|
|
This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!
|
|
|
Navigate the Summary Parts:
Part 1: Beginning
Part 2: to Chap 6 - meet Berko
Part 3: to Chap 9 - bar hopping
Part 4: to Chap 11 - the black hats
Part 5: to Chap 16 - Verbov Island
Part 6: to Chap 22 - the shoot-out
to be continued ...
|
Summary of The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
Go to the latest installment
Summary from the Book Jacket: "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 fledging state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. 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, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.
But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worry about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life -- and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder -- right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediate., Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage -- and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears."
Characters:
- Baronshteyn, Aryeh - the lawyer, advisor, and son-in-law to the rebbe of Verbov Island
- Benito Tagenes - the Filipino donut king, friend and informer to Landsman
- Berko Shemets – 39 year-old partner/cousin to Landsman, half-Tlingit half-Jewish
- Bina Gelbfish – 42 year-old ex-wife to Landsman, now his supervisor
- The black hats – the Hasidic (Orthodox) Jews
- Brennan, Dennis – an aging has-been reporter who once wrote an expose on Hertz Shemets.
- Buchbinder - crazy dentist and religious fanatic
- Django – unborn son of Landsman and Bina whom Landsman convinced her to abort; this act ended their marriage
- Ester-Malke Taytsh – Berko's wife
- Gelbfish, Bina – see Bina
- Landsman, Isidor – Landsman's dead father, a chess champ who killed himself
- Landsman, Meyer – 44 year-old protagonist, 20 year veteran of the Sitka police force.
- Landsman, Naomi – Landsman's sister, a pilot who died recently in a flying accident
- Lasker, Emanuel – murder victim at the beginning of the book
- Shemets, Berko – see Berko
- Shemets, Hertz – Landsman's uncle and Berko's dad, a spymaster now in disgraced retirement.
- Shpilman, Heskel – the tenth and current rebbe of Verbov Island
- Shpilman, Mendel – 38 years old, only son of the rebbe, chess prodigy and potential Messiah (Tzaddik Ha-Dor)
- Taganes, Benito - see Benito Teganes
- Taytsh, Ester-Malke – see Ester-Malke Taytsh
- Zimbalist, Itzik – the "boundary maven" who determines the eruv (the symbolic boundary that extends the area in which Orthodox Jews can carry certain items on the Sabbath) on Verbov Island. Considered an outsider, but a powerful outsider, by the black hats.
Setting: Late October 2007 in an alternate-history timeline in Sitka, Alaska. After the Second World War, the attempt to colonize Palestine failed, and the Federal District of Sitka was created within Alaska to be the temporary homeland of the world's Jews. Since then, sixty years passed. The Federal District of Sitka has turned into a thriving Jewish community with an Eastern-European flavor where Yiddish is the native language and American-English is used rarely and mainly for swearing. Now, in nine weeks, on 1 January 2008, time runs out on the lease. The Reversion will dissolve the Federal District of Sitka and return the land to the state of Alaska. Due to restrictive immigration quotas everywhere, the Jews could potentially have nowhere to go. The lucky ones with relatives in other countries to sponsor them are all trying to immigrate.
Pages 1 – 25:
(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Chapter 1. Meyer Landsman, a washed-up alcoholic detective living at the crummy Hotel Zamenhof, gets notified by the hotel night manager that someone has murdered the guy in room 208. The night manager Tenenboym is a former U.S. Marine who was a heroin addict in the sixties after the Cuban war. The two men go investigate the crime scene. The dead guy Emanuel Lasker was shot in the head by a gunman using a pillow to muffle the gunshot noise.
Though they're both off-duty, Landsman calls his partner Berko. Then he apologizes, says he'll handle the preliminary stuff tonight on his own, and then calls the dispatcher to make himself the primary on the case. Thinking about the upcoming Reversion (where the Federal District of Sitka gets dissolved back into Alaska), he reflects that these are strange times to be a Jew.
Chapter 2. Landsman goes up to investigate the roof, and then must conquer his claustrophobia to check out the basement. He can't quite manage the crawl space, so he skips it. Chapter 3. He returns to the street to wait for the uniformed cops. He thinks about the reason for his failed marriage: his ex-wife Bina got pregnant with a baby boy they'd decided to name Django. But Landsman, ambivalent about being a dad, convinced her to have an abortion after they got a test result that indicated that the boy could be born with abnormalities. Subsequent guilt paved the way for their divorce.
Meanwhile a homeless old guy known as the Prophet Elijah comes up to chat. He carries a donation box for the almost unattainable cause of colonizing Israel (Palestine). Landsman puts in a twenty, but when Elijah mentions the coming of the Messiah and Landsman jokes about it, the old guy gets offended, returns the twenty, and departs.
Chapter 4. The forensics guy Shpringer show up. He and Landsman return to the crime scene and find three important things: the dead guy played serious chess, used heroin, and owned a tefillin – a prayer strap that marks him as a "black hat" or Orthodox Jew. The morgue workers show up to haul off the dead guy. Landsman thinks about how much he hates the game of chess, and he misses his sister Naomi, a pilot who flew her Super Cub into a mountainside last April. He also misses his ex-wife Bina.
Go to the next part of the Synopsis for The Yiddish Policemen's Union
See the review for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
Go to the Index of Chapter-by-Chapter Summaries
Index of All Short Summaries
Go to the Current Novel on Twenty-Pages-a-Day!
|
|
Buy on Amazon: