Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  But there is much more to any Chabon story than loss and disappointment. By magic, paper roses bloom from piles of ash. He has always played with different ways of telling tales. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a coming-of-bisexual-age novel, a Gatsby for slackers. Wonder Boys was a send-up of the groves-of-academe roman à clef, winking at Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, and Bernard Malamud even as it tickled the funny bones of magic realism, shlock horror, and quasi-Faulknerian “Mocknapatawpha.” Kavalier & Clay, with escape-artist Harry Houdini as the superhero template, was a graphic novel that impudently asked us to imagine all the pictures on our own. Summerland was a boys’ book of pilgrimage and quest, as if Harry Potter had gone to Wrigley Field to save baseball, summertime, storytelling, and his father. The Final Solution married Victorian melodrama to the espionage thriller, plus Goethe and Schiller and Gilbert and Sullivan and honeybees. Gentlemen of the Road owes as much to movies like The Black Rose (1950), with Tyrone Power as an English scholar and Orson Welles as a warlord looking for Kubla Khan, and Conan the Barbarian (1981), with Arnold Schwarzenegger punishing the savage tribes for wasting his parents, as it does to Don Quixote and Dr. Zhivago. And now, insouciantly, this sci-fi noir, a half-baked Alaska in which everybody insists on speaking Yiddish.

  And yet, a closet humanist, Chabon has also always listened to all of his characters with blameless patience, willing to stay up past his bedtime, or sleep over an extra day or two, to entertain extenuations, parse motives, and talk us through our creepy dreams. It is as if his protean way with narrative forms extends to human behaviors. He is as sympathetic as he is nosy. Writing a detective novel set in an imaginary Jewish Alaska licenses him to itemize what they wear up there (skullcaps, galoshes, polar-bear jammies), what they eat (pickled tomatoes, Chinese doughnuts, noodle pudding, moose chili), and what they carry in their purse (Tabasco sauce, corkscrews, opera glasses, fish-oil pills). He doesn’t so much digress as he circles around. (In her new biography of Leonard Woolf, Victoria Glendinning observes: “His train of thought always took the scenic route.”) And we usually feel better coming out of his revolving doors than we did going in.

  What’s more, he is as whimsical as he is generous: “I can see that some women do indeed look a little like guitars,” Art acknowledges in Pittsburgh. Wonder Boys is, to the best of my knowledge, the only serious novel in which a tuba has a featured role—as a noise, a muse, an umbrella, a symbol of absurdity, and a body dump. Imagine a comic-book artist, like Josef in Kavalier & Clay, immortalizing the love of his life, Rosa Luxemburg Saks, by turning her into the Cimmerian moth goddess from the Book of Lo, at once Druidic and Babylonian, with “immense green wings” and “sensuously furred antennae.” Summerland may not stack up against Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, or “The Children of the Heart” adventure series in David Grossman’s See: Under Love, or “The Chums of Chance” in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, but you have to enjoy the whole idea of a baseball game as “nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.” And in The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, we love Bina almost as much as Landsman does when she chooses in the cafeteria not to order “the baked thermometer” because “they only had rectal,” and when, a few pages later in her ex-husband’s forlorn hotel room, she wants to know: “How do you say ‘shit heap’ in Esperanto?”

  Besides, who knew Chabon was so Jewish?

  2

  Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.

  —The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

  It’s obvious now how Jewish he has always been, as Gentlemen of the Road continues to spool itself out in the New York Times Magazine past publication day for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The one text imagines what Khazaria may have been like, between the Caucasus and the Volga, the Black Sea and the Caspian, after the Khazar kagan, court, and military caste all converted inexplicably to Judaism in A.D. 740. The other imagines, as of 2008, a Jewish state in Alaska rather than the Middle East, having trouble with Tlingits instead of Palestinians. But it didn’t always seem as if Chabon were looking backward, forward, and sideways at his Jewishness.

  Maybe because we spent so much time back in 1988 wondering whether the author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was or wasn’t gay, we didn’t pay enough attention to Art’s Jewish gangster father, who would have enjoyed shooting the breeze and also the competition with such fellow literary gangsters as Benya, the King of Crime in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories, and Dutch Schultz, who died full of words and holes in E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate. Maybe because Wonder Boys had so many scandalous things to say about writers and writing programs at a big university, we hurried past that hilarious and horrific sixty-page seder scene that confirmed Grady, “orphaned and an atheist,” in his feelings about his in-laws and their faith:

  I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I liked what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat….

  Maybe because Kavalier & Clay was such a rollicking encyclopedia on comic-book art, on the “dislocated and non-Euclidean dream spaces,” “the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time between the panels of a comic book page,” and their “total blending of narration and image”—just like Citizen Kane!—we sort of took Hitler for granted. But Josef the émigré didn’t, knowing perfectly well that his comic-book superhero, The Escapist, hadn’t saved his younger brother; knowing that for the Prague Jews he had left behind, there would be no Fortress of Solitude or Bat Cave; knowing even in the navy in Antarctica, while listening to his grandfather sing Schubert on shortwave radio, that Theresienstadt was a German fairy tale for Czechs, “a witch’s house made of candy and gingerbread to lure children and fatten them for the table.” And when his old partner Sammy finally does get to look at The Golem, the dark graphic novel Josef has been working on secretly for years, his first stunned reaction is: “So. You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here.” This is the Sammy who has already explained to Josef that comic-book superheroes, like Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, are a Jewish immigrant invention: “Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.”

  You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here.

  Not so much in Summerland, perhaps, with its mix of Norse myth and Native American folklore, its golden bough and sacred tree, the Yggdrasil, from which ash Ethan makes a magic baseball bat. But The Final Solution resonates. Naturally, the little boy who can’t talk will attract the interest of the eighty-nine-year-old former detective who still believes that the essential business of human beings is “the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life.” Still, in trying to deduce the crime of the century from numbers squawked by a gray parrot, Holmes finds that the secret history thrust upon him is so irrational, so senseless, that he is denied his deepest pleasure—the assembling of “a delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences… catching the light in glints and surmises.” We are left with ruined intellect and teary eyes: Sherlock Holmes as Oedipus at Colonus.

  Gentlemen of the Road suggests in passing that the Khazars might have decided to be Jewish back in the eighth century so as not to rile their rivalrous Christian and Muslim neighbors. But that’s about all it has to say on the subject, being otherwise preoccupied with elephants, slave markets, dung fires, minarets, red hair, horse butter, Persian binoculars, and battlefield surgery. This seems to me a sadness, not only because there really were Khazars, who got in the way of the Bulgars, Magyars, and Vikings nibbling at Byzantium until at least the twelfth century, before they disappeared into a tendentious book by Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe (1976); but also because a remarkable novel has a
lready been written about them—Milorad Pavicˇ’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1990)—which should have goaded Chabon into exerting himself more than he has. Surely he would have appreciated what Pavicˇ describes as the Khazar way of praying by weeping—“for tears are a part of God by virtue of always having a bit of salt at the bottom, just as shells hold pearls.”

  But if Gentlemen disappoints, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, in which the enduring tropes of the private-eye novel and the science-fiction parallel-universe fantasy are mixed and matched, is triumphant, as if Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick had smoked a joint with I. B. Singer. In an alternative twentieth century, Russia has gone through three republics without a revolution. The Holocaust is called, instead, the Destruction. An atom bomb fell on Berlin in 1946. In 1948, Jews in the Holy Land were defeated and savaged by Arabs, so there is no Israel. Enticed by a settlement act that promised them sixty years of sanctuary before their federal district reverted to Alaska, thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews arrived by a World War I troop transport at a swamp near the old Russian colony of Sitka, where they were numbered, inoculated, deloused, and tagged like migrant birds, only to discover fifty thousand Tlingit Indians already in possession of most of the flat and usable land. After which, nonetheless, crews of young Jewesses in blue headscarves went immediately to work, “singing Negro spirituals with Yiddish lyrics that paraphrased Lincoln and Marx.”

  Down South, the American First Lady is Marilyn Monroe Kennedy, the Cuban war has not gone well, and the Jews of Sitka are called “the Frozen Chosen.”

  Jewish Sitka, population 3.2 million, a couple of months shy of the 2008 “Reversion,” is one of the novel’s finest characters, an imaginary city, a Calvino Despina, as palpable as Tel Aviv, as ghostly as Warsaw, as liverish as Buenos Aires, with newspapers, cigarettes, tunnels, and secrets—everything but public transportation. We visit the Hotel Zamenhof on Max Nordau Street for dead bodies, the Hotel Einstein on Adler for nostalgia, the Ringelblum Avenue Baths for conspiracy, Bronfman University for a joke, the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria for pickled crab apple and perhaps a kreplach shaped like the head of Maimonides, and Goldblatt’s Dairy Restaurant, to remember a Jewish massacre of Tlingits. We meet momzers, shtarkers, schlossers, grifters, boundary mavens, patzer ex-cons, bottom-rung bet runners like Penguin Simkowitz, mouse-eyed shtinkers like Zigmund Landau (“the Heifetz of Informers”), ultra-Orthodox black-hat wiseguys like the Verbover Hasidim, in charge of gunrunning, money-laundering, cigarette smuggling, policy racketeering, and all plots involving a Third Temple, and Landsman’s partner in crime-stopping, Berko Shermets, a half Tlingit whose Indian line goes all the way back to the creation-mythic Raven but, at this time in this place, an observant Jew “for his own reasons”: “He is a minotaur, and the world of Jews is his labyrinth.”

  After “half a century of a sense of mistakenness,” of a smell on the wind of salmon being canned and what Landsman calls “the Brownian motion of collective woe,” there are suddenly in Sitka silly signs and parodic portents: First, a face, bearded with sidelocks, has shown up two nights running in the shimmer of the aurora borealis. Next a chicken in the kosher slaughterhouse has turned on the shochet and announced, in Aramaic, the imminent advent of the Messiah. Finally, more seriously, the body of a man named Mendel Shpilman is found dead in a room in Landsman’s Zamenhof. Routine inquiries establish that Mendel was not always “a sockless junkie in a cheap hotel.” The disowned son of a big-shot rabbi, he is said to have had an IQ of 170, to have learned to read Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek when he was eight years old, to have been, according to the black hats, a “miracle boy” with healing powers and quite possibly the Tzaddik-Ha-Dor, “the righteous man of this generation,” maybe even their Messiah. He seems also to have been gay, most likely hustled chess to buy drugs, probably tied off his arm with his tefillin to find a vein for heroin, and was definitely shot dead next to a chessboard on which the pieces were arrayed as a problem called a “zugzwang,” which is when you have no good moves but you have to move anyway—sort of like the Jews of Sitka on the eve of the Reversion: “They’re like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora.”

  (We might have guessed that Mendel’s “zugzwang” first appeared in the pages of another fabulist, Vladimir Nabokov, in whose imaginary Zembla the language they spoke was emphatically not Yiddish.)

  And not only does nobody care about the dead man, not even Mendel’s father, Rebbe Shpilman, the blackest of Verbover hats whose criminality would shame Babel’s Benya, but they have ordained that Landsman not care, either.

  3

  Maybe they’re hoping for World War Three. Maybe they want to crank up a new Crusade. Maybe they think if they do this thing, it will make Jesus come back. Or maybe it has nothing to do with any of that, and it’s all really about oil, you know, securing their supply of the stuff once and for all. I don’t know.

  —The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

  In design, the proposed Third Temple is a restrained display of stonemason might, cubes and pillars and sweeping plazas. Here and there a carved Sumerian monster lends a touch of the barbaric. This is the paper that God left the Jews holding, Landsman thinks, 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.

  —The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

  He doesn’t know how one proceeds under the circumstances, except with the certainty, pressed to the heart like a keepsake of love, that in the end nothing really matters.

  —The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

  Nobody can tell Landsman not to care about a crime. Crime is all he can bring himself to care about. He is otherwise “a disbeliever by inclination.” His personal life and the history of the Jews have persuaded him that “heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery.” But responsibility is another matter, and accountability, too, and vulgar curiosity as well. Take away his badge and gun and he’ll nose around for answers, anyway, flashing his Hands of Esau Yiddish policemen’s union card as a credential. Somehow, the death of his sister and the murder of Mendel are connected. Something weird is going on at the Beth Tikkun Retreat Center, which is less like an honor ranch rehab for rich Jewish addicts than a paramilitary facility for Zionist revanchists. Some ulterior meaning nags at him from Mendel’s zugzwang. And why are people talking behind his back in Hebrew? To Bina, the boss who used to be a wife, he tries to explain himself:

  Bina, I did not know this man. He was put in my way. I was given the opportunity to know him, I suppose, but I declined it. If this man and I had gotten to know each other, possibly we would have become pals. Maybe not. He had his thing with heroin, and that was probably enough for him. It usually is. But whether I knew him or not, and whether we could have grown old together holding hands in the lobby, is neither here nor there. Somebody came into this hotel, my hotel, and shot that man in the back of his head while he was off in dreamland. And that bothers me…. All these hard-lucks paying rent on a pull-down bed and a sheet of steel bolted to the bathroom wall, for better or worse, they’re my people now. I can’t honestly say I like them very much. Some of them are all right. Most of them are pretty bad. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let somebody walk in here and put a bullet in their heads.

  This is classic Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe/Lew Archer stuff—the American private eye, not a declassed aristocrat like Poe’s Dupin, nor a coke-addled scientist fiddler like Conan Doyle’s Holmes, nor a titled-gentry Wimsey, a nosy-genteel Miss Marple, or a world-weary European bureaucrat cop like Maigret, Van der Valk, or Martin Beck, but a hard-boiled, soft-hearted, smart-mouth gumshoe, the last romantic in a corrupt world—an omelet of St. George, St. Francis of Assisi, and sweet-and-sour Parsifal, a mixed grill of Galahad and Robin Hood, a submarine sandwich of stormbird and psychotherapist. The private eye weeps for you, even a sockless junkie. He evens the odds of the poor and weak against the rich and violent, the organized
criminals, neighborhood bullies, corporate goons, ministries of fear, drug cartels, death squads, and global conspiracies, usually with a jazz score. 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, every sorrowful secret just another reason to feel lousy about life.

  Except that there’s also Bina. She is under instructions to bury the Mendel Shpilman case, but Bina is one of those biblical matriarchs, like Rachel or Sarah, “who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains.” Ambitious as she is to keep her job after the Reversion, there is a reason she married Landsman in the first place, before they lost their child. And who is it that has issued these instructions from above? How come they want the lid on? Why are the Federal District pols, the Verbover black hats, and the Washington, D.C., globocops so suddenly in cahoots? What’s the meaning of the counterfeit red heifer spotted by Landsman grazing in the Indian outback? Who cut a deal with the Tlingits, in exchange for what? And why, oh why, kill Mendel, who had surely fallen so far out of the world as not to be in anybody’s way?