This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

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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
Pages 26 – 51:

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(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Chapter 5 dips into the back-story of Landsman's father Isidor Landsman and his uncle Hertz Shemets. Isidor and Hertz were boyhood friends and chess players back in Lodz, Poland.  Isidor was a prodigy with a mournful, agonized style of playing.  Hertz was a calm player with an unfailing eye for his opponent's weakness.  In 1940, Hertz and his mother and sister Freydl managed to immigrate to Alaska under the Alaska Settlement Act of 1940.  Hertz studied criminal justice at the Sitka Technical Institute and became a paralegal. 

Poor Isidor immigrated to Alaska in 1948, the only member of his family to survive the Nazi death camps.  Hertz took him in, and Isidor married Hertz's sister Freydl.  Hertz went to law school, and then joined the FBI. Eventually, he ended up running the FBI's regional counter-intelligence program. Freydl, mother of Landsman and Naomi, died of cancer when Landsman was in college. Before that, however, Isidor taught Landsman chess. All Isidor would do is hang out and play chess.  His mournful temperament and ruthless playing style taught Landsman to hate chess.

Finally Landsman, as a child, typed a letter to his father in which he confessed how much he hates chess, and mailed it to his father from a post office. Two days later, Isidor killed himself. Landsman developed psychological problems stemming from his guilt. Twenty-three years after his father's suicide, he then discovered the fateful letter unopened amongst his father's belongings. By the time the letter got delivered, his father had already committed suicide.

Chapter 6 opens with Landsman arriving at 630am at his partner's 24th-floor apartment.  Berko's wife Ester-Malke Taytsh lets him in.  She's clutching a pregnancy test that she hides in her pocket. Unlike Landsman's pathetic bachelor life, the Shemets-Taytsh household is characterized by a devoted marriage and two baby boys. Landsman remembers when Ester-Malke used to be a wild girl who ran with petty criminals.

He then has an extended memory of Berko, a huge guy who looks very Tlingit, coming to live in the Landsman household in 1981. Berko is the son of Hertz Shemets and a Tlingit woman Laurie Jo Bear.  Hertz, pursuing his lifelong interest in Tlingit artifacts, had a brief fling with Laurie Jo.  Consequently, their son Berko grew up tormented by the Tlingit for his mixed heritage until his mother got killed in the Synagogue Riots which resulted when the Jews fought back after the Tlingit bombed a synagogue built on contested land.

Young Berko sought out his father Hertz who immediately dumped Berko into the household of his widowed sister Freydl, Landsman's mom.  Berko has since embraced Judaism and Jewish culture fervently.

Now Berko emerges and they discuss last night's murder:  namely that Emanuel Lasker is also the name of a famous chess player from the 1920s.  Landsman shows Berko a book on chess found amongst the murder victim's belongings.  Ester-Malke interrupts to say she's pregnant, and Berko loses his temper, throwing the chess book at the wall. Landsman leaves and descends to his car. Berko joins him minutes later, already resigning himself to having another baby and needing to look for a bigger place to live.

Berko shows Landsman a photograph that fell out of the chess book: it shows the sign and front door of a café near the airport famous for its pie.  A clue? Landsman gets teary, remembering how his dead sister Naomi enjoyed eating coconut cream pie at that café.
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