“It has nothing to do with religion,” Berko says. “It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers.” (Yiddish 317)
Landsman’s relationship with his father, Isidor Landsman, was also shaped by Isidor’s absence more than his presence. The suicide of Landsman’s father undoubtedly created an emotional void within Landsman’s teenage years, but more importantly, it seems to have generated an innate mistrust in people, a quality that has served Landsman well in his job as a detective.
Moreover, Isidor’s suicide was preceded by the suicide of Landsman’s grandfather. Thus, Landsman was essentially exposed to a pattern that deflated the patriarch image of a father as the protector of his family. These losses have clearly helped shape Landsman’s cynical and grim outlook on life—“Landsman, the son and paternal grandson of suicides, has seen human beings dispatch themselves in every possible way, from the inept to the efficient” (Yiddish 153).
A Noz for Languages: Linguistic Masking
While German is represented in The Final Solution through the anomaly of the sequence of numbers frequently uttered by Bruno the parrot, English dominates the text and there is hardly any sense of a linguistic interplay. The situation is quite different in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, as the most prominent feature of linguistic manipulation rests on the interplay between Yiddish and English:
Although Sitka’s Jews are fluent in American English, they normally speak to each other in Yiddish, as the novel frequently reminds us. Chabon meets the challenge of using English to create an imaginary Yiddish-speaking world partly through neologisms that depend on bilingual puns. (Scanlan 519)
Both Landsman and his partner Berko designate a peripheral role for American English, a tool to convey momentarily frustration—“‘Fuck!’ This word is spoken in American, Berko’s preferred language for swearing and harsh talk” (Yiddish 47). In fact, whenever American English is employed in the novel, it usually has to do with uttering profanities:
“There are books,” Bina says. “And there are books.”
“Don’t be cryptic,” he [Landsman] says, and then in American, “What the fuck?” (Yiddish 189)
“Bastards,” she [Bina] says again, in American this time, and with greater heat. “Fucking Bible-thumping Yankee motherfuckers.”
“Language, lady, jeez!” (Yiddish 361)
Another interesting linguistic manipulation that Chabon employs in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is the role reversal of Hebrew and Yiddish; the novel portrays the imaginary situation in which Hebrew has been almost eradicated and Yiddish is the official Jewish language—“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” (Yiddish 286). Interestingly enough, Chabon chooses to eliminate Israel shortly after its abrupt foundation in 1948, which can also be linked to the country’s linguistic history, since Chabon “set about to imagine an ‘alternate history’ in which the country that rejected Yiddish has ceased to exist” (Myers 585).
The reverence with which Diaspora Jews treated Hebrew prior to its rebirth as the official language of Israel is evident in the novel; the treatment of Hebrew as a sacred tongue that belongs solely to the realm of prayers signals to the reader once again that the normalization of the Jewish people is manifestly impossible:
Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It’s only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect. (Yiddish 286)
Another nearly extinct language in Sitka is Esperanto, representing the real-life project of Dr. Zamenhof to create a constructed international auxiliary language. This failure is inherently a symbolic one; for Chabon, language is always particular and emblematic of the culture it depicts:
Along with Yiddish and English, some traces of Esperanto, an artificial, constructed language or “conlang,” are put to use. The residue of Esperanto’s failed utopian promise lingers in the novel, notably in the name of Landsman’s hotel, the Hotel Zamenhof, where the murder mystery begins. (Rovner 146)
In the context of Jewish identity, Esperanto has failed to take root in Sitka precisely for the same reason that Yiddish flourished: the need for a cultural affinity with one’s dialect. It has been suggested that the fading signs in Esperanto posted all over Landsman’s fleabag motel signify “the futility of the Jewish project as a whole” (Kravitz 99), but it can also be conceived as a linguistic failure to transport an international language into a closely knit community such as the Jewish settlement in Sitka, with its own set of cultural norms and concerns.
When Landsman is stripped of his Sitka detective badge, he resorts to its informal equivalent, the marginal organization called the Yiddish Policemen’s Union:
“‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,’” says the pie man. . . . Landsman’s American is just good enough to make him sound suspect. . . . It has a six-point shield in one corner. Its text is printed in Yiddish. It carries no authority or weight, not even with Landsman, a member in good standing for twenty years. (Yiddish 230)
This exchange of badges, demoting Landsman from official capacity to a member of a fringe organization that grants the novel its title, can also be perceived as emblematic of Landsman’s personality; it appears that underneath the manly façade of a detective in a homicide department lies a simple “yid,” another coined phrase of the novel.
Lost and Found: The Holocaust Effect
Chabon’s use of the Holocaust differs in each narrative, but it can be said that both texts “represent bold experiments with genre that locate the Holocaust within a hybrid narrative space, a no man’s land of literary expectations” (Richardson 162). Indeed, both The Final Solution and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union create an unusual thematic tension between the frame narrative of detection and the embedded references to the Holocaust.
The Final Solution is littered with Holocaust references, some more explicit than others, the chief one being that the novella takes place in England during the Holocaust. The reoccurring imagery of the trains is one obvious example, since it essentially frames the narrative, prominently featured in the beginning and end of the novella (Richardson 164). The exclusive access of the reader to the meaning of the sequence of German numbers is another example, which leaves room for individual discovery (Richardson 163), but more importantly, it creates an ironic gap between the detective and the reader, a gap that emphasizes the subversion of the classic detective function as the source of knowledge.
In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the Holocaust is the monumental historical event that enabled the existence of Sitka as a temporary Jewish autonomy. Many Holocaust survivors, such as Landsman’s father, “showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls” (Yiddish 380) and the text is heavily influenced by both the devastation of genocide and the instability of a temporary home, resulting in an overall sense of fledgling existence:
Chabon’s omniscient narrator takes great care to reiterate the unlikelihood of his characters’ existence throughout the narrative. . . . In a macabre parallel to the ultimate fate of many survivors of the Holocaust, several characters commit suicide throughout the course of the narrative, suggesting they are unable to cope with the fact of their own existence. (Richardson 166)
Yet the novel also explicitly refers to the symbolic importance of the Holocaust in the pursuit (which the novel often deems as futile) of a Jewish homeland—“Some of them just got comfortable here. They started to forget a little bit. They felt at home.” “I guess that’s how it always goes,” Landsman says. “Egypt. Spain. Germany” (Yiddish 380).
In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon creates another mute character, but ironically enough, it is the executor of the Messiah plan who does not have a voice and has to speak through others, both metaphorically and in daily practice—“Litvak’s plan was going to work because there was something about Mendel Shpilman that could make a man with a broken voice box want to speak” (Yiddish 352).
In addition, the Jewish imagery of Sitka turns morbid when described from the perspective of Landsman—“The Sitka Saturday afternoon lies dead as a failed messiah in its winding rag of snow” (Yiddish 173). However, when the perspective shifts to another focalizer, the tone is distinctly softer:
Hertz gets up and pours himself another shot. He stands by the window, watching the sky that is like a mosaic pieced together from the broken shards of a thousand mirrors, each one tinted a different shade of gray. The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light. (Yiddish 307–8)
If both Landsman’s and Hertz’s world of imagery is inherently Jewish and shaped by the same cultural paradigms, it is quite surprising that their focalization is so different; while Landsman’s focalization is utterly devoid of hope, Hertz’s focalization seems to capture a sense of ambiguity and complexity.
Much like the unfulfilled potential of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the dichotomy of exile versus autonomy remains almost abstract throughout The Yiddish Policemen’s Union; the threatening forces of Reversion echo in the backdrop while the only tangible exile is that of European Jewry who came to Sitka as refugees. It is this very abstraction that allows Chabon to place the novel in a constant state of uncertainty, perhaps following the same logic that prompts the narrator to comment that “a Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment” (Yiddish 349).
In essence, both narratives promote an elusive ending that seems to be on the verge of fulfilling its potential, while the reader is left to bridge the gaps on his own. Perhaps as a final commentary on Jewish identity, Chabon creates an obscure future for both his protagonists and their designated communities, and by doing so he enables the reader to draw his own conclusions. The Jewish identity that both texts attempt to form is only seemingly specific to the temporal-spatial dimension of the plots, but ultimately, it transcends the particular circumstances of each novel, while remaining somewhat ambiguous.
Works Cited
Brunsdale, Mitzi M. Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection 2 Volume Set: From Sleuths to Superheroes. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010.
Chabon, Michael. The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. 2004. New York: Harper, 2005.
Craps, Stef, and Buelens, Gert. “Traumatic Mirroring: Holocaust and Colonial Trauma in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution.” Criticism 53.4 (2011): 569–86.
———. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. 2007. New York: Harper, 2012. Kindle file.
Kravitz, Bennett. “The ‘Aquatic Zionist’ in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union .” Studies in Popular Culture 33.1 (2010): 95–112.
Kushigian, Julia A. “The Detective Story Genre in Poe and Borges.” Latin American Literary Review 11.22 (1983): 27–39.
Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920s to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006.
Myers, D. G. “Michael Chabon’s Imaginary Jews.” Sewanee Review 116.4 (2008): 572–88.
Richardson, Anna. “In Search of the Final Solution: Crime Narrative as a Paradigm for Exploring Responses to the Holocaust.” European Journal of English Studies 14.2 (2010): 159–71.
Roth, Marty. Foul & Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1995.
Rovner, Adam. “Alternate History: The Case of Nava Semel’s IsraIsland and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 9.1 (2011): 131–52.
Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 503–31.
Chapter 12
Not Growing Old but Growing Up
Alex Hobbs
Appropriate Masculine Identity in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys
Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was a coming-of-age narrative focused on a young man, Art Bechstein, who, after finishing his education, spends the summer exploring his sexuality and attempting to find his role in society. Chabon’s attachment to the Bildungsroman genre is also apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and his young adult novel, Summerland (2002). Wonder Boys (1995), on the other hand, is perhaps most obviously a Kunstlerroman, in which the novelist and creative writing instructor protagonist, corpulent Grady Tripp, loses his focus. Yet maintaining his professional reputation is only part of his struggle. Picaresque in tone for much of its 350-odd pages, the novel conforms to the Bildungsroman tradition and the themes of Chabon’s previous work. Grady’s character is transformed from pot-smoking, irresponsible man-child into a family man who acts as mentor for young writers. Thus, in many ways, it is the least likely of Chabon’s protagonists—the middle-aged Grady rather than any of the boys or young men—who is the most exemplary of Bildungsroman characters.
Grady is a forty-one-year-old man who is lost, both professionally and personally. He has conceived of his life as dominated by writing but, like WordFest (the literary colloquia that serves as backdrop to his story), it is less about writing than he thinks. Revelers at WordFest are more interested in getting together and having a good time, and Grady’s life, he comes to realize, should value human connection too, albeit with more permanence. All the characters, in fact, are looking for some sense of belonging, but Wonder Boys tracks Grady’s coming-of-age, growing up from eternal adolescent to an age-appropriate masculine role.
The novel, then, is both Bildungsroman and picaresque, centered on the changing masculine identity of its protagonist. Grady has entered a period of transition: it no longer seems appropriate to continue his quasi-adolescent existence but he is unsure whether he is ready to commit to a more mature, or age-appropriate relationship. Margaret Morganroth Gullette contends that “once you’ve lived long enough, an identity story is always a story of aging” (Aged by Culture 122). Consequently, Grady’s narrative discloses concerns about his aging body and his failing creative prowess. Yet, as Gullette also states, “Life-affirming plots and thoughts can be given to mid-life characters” (Safe at Last xiii), and so Grady is able to leave behind his sense of dislocation from others and move into a new period of his life with hope.
Novels of deep old age often look toward some sense of completion—Vollendungsroman, as Constance Rooke (“Hagar’s Old Age”) has termed such works—but Grady is not here yet. Rather, the narrative is formative and thus allied more with the Bildungsroman. Jerome Hamilton Buckley argues that such a novel should portray many of the following themes: “childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a working philosophy” (18). Wonder Boys certainly meets many of these demands. Grady is an adult and so has already established himself in a profession and found a role in society; however, midlife has caused him to reassess both, reflecting on his childhood, his relat
ionships, and his place in the incestuous small-town college, all of which has left him alienated from others and, indeed, dislocated from his former masculine identity. For Bakhtin, the Bildungsroman represents the transition period and offers “the image of man in the process of becoming” (19, emphasis in original); Martin Japtok concurs, arguing that this genre “prosper[s] in an environment of crisis or instability” (23). In Wonder Boys, while there is backstory and a final few scenes of settled family life, the bulk of the novel is focused on the WordFest weekend, which serves as the setting for Grady’s transition. For a Bildungsroman with a youthful protagonist, the hero must inevitably grow up and find his place in the world; Grady has found this once and so Wonder Boys links middle age with a reestablishment or relocation of identity, a second coming-of-age.
Gullette contends that midlife has become as much a recognizable stage of the life course as “childhood, adolescence, or old age” (Aged by Culture 94). Yet conceptions of middle age have changed over time. Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth have tracked these changing stereotypes, particularly through the twentieth century. They argue that until World War II, “middle age was steadily presented as a time of opportunity for ‘taking stock’ and self-development” (328). However, they contend, from the 1970s, middle age started to be recognized as a crisis period for both men and women. For women, this new stage of life is often marked by the onset of menopause; however, for men, biological or other signifiers are less definitive. This stage of life, which has been placed between midthirties and late sixties, is characterized by transition; as Jung dictates, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie” (13). Each stage of life has appropriate markers—speech, marriage, children, and so forth—but more than this, adult life, as Andrew Blaikie notes, “sees a conflict between ‘generativity’ (producing and piloting the next generation and/or leaving an improving of worth to society) and stagnation, which must be resolved prior to seeking the late life goal of ‘ego-integrity’” (7), or a feeling of relative completion or satisfaction. Midlife, then, is the period of transition between young adulthood and mature adulthood, and the self-reevaluation that accompanies such change.
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