The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon

Original and engaging

I did enjoy this book although I think it could have been better. The idea is original and Chabon has successfully created from his imagination a unique world. Like others I thought it lacked a glossary and footnotes - not just of the invented words but also to some of the other historical or contextual and factual details - ie Tzaddik Ha Dor, the significance of a red heifer. Without these I have every sympathy with reveiwers who feel they just couldnt get into the book - I also struggled. It took me a few pages to work out a sholem was his gun and not some sort of talisman! Despite its length and some of the long descriptive passages that are very atmospheric he has been rather selective in what and who is given this treatment which is a shame.

Despite the above I would recommend this book and will read other books by this author.

Tedious

I tried to like this book, I really did, but by page 100 I gave up. The premise is good - with no homeland in the form of Israel, there is a Jewish settlement in Sitka Alaska and it is about to revert to American rule and the settlers must apply for residency or leave.

Unfortunately almost every character is just a cipher for different styles of Judaism. Rather than progress the plot, Chabon provides endless details on how character X wears his yarmulke or how character Y feels uneasy about playing chess on the Sabbath. The main language is Yiddish and sometimes characters are explicitly stated to be speaking American. I soon got bored of every few words being self-consciously Yiddish (Chabon rams this down the reader's throat, presumably in case we forget the premise of the book).

By 100 pages, I really didn't care whodunnit nor why. The only impression the book left me with was that I am not going to bother with any of Chabon's other works, no matter how highly The Guardian rates them.

I gave it 1 star because there wasn't a "no stars" option.

Oy! Fun but Frustrating

Chabon apparently never met a metaphor he didn't like. He piles them one atop another to the point that they obscure rather than clarify the action. Indeed, I had to go to Wikipedia after finishing the book to make sense of the ending. What's more, the showy language never lets us forget that we're reading a book, that Landsman and Bina and the others aren't people but merely characters who are the invention of an inventive but infuriating writer.
All of which is especially frustrating because the concept and conceit of the book--an alternative history in which Jews were settled in a part of Alaska rather than settled in Israel--is brilliant, as are all the details. I wanted to be swept away by Chabon's vision, but his language kept getting in the way.

410 pages too long

The Yiddish Policemen's Union was, in my opinion 410 (paperback)
pages too long. To read this you have to know UK Yiddish,(I do)
USA Yiddish & USA police slang & street slang. How many of the
reviewers are this qualified? I think the newspaper reviews were
edited as I don't think the reviewers come into all the above
catorgories.I don't know any of my contemporary Jewish friends
who would call another a YID. I guess he has a loving mother
who purchased all his other work?

Yes, it went on too long

Yes, it went on too long. Like a movie that can't seem to end without going down still a few more hairpin curves, this novel keeps piling on the adventures. But the novel has already said what it had to say about halfway through.

This is a very much overrated book by an overrated author. The premise is only partly original, as most of the plot is borrowed from other good and not so good mysteries, and the whole idea, of a temporary Jewish state in Alaska, is only mildly amusing. The author does not do enough with it. He does not do enough to IMAGINE this alternate universe very well. What does the Jewish Sitka really feel like and look like, and what does the existence of a homeland in exile really mean for people like the one the novel supposes would live in Sitka -- about these things we learn next to nothing. By the middle of the book we have even run out of Jewish jokes.

I wish Chabon had written a funnier book, and I wish at the same time that he had taken the book he was writing more seriously.

In a word, this book is a potboiler for the postmodern set, and nothing more.