Michael Chabon’s latest book The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was in the news recently over claims that it is Antisemitic.
The New York Post’s Page Six reported that the book “depicts Jews as constantly in conflict with one another, and its villains are a ruthless, ultra-Orthodox sect that resembles the Lubavitchers.” Which reminded me a little of my mum’s take on the Jewish community of Manchester, England, where she was born.
Nevermind, as Gawker points out, the book has received glowing reviews from both The Forward and the New York Sun, two newspapers that would be extremely quick to highlight any Antisemitism if indeed there were any to be found. Which makes you wonder where the Post got the idea that the book was Antisemitic?
By chance, I recently finished Chabon’s most well-known work, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a lengthy but highly enjoyable Pulitzer Prize winning story about a young Jew who flees Nazi-occupied Prague and joins his cousin in New York where they become famous comic book artists.
Chabon’s research and attention to detail alone are worthy of the prize. But I have to say that in all my years of reading, I have never come across a novel with so many unfamiliar words. At the risk of appearing ignorant, a few of the words I tripped over are italicized below:
“His habit of youthful stoicism kept him cool in the lachrymose embrace of his grandfather that morning at the Bahnhof.”
“…he would invariably finish, with a sweeping gesture that, in the dusk of a Brooklyn July, was limned by the luminous arc of his cigar.”
“It was very hard to see but from time to time a rogue current of air, or the vagaries of the invisible, wheezing, steam-producing, machinery, would produce a break in the cover, and he could see that they were indeed inside a grand space, ribbed with porcelain groins, set with white and blue faience that was cracked in places, sweating and yellowed with age.”
“The storefronts were narrow, clad in clapboard, their cornices a ragged mess of telephone wires and power lines overgrown with Virginia creeper. Tommy wanted to say something about all of this to cousin Joe. He wished he could tell him how the churned-up sidewalk, the hectoring crows on the bare Virginia creeper, and the irritable buzzing of Mr Spiegelman’s neon sign made him feel a kind of premonitory sadness for adult life, as if Bloomtown, with its swimming pools, jungle gyms, lawns and dazzling sidewalks, were the various and uniform sea of childhood itself, from which this senescent hunk of the village of Manticock protruded like a wayward dark island.”
Yup, “porcelain groins.” I love it!
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemens Union
I can only assume you are becoming senescent; I’ll have to buy you some faience pots to bash about or we’ll have a lachrymose display of emotion limned on the wall with your paint set. Or something.
What’s the difference between a wayward dark island and a normal dark island? Does one move less than the other? Are islands migratory? I know geese are but I thought islands generally stayed put?
Beau, I think a normal dark island is better behaved.
I loved that book, but thought the ending was a bit dissapointing. It’s so detailed and then kind of trails off.