Seven Red

I remember when I used to drive up to college through the heart of the orthodox Jewish summer playgrounds: US 17, upstate New York, pretty much from the New York State Thruway to the once great resort areas around Monticello, now empty husks as a result of cheap airfare to Miami and points south, devastation with a brokedown racetrack. You’d get about 20 miles west of the Thruway and you’d start seeing these joyful yellow signs proclaiming the impending arrival of Moshiach. Yes, Moshiach is coming! Tell everybody waiting for Superman, that they should try to hold on the best they can…

This is the theme for Michael Chabon’s alternative history noir, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The alternative history here is not – for Americans, anyway – as disastrous as that of one of Chabon’s likely models, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. In Dick’s story, the Germans and Japanese have won World War II, and San Francisco, like the rest of the West Coast, is under Japanese occupation. In Chabon’s story, things unfolded a little differently. The Germans apparently beat the Soviets, which prolonged the war just long enough to have the US nuke Berlin in 1946. Some devastating war happened with Cuba in the early 1960′s (although one wonders why it would, given the alternative course of Russia).

But, more importantly for the story, there is no Israel. The small group of Zionists who tried to establish the Jewish state in the late 1940′s were ejected (literally pushed into the sea, as the saying goes) by an Arab coalition, while the great powers stood by. The Jews are still, in 2000, in the “big black lake of Diaspora” (202). Specifically, the US government allowed some Jews to temporarily settle in a god-forsaken corner of Alaska, and soon 2 million Jews came to those shores. They live in a very temporary semi-autonomous zone called the District of Sitka, which is soon to revert (the dreaded Reversion) back to US federal control, likely to be handed over to the Tlingit Indians, or the BIA. But in those 50 or so years, the refugees have built up a whole civil structure, cities, towns, governments, restaurants, sects of various orthodoxies, criminal gangs, and street names: a whole culture of Jewish Alaska. Everyone in the Sitka District speaks Yiddish, reserving what the narrator calls “American” for expressions like “Fuck You,” “Fuck your mother,” and “What the fuck?” (Nobody, of course, speaks Hebrew, but perhaps some scheming American Zionists.) There is a history of conflict with the native Tlingit, riots and half-breeds, seething hatred. With Reversion, it’s quite clear that this entire Jewish culture will disappear, as nobody seems assured to get residency permits for the reverted District, and the political environment in the US seems, well, unfavorable. “Strange times,” as the characters in the book continually remind us, “to be a Jew.”

In the midst of this brilliantly imagined world, Detective Meyer Landsman – your typical hard-boiled, sharp-eyed, drunk Jewish Alaskan gumshoe – must solve the murder of a heroin addict who had the bad luck of catching a bullet in the back of his head in Landsman’s very own fleabag (is there any other kind in noir?) hotel. The heroin addict may or may not be the vaunted Tzaddik – the Messiah of this generation come to redeem his people in the Holy Land. It would be difficult to go much more into plot than that without revealing the many twists and turns Chabon had fun performing for the reader (she says too many twists and turns for her liking). To speak in more general terms, I think we see in TYPU an interesting attempt to make sense of terrorism, and experiment which perhaps inverts some positions to determine whether some commonplaces about terrorism hold. And it seems more terrifying not when we’re asked to think differently about terrorism, but when we recognize it in its sparkling, Messianic sameness – emanating from the hills and tunnels of Tora Bora or the strange, cold Untershtaat of Jewish Alaska. These changed positions are easy enough to pull off, I guess, a kind of elementary thought experiment, maybe Ethics 101.

Where Chabon is more ambitious is in building the reminder of homelessness. The clarity with which Chabon sketches the District of Sitka is all the more devastating when we realize that it will really be gone in 15 weeks, this whole culture. And yes, this whole piece of fiction, this elaborate construction no more solid than a Jewish town under the ultimate sway of gentile government. And that so many other towns, whole functioning towns with little histories and places like homes are gone too, for the Jews in Spain, England, Poland, Germany, but also for so many others, gentiles, Africans, corn people, Sioux, Sunni, Shia. Our cities are fictions, and delicate ones. The simple thought experiment so happily deployed these days (what if it was you who…) takes on more heft in this context, for we are asked not merely to identify temporarily with the terrorist, but also to despise them temporarily, but at the same time. Of course, sophisticated people believe that holding contradictory notions is easy enough, and that people who are unable to do it are really the ones with the problem. TYPU suggest that its not that easy, really, and even if you can do it, you really haven’t solved or imagined anything.

They’re still waiting for Moshiach, I’d wager, up on US 17, in their buses out of Brooklyn, the black hats. They should read TYPU; it’ll tell them this: He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything…It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift.

In any case, I feel like I’ve done a good foray into contemporary (Jewish) lit, having read Lethem and two Chabon’s for the month. Now I’m on to…I’m gonna do it…you can’t stop me…Against the Day. I’m already 200 pages in, again. I’m really getting the feeling of what it must have been like to read Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973; this is also a book that responds to the problem of terrorism (and maybe Pynchon always was that, our Proust for the blasted cityscape). Strangely, like Kavalier and Clay and TYPU, I’m reading about the goddamn Arctic and Antarctica. What’s with the cold these days, fellas?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS |