This post contains spoilers through the end of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

At the end of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, we’re left with two terrible choices. Should Jews continue to pursue their ancestral homeland and transformation into a different kind of people, even if the cost is terrible? Or should they choose assimilation at the price of its being temporary, of the violence and upheaval of relocation.

There’s some suggestion that Israel is a cruel joke, that the transformation Jews will undergo should they possess it will be not to their liking. “This is the paper that God left the Jews holding,” Landsman thinks at one point, “the promise that we have been banging Him a kettle about ever since. The rook that attends the king at the endgame of the world.” But what happens when the process of banging the kettle becomes an objective in and of itself? What would it mean, specifically, for Jews to achieve security, a question posed almost accidentally by Landsman’s forgotten gym flyer: “The Jew to the right is lean, tanned, and trim-beareded, relaxed, self-confident. He looks a lot like one of Litvak’s young men. The Jew of the future, Landsman thinks. The unlikely claim is made by the postcard that the left-hand Jew and the Jew on the right are one and the same person.” The suggestion is that something won’t survive the transformation.

And that confidence may give rise to something terrible, at least in the transition. Ester-Malke, Berko’s wife, foresees something terrible:

All these people rioting on the television in Syria, Baghdad, Egypt? In London? Burning cars. Setting fires to embassies. Up in Yakovy, did you see what happened, they were dancing, those fucking maniacs,t hey were so happy about all this craziness, the whole floor collapsed right onto the apartment underneath. A couple of little girls sleeping in their beds, they got crushed to death. That’s the kind of shit we have to look forward to now. Burning cars and homicidal dancing.

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This post contains spoilers through Chapter 35 of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

In these chapters, there were two things that stood out to me: the women in Landsman’s life, and the trauma of Reversion, what it means to face the impending loss of a land that may not be the one that was promised, but has turned out to have soil fertile enough to sink roots in anyway.

Michael Chabon’s women have a tendency to assume a sort of mystical quality, an unfathomability. It’s not so much that his men are dumb, but that woman operate by a set of separate laws than men, and that only sometimes do they overlap. There’s the moment of recognition between Sam and his mother over the subject of Tracy Bacon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, or the observation that unites Landsman and Mrs. Shpilman, her memory that “It has been many years. But as I recall, politeness was not a great strength of that Jewess.” What makes Naomi’s loss so particularly painful to Landsman is, of course, that she’s his sister, but that they lived by a similar set of laws, “close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove…She had the Errol Flynn style of keeping a straight face only when she was joking, and grinning like a jackpot winner whenever things got rough. Slap a pencil mustache on the jewess, and you could have sent her swinging form the rigging of a three-master, sword in hand.” And now her brother needs to follow in her path, to summon up that swashbuckling tendency without ending up plastered on the side of a mountain, without creating a hole in someone else’s life.

And these are particularly difficult times to thread that needle. “I respect your keeness,” Landsman tells a doctor who is concerned about his drinking, “but tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don’t you think you might take up drinking?” Belief is powerful in the best of times, giving rise, in Landsman’s account, to the fata morgana, and in these, to the particular disappointments of Berko’s father. And so it makes a certain amount of demented sense that a school of thought that “Some people say Messiah will tarry until the Temple is rebuilt. Until altar worship gets restored. Blood sacrifices, a priesthood, the whole song and dance.”

But with that clarity of intent comes a narrowness, in everything from language to dinner tables. In Peril Strait, Landsman hears a spoken form of Hebrew that “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.” Failure, of course, that leads to violent determination to erase those associations. And as Reversion approaches, the pluralism of Hertz’s table as fallen away from the time when it was “a lively region, the only table in these divided islands at which Indians and Jews regularly sat down together to eat good food without rancor. There was California wine to drink and be expatiated upon by the old man. Silent types, hard cases, and the odd special agent or lobbyist from Washington mingled with totem carvers, chess bums, and Native fishermen.” If only that could be the dream, rather than a harsh and unobtainable purity.

This post contains spoilers through Chapter 25 of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For next Friday, let’s read through Chapter 35.

The theme of this week’s reading, entirely incidentally, turns out to be how different Jews — and by extension, different kinds of people — handle the brokenness of the world, the impossibility of perfect observance. The Law, it turns out, is not something you can game to get the perfect results: the rebbe’s diet doesn’t prevent him from turning into a human mountain, Mendle Shpilman’s arranged marriage cannot erase his homosexuality, and the Verbovers need the boundary maven to compromise for them so they can live with themselves. Inherent in observance is, as Landsman observed “a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.”

What makes Mendel Shpilman seem like the Messiah isn’t necessarily just his ability to confer blessing, but his ability to bridge the gap between desire and ability so smoothly: “Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel say all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark serge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life…He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.” Other people have other solutions. Bina has her miraculous purse — she may not be able to bridge the gaps in the human soul, but she’s able to make almost any other circumstances bearable: “If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass—Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.”
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This post contains spoilers through the first 12 chapters of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Next week, I’m off for Thanksgiving, but for the Friday after that, let’s read through Chapter 25.

One of the things that’s fascinating about alternate histories is which events and impulses the authors think would stay the same. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the United States went to war with Cuba, but the conflict produced a rash of heroin addictions, much as the Vietnam War did. The Israel Lobby may be dedicated to an Alaskan homeland, run by a Jewish COINTELPRO agent who “diverted up to half his operating budget to corrupt the people who had authorized it. He bought senators, baited congressional honeypots, and above all romanced rich American Jews whose influence he saw as critical to his plan,” but it still exists. Six decades in Sitka haven’t undone the Jewish fear of annihilation — as Landsman’s colleague tells him of the tunnel under his hotel “When the greeners got here after the war. The ones who had been in the ghetto at Warsaw. At Bialystock. The ex-partisans. I guess some of them didn’t trust the Americans very much. So they dug tunnels. Just in case they had to fight again. That’s the real reason it’s called the Untershtat.” Hasidic Jews are still ridiculously well-organized, even if they’re turning their talents to crime in Sitka. Sectarian differences still matter. Landsman knows, when he and Berko go visiting, that “He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing.” And while Jews may have swapped Palestinians for American Indians, the specter of violent conflict still looms, whether in a synagogue bombing, or in Berko Shmets’ hammer.
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