AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am grateful for the help of the following people, works, Web sites, institutions, and establishments:
The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire; Davia Nelson; Susie Tompkins Buell; Margaret Grade and the staff of Manka’s Inverness Lodge, Inverness, California; Philip Pavel and the staff of the Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, California; Bonnie Pietila and her fellow denizens of Springfield; Paul Hamburg, librarian for the Judaica Collections, University of California; Ari Y. Kelman; Todd Hasak-Lowy; Roman Skaskiw; the Alaska State Library, Juneau, Alaska; Dee Longenbaugh, Observatory Books, Juneau, Alaska; Jake Bassett of the Oakland Police Department; Mary Evans; Sally Willcox, Matthew Snyder, and David Colden; Devin McIntyre; Kristina Larsen, Lisa Eglinton, and Carmen Dario; Elizabeth Gaffney, Kenneth Turan, Jonathan Lethem; Christopher Potter; Jonathan Burnham; Michael McKenzie; Scott Rudin; Leonard Waldman, Robert Chabon, and Sharon Chabon; Sophie, Zeke, Ida-Rose, and Abraham Chabon, and their mother; The Messiah Texts, Raphael Patai; Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary, Uriel Weinreich; Our Gang, Jenna Joselit; The Meaning of Yiddish, Benjamin Harshav; Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish, James Matisoff; English-Yiddish Dictionary, Alexander Harkavy; American Klezmer, Mark Slobin; Against Culture: Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska, Kirk Dombrowski; Will the Time Ever Come? A Tlingit Source Book, Andrew Hope III and Thomas F. Thornton, eds.; The Chess Artist, J. C. Hallman; The Pleasures of Chess, Assiac (Heinrich Fraenkel); Treasury of Chess Lore, Fred Reinfeld, ed.; Mendele (http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/index.utf-8.htm); Chessville (www.chessville.com); Eruvin in Modern Metropolitan Areas, Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer (http://www.aishdas.org/baistefila/eruvp1.htm); Yiddish Dictionary Online (www.yiddishdictionaryonline.com); and Courtney Hodell, editor and redeemer of this novel.
The Hands of Esau brotherhood was founded by and appears here with the kind permission of its grand chairman and president for life, Jerome Charyn; the Zugzwang of Mendel Shpilman was devised by Reb Vladimir Nabokov and is presented in his Speak, Memory.
This novel was written on Macintosh computers using Devonthink Pro and Nisus Writer Express.
PRAISE
PRAISE FOR
Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
“Builds upon the achievement of Kavalier & Clay, creating a completely fictional world that is as persuasively detailed as his re-creation of 1940s New York in that earlier book, even as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is like watching a gifted athlete invent a sport using elements of every other sport there is—balls, bats, poles, wickets, javelins, and saxophones…. The pure reach, music, and weight of Chabon’s imagination are extraordinary, born of brilliant ambition you don’t even notice because it is so deeply entertaining…. Breathtaking.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, Washington Post Book World
“A rich, terrifically funny, and sad novel about the pain of exile, both personal and spiritual.”
—John Freeman, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“A larger-than-life folk tale set in an alternate universe version of the present where issues of exile, belonging, identity, nationality, freedom, and destiny are examined through a fun-house mirror that renders them opaque and recognizable all at once.”
—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“It’s obvious that the creation of this strange, vibrant, and unreal world is Chabon’s idea of heaven. He seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction…. The fanciful Sitka of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union plays the delicate, infinitely complex game of fiction fairly: this place is so vividly imagined you practically need a parka and a prayer shawl to get from one page to the next.”
—Terrence Rafferty, New York Times Book Review
“Chabon’s prose is so awesome, it’s a crime not to quote it…. Chabon may be incapable of writing a bad book.”
—Lev Grossman, Time
“Triumphant, as if Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick had smoked a joint with I. B. Singer…. This is classic Sam Spade–Philip Marlowe–Lew Archer stuff…. A hard-boiled, soft-hearted, smart-mouthed gumshoe, the last romantic in a corrupt world—an omelet of Saint George, Saint Francis of Assisi, and sweet-and-sour Parsifal, a mixed grill of Galahad and Robin Hood, and a submarine sandwich of stormbird and psychotherapist…. To these savories, Chabon has added the Flying Dutchman and the Wandering Jew, and it works so well we want it to go on forever.”
—John Leonard, New York Review of Books
“Ambitiously imaginative…. As usual, Chabon’s language is incandescent, distilling sad Jewish mysticism into pulpy prose…. Equal parts Chaim Potok, Dashiell Hammett, and Woody Allen, Policemen’s Union creates a new genre: hard-boiled-egg noir.”
—Brian Braiker, Newsweek
“Chabon’s new detective novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, consolidates his reputation for virtuoso descriptive writing, shrewd character development, and breathtaking plotting…. Part Bellow, part Chandler, part Marx (Groucho, that is), the novel caroms off cliché to become something boisterously, luxuriantly original.”
—Dan Cryer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Soulful yet verbally dazzling.” —Kyle Smith, People
“A runaway delight…. Philip Roth may be the recipient of PEN’s first Saul Bellow Award this spring …. but it’s Chabon who’s carrying on the Jewish American tradition of stylistic brilliance, making us laugh with the tilt of a sentence, the tone of a clause.”
—Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Marvelous…. An excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its impending blockbuster superfame.”
—Sam Anderson, New York magazine
“Exuberant…. Grand fun.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“The wit and brio of Chabon’s inventiveness are unfailingly delightful, but he’s also playing a deeper game…. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is about no Jews who have ever lived, but it is one of the best novels in English about what it means to be a Jew, and how it feels. In fact, the book is so good not despite taking place in an imaginary world but because of it…. A stunning act of imagination.”
—William Deresiewicz, The Nation
“Michael Chabon is an escape artist: his novels are elegant and energetic circus tricks that celebrate, again and again, the joy of release from the constraints of the everyday world. His new novel is his most daring and unlikely act yet…. Irresistible.”
—Daniel Swift, Financial Times
“[A] loopy, brilliant Jewish epic…. Marvelous…. What’s not to love?”
—Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
“You are in for a treat, not just for the electric charge of Mr. Chabon’s writing but for a story more finely plotted than any published this year.”
—The Economist
“The world of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, lives and breathes so palpably on the page that readers may wonder why mapmakers haven’t caught up with it yet… A tour de force.”
—Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times
“Chabon demonstrates once again … that he ranks among the most important, and interesting, contemporary American novelists.”
—Erik Spanberg, Christian Science Monitor
“Chabon strings up a literary high wire, and performs a complex and beautiful act…. A worthy cousin to that of Philip Roth’s Plot Against America…. Like Roth, Chabon has enough chutzpah and skill to transcend formula or cocky literary conceits…. Strange times to be a Jew, indeed. But a great time to be a reader.”
—Connie Ogle, Miami Herald
“The entire premise stretche
s credibility, but Chabon carries it off because he writes like a dream and he colors in the Sitka District with vivid detail…. With this book, a brilliant American writer has given us a great new story.”
—Michelle Locke, Associated Press
“Ambitious but accessible, dense with allusion but propelled by action, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union proves a beautiful marriage of high and low: a novel with a literary mind and a populist heart.”
—Cliff Froehlich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“The best writer of English prose in this country, and the most interesting novelist of his generation…. Even those readers bowled over by the capacious inventiveness of his Pulitzer Prize–winning opus, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, are going to be amazed at how inventive Chabon can be. What Chabon has done here is extraordinary.”
—John Podhoretz, The Weekly Standard
“An admirably ambitious and beautiful work of literature…. What’s remarkable about these sentences is not just their tone, at once gritty, gorgeous, and lovesick for something lost. With their dark, melancholy reverb, they turn noir into a vehicle for ideas…. A literary original.”
—Mark Oppenheimer, Forward
“We are currently seeing a trend of novels like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, novels of manic geographical origami, novels of kaleidoscopic Venn diagrams, and novels that speak in a Creole of nerdish traditions…. [The Yiddish Policemen’s Union] puts the other books in the shade.”
—Benjamin Lytal, New York Sun
OTHER WORKS
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
A Model World and Other Stories
Wonder Boys
Werewolves in Their Youth
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Summerland
The Final Solution
Gentlemen of the Road
Maps and Legends
Manhood for Amateurs
CREDITS
Cover and text illustrations by Will Staehle
Designed by Leah Carlson-Stanisic
COPYRIGHT
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Chabon. Glossary copyright © 2008 by Michael Chabon and Sherryl Mleynek. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2008.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-00-714983-4 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062124586
08 09 10 11 12 ID/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Michael Chabon Page 41
