March 3: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon
Discussion leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, once again history threatens to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. A gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption.

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Reviews:

Booklist Review: /*Starred Review*/ Like Haruki Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), Chabon plays with the conventions of the Chandlerian private-eye novel, but that's only one ingredient in an epic-scale alternate-history saga of Jewish life since World War II. The premise draws on an obscure historical fact: FDR once proposed that Alaska, not Israel, become the homeland for Jews after the war. In Chabon's telling, that's exactly what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn't gone as planned: the U.S. government now has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced son of Sitka's most powerful rabbi. No one wants this case solved, from Landsman's boss (his ex-wife, Bina) to the FBI, but our Yiddish Marlowe keeps digging, uncovering apocalypse in the making. Chabon manipulates his bulging plot masterfully, but what makes the novel soar is its humor and humanity. Even without grasping all the Yiddish wordplay that seasons the delectable prose, readers will fall headlong into the alternate universe of Chabon's Sitka, where black humor is a kind of antifreeze necessary to support life. And when Meyer, in the end, must «weigh the fates of the Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet» against a promise made to a grieving mother, it's clear that this parallel world smells a lot like home. Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ran the book-award table in 2000, and this one just may be its equal. -- Bill Ott (Reviewed 03-01-2007) (Booklist, vol 103, number 13, p38)

Publishers Weekly Review: Reviewed by Jess Walter They are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is -- deep breath now -- a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel begins the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America -- with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noir???or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. (May)Jess Walter was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and the winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for Citizen Vince.Staff (Reviewed March 5, 2007) (Publishers Weekly, vol 254, issue 10, p34) --

Library Journal Review: /* Starred Review */ What's washed-up cop Meyer Landsman to do when a heroin-addicted, chess-crazed denizen of the dump where he lives gets plugged in the head? He's going to find the killer, and to that end he calls in his partner (and cousin) Berko Shemets, a bear of a man who's also half-Tlingit because, you see, this is Alaska? In this wildly inventive blackest of black comedies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) imagines that after World War II Roosevelt decreed the yet-to-be-50th state the homeland of the Jews. Years have passed, and the Jews have settled in very nicely, thank you, re-creating the aura of the Mitteleuropa they've lost though the black-hatted, ultra-orthodox Bobovers turn out to be real thugs. The meddling of our two boys leads them straight to powerful and dangerous Bobover leader Rebbe Gold and eventually to a plot aimed at the reclamation of Israel. It also leads them into plenty of hot water with the top brass, including their new boss???Meyer's ex-wife, Bina. Raucous, acidulous, decidedly impolite, yet stylistically arresting, this book is bloody brilliant???and if it's way over the top, that's what makes Chabon such a great writer. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal --Barbara Hoffert (Reviewed March 1, 2007) (Library Journal, vol 132, issue 4, p68) 1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ Imagine a mutant strain of Dashiell Hammett crossed with Isaac Bashevis Singer, as one of the most imaginative contemporary novelists extends his fascination with classic pulp. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 2000, etc.) returns with an alternate-history novel that succeeds as both a hardboiled detective story and a softhearted romance. In the aftermath of World War II, a Jewish homeland has been established in Alaska rather than Israel. Amid the mean streets of Sitka, the major city, Detective Meyer Landsman lives in a seedy flophouse, where alcohol has dulled his investigative instincts. His marriage to his beloved Bina couldn't survive an aborted pregnancy, after tests showed the possibility of birth defects. He also hasn't gotten over the death of his younger sister, a pilot whose plane crashed. He finds his sense of mission renewed when there's a murder in the hotel where he lives. The deceased was a heroin-addicted chess player, his slaying seemingly without motive. There's an urgency to Landsman's investigation, because the Promised Land established by the Alaskan Settlement Act is only a 50-year rental, with Jews expected to go elsewhere when the "Reversion" takes place two months hence. Thus, Landsman must solve the case before he loses his job and his home, a challenge complicated by the reappearance of his ex-wife, appointed chief of police during this transition before the Reversion. In her attempts to leave a clean slate, will she help her former husband or thwart him? Adding to the intrigue are a cult of extremists led by a gangster rabbi, a possibility that the death of Landsman's sister wasn't an accident and a conspiracy led by the U.S. government. "These are strange times to be a Jew," say various characters, like a Greek chorus, though the novel suggests that all times are strange times to be a Jew. A page-turning noir, with a twist of Yiddish, that satisfies on many levels.
(Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2007)

See The Yiddish Policemen's Union at Harper Collins' web site.

Small Island: a novel / by Andrea Levy

Discussion leader: Edna Ritzenberg

Set mainly in the British Empire of 1948, this story of emigration, loss, and love follows four characters -- two Jamaican and two Britons, struggling to find peace in postwar England. Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with humor and tenderness, with a backdrop of bombed out houses and post-wartime conditions.


The Author's Web Site
Small Island Read 2007:

Reviews

The New York Times, April 3, 2007 (requires free login)

Amazon.com Andrea Levy's award-winning novel, Small Island, deftly brings two bleak families into crisp focus. First a Jamaican family, including the well-intentioned Gilbert, who can never manage to say or do exactly the right thing; Romeo Michael, who leaves a wake of women in his path; and finally, Hortense, whose primness belies her huge ambition to become English in every way possible. The other unhappy family is English, starting with Queenie, who escapes the drudgery of being a butcher's daughter only to marry a dull banker. As the chapters reverse chronology and the two groups collide and finally mesh, the book unfolds through time like a photo album, and Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with a humor and tenderness that is both authentic and bracing. The book is cinematic in the best way--lighting up London's bombed-out houses and wartime existence with clarity and verve while never losing her character's voice or story. --Meg Halverson --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. After winning the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Levy's captivating fourth novel sweeps into a U.S. edition with much-deserved literary fanfare. Set mainly in the British Empire of 1948, this story of emigration, loss and love follows four characters—two Jamaicans and two Britons—as they struggle to find peace in postwar England. After serving in the RAF, Jamaican Gilbert Joseph finds life in his native country has become too small for him. But in order to return to England, he must marry Hortense Roberts—she's got enough money for his passage—and then set up house for them in London. The pair move in with Queenie Bligh, whose husband, Bernard, hasn't returned from his wartime post in India. But when does Bernard turn up, he is not pleased to find black immigrants living in his house. This deceptively simple plot poises the characters over a yawning abyss of colonialism, racism, war and the everyday pain that people inflict on one another. Levy allows readers to see events from each of the four character's' point of view, lightly demonstrating both the subjectivity of truth and the rationalizing lies that people tell themselves when they are doing wrong. None of the characters is perfectly sympathetic, but all are achingly human. When Gilbert realizes that his pride in the British Empire is not reciprocated, he wonders, "How come England did not know me?" His question haunts the story as it moves back and forth in time and space to show how the people of two small islands become inextricably bound together. Agent, David Grossman. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From School Library Journal Adult/High School–This novel examines class, race, and prejudice in London in 1948, when a new multiracial England began to form. Through four principal narrators comprising two married couples, the author brings to life the dreams and fears of a generation. Gilbert, a Jamaican newlywed who served in the RAF during World War II, hopes for a prosperous future in London, though his experience of racial discrimination tells him this won't be achieved easily. His young wife, Hortense, is more naive. Arriving from the colonies prepared to take up a teaching career, she is soon in despair over rude rejections and her struggle to make herself understood, literally and figuratively, by white working-class neighbors who don't seem to comprehend the pristine English she learned on her home island. Even the small comforts provided by their affable landlady are soured when Queenie's long-missing husband returns and is less than pleased to meet the black boarders. As these mismatched pairs relate their sides of the story, the author's linguistic skill pitches their voices perfectly within time and place. Though none of the characters is very likable, all are nuanced personalities who make the book intriguing and believable throughout, even a final plot twist involving a coincidence of Dickensian proportions. Affecting, funny, and sad, this is a masterful depiction of a society on the verge of major changes.–Starr E. Smith, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From The New Yorker In the shabby remnants of post-blitz London, three near-strangers find themselves in a single house. Queenie Bligh is a spirited Yorkshirewoman waiting for her husband to return from the war and taking in tenants to make ends meet. Gilbert Joseph, a Jamaican R.A.F. veteran, is struggling to establish himself in England, a country that he'd been taught was his motherland but which regards him as an interloper; his bride, Hortense, has just arrived in London and is bewildered that her education and class can't transcend the color of her skin. The narrative voice jumps between the characters, a technique that embeds familiar cultural observations in closely observed and surprising lives. If the plot sometimes verges on the operatic, Levy's writing deftly illuminates the complex and contradictory motives behind each character's behavior. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Following the quiet but critical success of Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), Never Far From Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), British novelist Andrea Levy's fourth book, Small Island -- the first to be published in the United States -- is a breakthrough of sorts. Each predecessor has drawn to varying degrees upon Levy's experiences growing up in London as the daughter of first-generation, postwar Jamaican immigrants, and has mined the complicated landscape of what it means to be black and British both before and after the vogues for "Cool Britannia" and all things multicultural. Yet her early books went unheralded by the sort of media hype and glossy fanfare that greeted Zadie Smith's clever first novel, White Teeth, in 2000 and, to a lesser degree, Hari Kunzru's masterful debut, The Impressionist, in 2002. Small Island represents an arrival (or is it a "departure"?) of a particular kind, then; despite being, and I would add very much mistakenly, omitted from the Man Booker long list in 2004, the novel has since been showered with a dazzling array of literary accolades -- the Orange Prize (over the likes of Margaret Atwood and Rose Tremain), the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and most recently the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, which places Levy in the esteemed company of such former winners as Nobel laureates V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Prize-winning is an arbitrary sport, but the recognition bestowed upon Levy's work is a testament to her talents -- her formidable craft and staying power in an otherwise faddish business. Small Island is free of the prosaic affectations that are often the hallmark of celebrated authorship; there are no postmodern pyrotechnics or other gimmicky hoops to jump through. Rather, Levy tells a good story, and she tells it well -- using narrative voices across time and space as she revisits the conventions of the historical novel and imagines the hopes and pains of the immigrant's saga anew. Levy's novel is no mere flight of fantasy, for it is rooted in the past and mired in the complicated stuff of empire. At the same time the memorable characters are radically unhinged from any sense of national fixity as their lives become intermeshed in strangely unexpected yet predictable ways. Set intermittently in postwar London, the narrative centers on the interactions between two couples, the determined Jamaican newlyweds Hortense and Gilbert Joseph, and the quintessentially English Queenie (named for Victoria, former Empress of India) and her phenomenally dull husband, Bernard Bligh. Gilbert, whom Queenie had known when he was an R.A.F serviceman during the war, takes up residence in her Earls Court rooming house as she awaits Bernard's delayed return from an overseas posting. While Gilbert's good fortune in finding Queenie again hints at the possibility of stabilized race relations, albeit ones tinged with well-meaning faux-pas and unintended prejudices, Hortense's arrival sets in motion the events and reflections that will culminate in the forging of a postcolonial portrait that is at once familial and historical. Although the main action of Small Island takes place over a few weeks, Levy splits the novel into "Before" and "1948," the latter moment denoting a powerful geopolitical watershed. The year marked the docking of SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury and the disembarkation of 492 Caribbean subjects on the not-so-welcoming shores of the mother country, forever changing that nation's singular sense of itself. As well, 1948 witnessed the momentous aftermath of Indian independence and partition -- the imperial map coming apart at the seams. One particularly successful aspect of the novel is Levy's ability to reflect upon this larger picture while paying close attention to the intricacies of her characters' quotidian experiences with a wry and penetrating humor. The idea of smallness in the title thus speaks to the complicated ways in which the world begins to contract for all concerned. "Small island" is a playful, belittling aspersion Jamaicans like to cast upon their smaller West Indian neighbors. Yet when Gilbert returns home after his duty abroad, his horizons perceptibly broadened, he discovers with alarm that the "island of Jamaica was no universe." Similarly, Bernard's tragicomic arrival back in London prompts his curmudgeonly surprise that "England had shrunk. It was smaller than the place I'd left." His vehement distaste for the presence of "darkies" in his house further heightens the provincialism and vulgar racisms that we've seen as Gilbert and Hortense -- for all their cosmopolitan aspirations, middle-class sensibilities, and colonial learning -- struggle against the daily inequities of institutionalized discrimination. Small Island's temporal dynamics and the artfully choreographed connections among the various first-person voices propel the reader forward through differing perspectives and revelations. One possible flaw is that the novel turns on a huge coincidence, which some readers may find too forced, too sentimentally contrived. Granted, this is a well-worn device with its near-Dickensian reliance on the mechanics of plot, but how better, perhaps, to imagine and unpack the complex interlocutions of a wide world writ small? Reviewed by Louise Bernard Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Levy, the child of parents who sailed from the Caribbean in the first wave of postwar immigration, fictionalizes the immigrant experience in her fourth novel. Relying on memoirs and oral histories, she describes in heartwrenching detail the lives of four individuals in 1948 England. Her plain, humorous style underscores the gravity and immediacy of her themes. She pens deep, convincing characters-Queenie speaks like a true Londoner; Bernard sounds like he served in India. The couples’ interactions are often predictable-Levy “manoeuvred her characters into the right place at the right time”-and the range of viewpoints sometimes disorients. Yet, these flaws barely diminish the power of this frank representation of the racism and disappointment of the era. “This is,” The Guardian concludes, “Andrea Levy’s big book.” Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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ISBNs Associated with this Title:
	0755307496 1417685891 : Glued Binding 0312424671 : Paperback

Playing for Pizza

Grisham takes fictional Browns QB to Italy
Thursday, October 25, 2007 4:12 AM
By Gary Budzak
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

(Doubleday, $21.95) by John Grisham
Former Cleveland Browns quarterbacks Charlie Frye and Rick Dockery can relate: One bad game, and the Browns say bye-bye.
Frye was the Browns' starter going into this season, but a bad first half in a loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers got him dealt to the Seattle Seahawks days later. Dockery was mopping up in the American Football Conference championship game against the Denver Broncos and somehow gave the game away. Next stop for Dockery: the Parma Panthers -- in Italy, not Ohio.
Frye is real, of course, and Dockery is a figment of John Grisham's imagination. He stars in the latest Grisham novel, Playing for Pizza -- a departure from the author's usual legal thrillers.
Dockery's sudden departure echoes that of Frye. Had the Browns management read Grisham's galleys?
Dockery, a journeyman player, played so badly that he needs not only a job but a way out of town for his safety -- not to mention a paternity issue. His agent suggests Italy, where at least Dockery would still be able to play football.
The Italians play the American form of the game,
although their best teams probably couldn't beat Mount Union College. Each team is allowed three American ringers, and Dockery is wanted despite his bungling against the Broncos.
Dockery's new coach is American, but his teammates are mostly Italian. A running back called Franco (after Steelers great Franco Harris) shows Dockery highlights of his running. Dockery asks whether the film is in slow motion.
In addition to assimilating with the Panthers, fish-out-of-water Dockery also has to adjust to Italian culture: driving a stick-shift car, parking in tiny spots and pacing himself during multicourse dinners. Can an American jock learn to appreciate real Parmesan cheese, Italian opera and the architecture and history of castles and cathedrals? Will he end his one-night stands and find a mate? And will he finally be a game winner?
Grisham hung out with and used the real Parma Panthers to legitimize and add passion to his page turner. Readers care about Dockery and root for him and the Panthers. If only Charlie Frye could have similar luck with the Seahawks.
Among the penalties, however, is a plotline that sends a Cleveland sportswriter to cover Dockery's games in Italy. In these crunch times for newspapers, a freelancer in Italy would e-mail a story to the paper,
if the paper bothered covering it at all.
But that minor complaint isn't enough to keep the highly readable story out of the end zone.
gbudzak@dispatch.com