what we once was. Ober `khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But we did not die. we live." Irena Klepfisz.
Yiddish is positively not passed in Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union". In fact, a primary denunciation of Jews via a "Pale of Settlement" (where Jews were authorised to live in Imperial Russia) suffuses this book with a abounding aroma of a denunciation whose any word can take on a divide or even section of definition in a hands of a right speaker. Chabon is one such orator (or writer) and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is a book that is abounding in enjoyment.
"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is an suave mix of genres, a mix of crime novella and swap history. we consider of it as a mix of Dashiell Hammett's dim crime stories like "Red Harvest" and Philip Roth's alternate-history novel "The Plot Against America".
Chabon has combined a universe in that there is no Israel. Rather, Israel had been dejected in a 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Since that time a United States, partly as a outcome of shame over a Holocaust has combined a proxy homeland for replaced European Jews in and around Sitka, Alaska. Yiddish, not Hebrew, is a primary language. As a book opens, tighten to 60-years after a finish of Israel, Sitka is due to return behind to U.S. control and a million or so inhabitants face a awaiting of being stateless refugees. The hero, or protagonist, is Detective Meyer Landsman. Like one of Dashiell Hammett's characters he is a flawed, down-on-his fitness patrolman with zero most going for him solely a clever clarity of right and wrong and a personal firmness of a top order. He is a drunk, he is divorced (and his ex-wife is his autocratic office) and he lives in a flea-bag hotel. He is awakened out of something of a faint and told a murder has been committed in a hotel.
It does not utterly do Chabon's book probity to contend that a story line is essentially that of Landsman's examination into a murder of this foreigner in his fleabag hotel. That is positively how a book plays out. However, that is simply a structure of a book. As in Hammett, there is a murder in a city filled with fervour and crime and a trail Landsman contingency travel is filled with hurdles and dark minefields. As in Roth, a story of Landsman (which in itself is a Yiddish word that competence be roughly translated as associate countryman) is a story of a people set adrift and apart. It is a story of a people bobbing in a sea though an anchor, though a homeland. It is touching but, ironically, it is piquancy though a schmaltz.
Chabon's writing, like Yiddish itself, is abounding and thick with meaning. But some-more importantly, it is both humorous and thoughtful. The barbs and insults and irascibility with that a characters demonstrate their affinity for any other and their ridicule and loathsome is, in my opinion, dead-solid perfect. As we examination "Yiddish Policemen's Union" we could prognosticate a physique denunciation and clarity a arched eyebrows or sneers on a lips of a characters as difference come acrobatics out of their mouths in a torrent.
Although we won't contend anything to exhibit a plot, we consider Chabon shows glorious gait and timing in building a plot. He conjunction rushes to display too many sum too shortly nor leaves all to a outline explanation during a book's climax. Chabon keeps a pot hot and that kept me branch page after page after page prolonged after we should have incited out a lights for a night.
One slight cautionary note: we grew adult in a Queens, New York area during a time when Yiddish difference and expressions were sprinkled liberally via any examination both in my family's unit and via my neighborhood. However, if we don't have any before knowledge with Yiddish we advise going on line and retaining a Yiddish-English web page accessible if we find we have any problem with a peculiar word or phrase. Ultimately a pleasures of this book so distant transcend a minimal weight of introspective a occasional bizarre word. we discuss it only so a intensity reader is wakeful in allege that they competence see a few difference that competence not be straightforwardly accepted by any reader.
I got a good understanding of pleasure from reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" and suggest it heartily. L. Fleisig
93 of 104 people found a following examination helpful.
A Strange Time to Be a Jew
By Edward Aycock
I've been reading Chabon given we initial picked adult "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" over a decade-and-a-half ago, and it's been fun saying his essay develop with any new work. we trust that "Kavalier and Clay" is one of a best American novels of a past 10 years, and that's not even since I'm such a comic book fan; it's only an unusual novel on many levels. When we listened of a judgment of "Yiddish Policemen's Union," we was disturbed that it sounded a bit too high concept; afterwards we deliberate that Chabon is such a good author that I'll pardon him for anything - even his new "Simpson's" voiceover where he and Jonathan Franzen got into a fistfight. Luckily, no redemption needs to be postulated (like Chabon couldn't caring reduction anyhow; who am we in a Kakutani-era of literary criticism?) Chabon's newest novel is only serve acknowledgment of his skill.
This book is singular as it's not a suppositional novel masquerading as Jewish noir, nor is it noir with a silken veneer: it's all during once. The questions of Jewish temperament and what will occur to a village once a Reversion happens never takes divided from a categorical tale; it's so good tucked in with a categorical movement that Chabon never goes off on a tangent. All a while, Chabon plows forward with a poser that will set off chuckles of approval as he hits and bounces on any noir gathering like a pinball. Informers, lamentation mothers, constant partners, a requisite impulse when an unfriendly crime enters a support - it's all there, though with a conceal of a Jewish village in a north, it feels fresh.
A few reviewers have commented that they missed out on Jewish in-jokes. I'm a goy by and by though didn't feel we was blank anything by not picking adult on them, so do not let that keep we from reading a novel. we wish to examination a book again only to get a feel of a difference and singular account character that follows a grammatical phrasing of Yiddish. (Another well-developed touch.)
By environment a novel during a finish of an era, Chabon has also been means to avoid any possibilities of a authorization with "the stability mysteries of ..." Actually, that doesn't sound like it would be such a bad thought though I'd rather Chabon take on a totally new subject.
Bravo, Mr. Chabon.
310 of 372 people found a following examination helpful.
Aleichem Meets Hammett
By David Englander
What can we contend about a book like this? Not most though giving something away. It's brazen as can be believed. What's it about? Read a Publisher's Weekly content above. Or, improved yet, don't.
Chabon is a talent and a madman, a sorceress and a mensch. He's a wrecking crew, a culture-blender, and a rebbe make-up heat. Who else would, or could, take Nick Charles and put him in Shalom Shachna's body? (Or maybe it's a other approach around.) Equal tools Kabbalah and Ka-Bar, it's humorous and gripping, and entertaining, and so distressing during times it's tough to breathe.
In sum, we found it unusual - a concept, a language, a characters and a plot. It's not perfect, though it is simply one of a best novels I've examination in a decade. Is that "helpful"? we doubt it. If we were you, we wouldn't wish to know more. Spoilers are odious, irrelevant, and accessible elsewhere. If we adore Chandler, Hammett, Roth, and I.B. Singer, we think we will adore this.
Put some Manischewitz in a lowball and lay by a electric glow and moment this book open.
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