Excessive Candour
Zugzwang on a Hot Tin Roof

There is no point in writing an alternate history unless you meant to do that. Maybe the ultimate failure of Philip Roth's otherwise brilliant The Plot Against America is that, in the end, it doesn't really mean to be alternate, except for an initiating conceit. But the unexamined alternate history is not worth living. A genuine alternate world/alternate history must be an argument about the case of things, or why bother?

An alternate history is a sentence on the world.

Whether that sentence spells heaven or hell or parole, it is a spell of judgment, or else we are in Faerie, which is another story altogether, something Other. In SF there is no Other but difference, and difference is a speculum. In the radical form of SF known as alternate history that speculum should reconfigure every jot and tittle of the world shown. Any told moment in an alternate world should be as irradiated with meaning as any single shot in a 1940s film noir, where nothing is given that is not meant to be taken. So the first thing one needs to ask about Michael Chabon's new novel is whether The Yiddish Policemen's Union knows that it is a sentence on the world. Is it world-drenched? The answer—which I suppose is almost tantamount to giving the plot away—is yes.

If there is a single jonbar point to mark the beginning of the world experiment of this novel, it is the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes' 1940 proposal to establish a homeland in Alaska for Jews facing extermination in Europe. In our world, of course, the proposal got nowhere; in The Yiddish Policemen's Union (as we are told in backstory asides) it was accepted, and a temporary Jewish homeland was soon established in and around the historical town of Sitka, about halfway down the Alaska panhandle. Chabon spends little time elaborating changes in world history directly or indirectly consequent upon his point of departure, though we do learn that in 1946 the Allies drop an atomic bomb on Berlin, and that in 1948 a nascent Israeli state in the Middle East is destroyed, and the survivors flee west and north, most of them to the Federal District of Sitka, whose population has reached around 3 million by the turn of the millennium, when the district is due to revert to American governance. It is a stew of diaspora. It tastes of everything that diaspora has meant, except genocide. It is also a cunning alternative to the successful founding of Israel in our world, with the Tlingit Indians serving (in part) as Palestinians and the distant but somehow omnipresent Americans serving (in Chabon's world as in ours) as seemingly complaisant (but anxiety-inducing) landlords.

Noir to Alaska

We learn all of this en passant, almost as though overheard in the chinks of the main story (see below), but I think we are intended to forget nothing. Though the physical action of The Yiddish Policemen's Union sticks to Sitka, we catch side glimpses in asides of an America that differs subtly from the throbbing miracle and monster we bend our lives to in this world. It may be the sadder, slower outcome of World War II—or some other jonbar bounce I missed in a first read—but Chabon's America seems less tumescent with onrush than our own steaming behemoth, a strangely unheated dream and nightmare of a land wrapt in gear, almost the kind of America which we might with huge care feel some nostalgia over: noir, nacreous, storyable, just a bit like Happy Days Before the Plague. We also gain glimpses of a Middle East without Israel, a nightmare tangle differently stewed but similarly rancid.

It is all this alternate world that the narrated story—the noir tale that fills with sad insistent savor the frontage of Chabon's wily book—must somehow entail. In the end that entailment works, though there are moments when the connective networking thins almost to slapstick, moments when it is hard to credit the algorithms of scale-shift connecting the eruv (see below) that governs the protagonist to the eruv that governs the surge of a bound and blinded world to Jerusalem itself. But, in the end, the book means itself. It is an alternate history that meant to do that.

We begin in medias res. Meyer Landsman, a recently divorced detective in the Sitka District police, has been "flopping" in a bad hotel, a place whose residents are probably beyond reading Isaac Bashevis Singer. Here he finds a murdered man, a known chess master. From page one, in other words, we are in the grip of a crime novel, and Landsman looks to be an ideal psychopomp: secular, disillusioned, tortured by arrogant guilt over the good abortion advice he gave his wife before his arrogance of self-flagellation breaks up their marriage (just as he is tortured over a letter he wrote his father before he killed himself, a letter his father never actually opened), a very funny man, a loser, a close-call winner (he must have brains or he cannot guide us) and lovable. The diction Chabon creates to manifest Landsman, and through Landsman's point of view Sitka itself, either came to him in a flash of genius or cost anguishes to achieve: a phantasmagoric transmuted Yiddish American parlay shot through with noir turns, skaz-like gonzo riffs and similes (almost all of them tending to link animate to inanimate, a process which works to claw the haunted exiles of Sitka into their exilic fix); a superb, superbly paced memorious urban take.

The intimate becomes the universal

It is a language easy to fall out of into some wrong register (in the first person it would have choked on the page)—and its tone-perfect presentation has such a hypnotic allure for the reader that the novel becomes very dangerously daylit in those passages where Chabon has to open his tale out in the second half, in order to tie the intimate eruv of Landsman in Sitka to the world eruv which will open the path for a Messiah figure—the Tsaddik Ha-Dor who reappears once a generation in order to redeem Israel if Israel is fit to be redeemed—to make the Middle East the kind of territory the Americans can get oil out of. At these points The Yiddish Policemen's Union fails to read as though an entire secret universe—a permitted space within the circumambient secular—is being unfolded in a secret language anyone can read (some Yiddish puns excluded, perhaps). But the book comes back to itself before the end.

Like any great crime novel, Chabon's moves from interview to interview, locale to locale, building (as does any great crime novel from California) a mosaic portrait of the world much greater than the sum of the parts, and also different from any sum of the parts: because (like any great crime novel) The Yiddish Policemen's Union is an eruv, a space through which may be traced the secret route to the solution of a mystery. In this case, that mystery combines the intimate tale, which is that of the seemingly intimate murder, and the soiled macro epic, which claims to sacralize the world. As Landsman begins to home in on the identify of his victim, he visits the semi-autonomous enclave of the Verbover Hasidim, who are also the crime lords of Sitka, and here encounters a boundary maven whose task it is the create eruvs—an imaginary imposition of space which transforms external aspects of the world into parts of the home, thus allowing and guiding complex actions otherwise forbidden to Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath—mostly through rimmings and ariadnes of tied string and wire. The end of it all is tears and (as historically in the diaspora) survival.

The world is falling apart, or becoming unmercifully overlit, and the Reversion is nigh. Landsman—and his wife and partner, both envisioned with immaculate intensity by Chabon—do a slow grieved dance toward solution. As does the world, in its scope. Landsman dreams feverishly through a bad night of Einstein and his murdered sister (it is part of the same story) and the urban nightmare of Sitka dying. Soon

... his dream calves other slow iceberg dreams, and the ice hums with fluorescence. At some point the humming that has plagued Landsman and his people since the dawn of time, which some in their foolishness have mistaken for the voice of God, gets trapped in the windows of room 505 like sunlight in the heart of an iceberg.

This humming can be heard throughout the final pages of the book. The murder victim, whom we have early on been told is a refusenik Messiah, has died with a very peculiar chess problem by his side. Landsman, with a hum of intuition, finally works it out. It is the depiction of a zugzwang, a situation in chess where no move is favorable, but some move must be made. It leads to checkmate: Messiah's and ours. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a lacrimae rerum paean to a world locked into false sacralizing while we continue to die. In this quite extraordinary, comical, rending tale, a very great tragedy is predicted for the dance of our hotting world. It is a novel which can be boiled down to one simple sentence: Eruv becomes zugswang.