The Language of Exile - The Yiddish Policemen's Union

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Actually in Stalin's Birobidjan one of the languages I think was Yiddish??  :think:   --CSR

http://www.tjctv.com/movies/stalins-forgotten-zion/

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The Language of Exile



Michael Chabon's new novel is a strange noir tale featuring Yiddish, the language of his grandparents. He tells Stuart Jeffries about the fun he had writing it, Jewishness and why good looks mean nothing

          o The Guardian, Thursday 7 June 2007

Strange times to be a Jew, says a character in Michael Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. "Strange" isn't the word. "Harrowing" and "miserable" are better ones. For Chabon has imagined a post-Holocaust world in which the three-month-old state of Israel has been destroyed, and the only homeland the Jewish people can flee to is a string of islands in Alaska that the US government has leased them. Sitka, as it is known, is hardly the promised land: orange harvests are minimal, the indigenous people don't care for their new neighbours, and the poor Jewish schmucks who wind up there are nicknamed the Chosen Frozen, as if to rub their noses in their misfortune. When the novel begins, their luck takes a turn for the worst: their 60-year-lease is up and so 3.2 million Jews must leave even this grim corner of the world.

What made Chabon come up with such a barmy idea? "I can't claim it as my own," says Chabon, over pizza in London. "I found a travel book called Say It In Yiddish in a store one day and that set me thinking: how wonderful it would be if such a book had a use, if you really could travel to countries where they spoke Yiddish. So I wrote an essay about that and, while I was researching it, I found that there had been a proposal to allow Jews to settle in Alaska during the second world war.

"It was offered as a humanitarian gesture, but it was partly a beard. It was remote and depopulated, and they thought the Jews would build the infrastructure - roads, industry and all that. Americans don't have a great record on saving the Jews from the Holocaust."

Chabon's grandparents spoke and loved Yiddish. "They would use it, mostly, when they wanted to say things about me they didn't want me to understand. Because Yiddish was the language of exile, I was exiled from exile itself. But I was aware of how they loved Yiddish and they loved the world it created." His ancestors came from Yiddishland - an area where Jews lived lying across the borders of Lithuania, Russia and Poland. "It is a language that anticipates and finds calamity at every turn. And where Dickens would take a paragraph, Yiddish does it in a word," says Chabon. A Yiddish saying makes this distinction: "A shlemiel is somebody who often spills his soup; a schlimazel is the person the soup lands on."

"There is a sense in Yiddish of intensely felt humanity, and both a sentimental and a cold-eyed view of what human beings can expect from the world," says Chabon. That, I suggest, sounds remarkably like the philosophies of most of the private dicks in novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. "Exactly. When I started to re-read Chandler, I got a sense of how well the Yiddish sensibility would map on to hard-boiled fiction."

This mapping of Yiddish on to noir is Chabon's conceit in what is his first adult novel for six years. Its hero is a homicide detective who has to investigate the murder of a heroin-addled chess prodigy who may have been the messiah the Jews have been awaiting for several millennia. "He's a heroic nebbish - a typical Jewish archetype," says Chabon. Where Sam Spade might have drunk a gimlet, Landsman sucks down slivovitzes. He smokes endless papiros (cigarettes). But beyond the superficial noirish accoutrements, Landsman's character subverts the stereotype of the genre's alienated protagonist. His ex-wife is his boss, his partner Berko Shemets has a family, and the complex plot embroils Landsman's dead sister and Berko's dad. The book thus detonates a shibboleth of noir fiction - that there is no place for family members down its mean streets, still less former wives.

Throughout the novel, the offensive word "yid" is used among Jews without anyone taking exception. "I have no misgivings," says Chabon. "In Yiddish, yid means Jew. So when you say the greeting 'Vos macht a yid?' it means 'How's it going?' When spoken between Jews 'yid' has intimacy - and that's why I used it. It demarcates the fact that you belong to the group. So in my novel, which is set in a big ghetto, everyone is a yid."

There are also a lot of Yiddish curses in the book, the most common of which is, "A black year on him." Not that bad a curse - only a year, after all.

Chabon clearly had a great deal of fun writing the book. "For me writing is all about the love of language," he says, and this love expresses itself in his creation of some delightfully snarling repartee, a meticulously imagined Sitka and a hatful of Yiddish neologisms. A uniformed cop is called a latke ("because their hats are latke-shaped," says Chabon). A gun is a sholem ("A gun is a piece in English slang," explains Chabon. "Sholem means peace in Yiddish."). A mobile phone is a Shoyfer (a brand name - mobile phones are Sitka's second biggest export).

One US critic baulked at the novel's Yiddish, finding it as "alienating to the reader as the demotic Russian of A Clockwork Orange or the pseudo-pidgin English of Cloud Atlas". It isn't. For someone like me, whose knowledge of Yiddish comes chiefly from Curb Your Enthusiasm and that scene in Mrs Doubtfire where Robin Williams counsels that one "should never buy gribbonus from a moil", you won't find Chabon's Yiddish a problem but mostly a pleasure.

If the idea for this novel sounds unpromisingly uncommercial, then consider this. Chabon's novel was optioned as a film before he even wrote it. Plus, last time I looked, it was number 18 on amazon.com's bestseller list.

But then the 44-year-old novelist is one of the US's hottest literary talents. He has been hot ever since 1988 when his creative writing professor surreptitiously sent Chabon's novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to a literary agent, and Chabon was paid a then record $155,000 advance for it. It was published in 1988. He went on to write Wonder Boys (which was made into a ropey film starring Michael Douglas), the Pulitzer-winning paean to comic books The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and a novella, The Final Solution, featuring a Sherlock Holmes-like investigator. He even has another career as a screenwriter: he wrote Spiderman 2 and worked for a while on Disney's Snow and the Seven, a live-action martial arts version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In fact, Chabon is so hot that in the Simpsons last November his cartoon simulacrum went toe-to-toe with Jonathan Franzen's. In the episode, the author of The Corrections hits Chabon with a portrait of Snoopy. It seems impolite to ask why. Chabon responds by saying, "You fight like Anne Rice!" before attacking Franzen.

Chabon was even, thanks to his enviable good looks, offered a spot in a Gap ad and a chance to be featured as one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People - a black year on him. He turned both down, saying: "I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. To be praised for something like that [his looks] is just weird."

The Yiddish Policemen's Union has already been trashed for depicting Jews unfavourably (amid, to be fair, some very favourable reviews). For example, under the headline "Novelist's Ugly View of Jews", the New York Post alleged that Chabon's depiction of "Jews as constantly in conflict with one another [is] bound to set off a firestorm of controversy."

"All I'll say about this is that it hasn't created a firestorm," says Chabon. Don't some Jews dislike his book's perspective on Hassidic Jews ? "I guess some do. There's always the risk, when Jews write about Jews, of creating a shander fer de goyim [a scandal for non-Jews]," says Chabon. "Philip Roth gets it all the time. It's my first experience of that." Enjoying it? "It's either mild. Or way off. It hasn't hurt yet." Some critics too take the uneasy relationship between Sitka Jews and their native American neighbours in the book to be an allegory of the Jews and the Palestinians. "It's really not. My point was that new peoples don't often get along with the indigenous peoples. That's true of the New Zealanders and the Maoris as much as of the Jews and the Palestinians." And anyway, he adds: "What interests me is the drama of the Jews, rather than deciding in my novels whether Israel or any other homeland is necessary for us."

Chabon himself seems enviably well adjusted, telling me of his happy home life back in Berkeley, California, where he lives with his second wife, Ayelet Waldman, and their two children. In 2005, Waldman wrote a Guardian piece about how she loved her husband more than her children. He agrees that they're happy. "We both work at home a lot. We help each other all the time with our writing. And then I do the childcare and make dinner. That's my life. I couldn't do anything else."

· The Yiddish Policemen's Union is published by Fourth Estate next Monday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/ju ... re.fiction