Shammes eats a shtekeleh
I just finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union yesterday even though it’s been out for
about 1000 years. Chabon and I go way back and it’s always been a strained relationship. I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and was amazed by the prose style and fascinated by the way he was able to make a description sing and surprise. But I never loved it; it was always about admiration and amazement for me and never about a true head over heel lets-run-away-together enchantment.
This novel is a detective story/alternative history where the Jews were kicked out of Israel in 1948 and somehow land in southeastern Alaska for a few decades before the US decides to kick them out again. The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a detective (a shammes in Yiddish) trying to find the killer of a junkie heroin addict killed in the flophouse he live in before the Reversion sends all the Jews scrambling. There are all kinds of hoary detective cliche’s (down and out detective, losing his badge, tough guy banter, gangsters, at least-spoiler!–his partner doesnt’ die). Still, no detective story is so crammed full of scrumptious language.
In the acknowledgements Chabon notes his use of Yiddishdictionary.com and it shows. Did you know shoyfer means phone in Yiddish? Well, actually it is a ritual ram’s horn blown on the Sabbath and so therefore it’s the slang term for a phone. Yikes. Still, even though there is a long, obsessed, devoted description of the magic properties of the Phillipino/Yiddish doughnut called shtekeleh which apparently Chabon made up.
But when it comes to description, dude can write.
A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue. At 12:03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stuccos of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, but he is no stone.
Such a great mix of hard-boiled fiction metaphor-twisting prose and that “violin-colored throb…” Wow.
What I love about Chabon is that he’s so clearly a lit fiction writer with those sensibilities and brings them into the realm of popular lit. He’s not always easy to read but his challenges tread a good line between litera-cha and popular lit. There’s talk of a movie version with Cohen brothers directing which could be beyond amazing. I’m not sure who get to be Landsmen–Harrison Ford? Phillip Seymore Hoffman?
As a teacher, I want to clip out some passages as good description models–especially to show how he is able to create surprising metaphors that are nevertheless clear. I’m also interested in how he uses the Yiddish vocab. Could their be an assignment where you get a set of dialect terms or jargon terms and you have to use them to tell a story? I love the idea of the play of language as it’s own character. It would be an advanced skill for students but amazing if it works.
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