{"id":10634,"date":"2007-10-03T10:10:54","date_gmt":"2007-10-03T14:10:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/03\/10634.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:59","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:59","slug":"book-report-the-yiddish-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/03\/book-report-the-yiddish-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger’s previous experience with Michael Chabon’s books was not entirely positive. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay<\/a> didn’t live up to its wonderful first third, and The Final Solution<\/a> did nothing for me whatsoever. So when I started The Yiddish Policemen’s Union<\/a>, I was prepared to be disappointed. When it started out well, I acknowledged that it started out well, but fully expected the quality to decline precipitously. When the language was vastly enjoyable, I enjoyed it vastly, but warily.\n

And when, inevitably, the last third of the book let me down from the heights of the first third and the middle third, rather than being disappointed, Your Humble Blogger was relieved that it wasn’t worse. And, in fact, it only declines from excellent (perhaps great) to pretty good, which is much better than going from good to lousy. Depending on how much you hate red-heifer talk. Usually, the moment a red heifer comes into it, I fling the book across the room. Not so bad, this time, and (for those who do fling it across the room at the first reddish cow) although it does signal the deterioration of the plot, the book itself holds up, despite.\n

I do wonder, however, what it is like to read the book as a non-Jew. Is it harder to place yourself into Mr. Chabon’s long dark Sitka of the soul? Is the sense of the uncanny derived from my recognition of the rhythms of Yiddish?\n

Mr. Chabon, by the way, struggles with and succeeds against one of the problems of speculative fiction as well as some other kinds of fiction: the book is written and read in English, but is conceptually in another language, one which neither the author nor the reader know well enough to make the book actually in that language. In this case it’s Yiddish, but it’s often enough Galactic Standard, or Russian, or R’peuphid. The characters occasionally use English, and that is indicated in the (actually English, but conceptually Yiddish) text around it. The reader has to do a kind of pseudo-translation, reading as if you were translating, or as if you were suddenly become fluent in that other language. Only, of course, there is no other language, there’s just the English text. It’s an awkward thing, and must be a major annoyance for a writer (just as it is often a major annoyance for YHB), but Mr. Chabon succeeds at it. In my opinion. But is that due to my familiarity with Yiddish (tho’ I’m far from fluent—I know enough German and enough Hebrew and listen to enough Klezmer that although I can’t actually understand<\/I> what’s being said, I can follow<\/I> it, if you see what I mean), and would somebody who had never heard a Yiddish curse have the same opinion? I don’t know.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n

\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger’s previous experience with Michael Chabon’s books was not entirely positive. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay didn’t live up to its wonderful first third, and The Final Solution did nothing for me whatsoever. So when I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16210,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10634\/revisions\/16210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}