Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  The subversion of the detective function seems to shake the very foundations of the genre in the novel; it has been suggested that The Final Solution can be perceived as a testimony of the genre’s demise within the reality of a chaotic world, “an elegy for the detective story, a mournful reflection on the loss of the rational and moral order of the world, which is a necessary precondition of the genre” (Craps and Buelens 572). The moral depravity and senselessness that this particular historical period confronts the reader with is of course a reference to the Holocaust.

  Europe during World War II presents another generic subversion—the abstraction of the gothic villain. While Doyle always resorted to an individual gothic villain who functioned as Sherlock Holmes’s arch nemesis, such as Professor James Moriarty, Chabon does not; his individual villains are victims of circumstances and are in no way a match for the old man, nor do they express any animosity toward the aging detective, which could potentially turn them into archrivals. The only implicit villain in The Final Solution, whose values are in stark contrast to those of the old man, is the entire Nazi regime.

  In addition, some maintain that Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s faithful companion, is replaced in The Final Solution by Thomas Panicker, the village’s vicar and the old man’s driver (Craps and Buelens 574). However, the old man’s emotionally and intellectually inferior partner is in fact the mute Jewish boy named Linus Steinman. The boy’s “voice” is represented and evoked by his companion, a parrot named Bruno that keeps repeating a mysterious sequence of German numbers. Yet this intellectual inferiority is complicated due to the fact that Linus is suffering from some kind of posttraumatic disorder, which has hindered his communicational skills:

  “Well, he has the strange trait, of course, of reversing his words. Mirror writing. Apparently, according to the doctors, it’s related in some way to his inability to speak. Some sort of trauma, no doubt.” (Final 109)

  Ironically enough, the very last sentences of the novella reveal the boy’s voice; he is emancipated from his muteness and at the same time imprisoned by the Holocaust, represented by the series of German numbers that have been “passed down” from Bruno the parrot, his surrogate voice—“‘Sieben zwei eins vier drei,’ the boy whispered, with the slightest hint of a lisp. ‘Sieben acht vier vier fünf ’” (Final 131).

  As far as the old man is concerned, the kidnapping of Bruno is a much more compelling puzzle than the murder case, perhaps due to the parrot’s symbolic value as the “voice” of the muted European Jewry—“To find the boy’s parrot. . . . If we should encounter the actual murderer along the way, well, then it will be so much the better for you” (Final 28, emphasis in original). When Bruno the parrot is personified throughout several passages, which depict his struggle with his capturer, he is endowed with more than just memory and verbal capacities but rather possesses a form of consciousness; Bruno is able to process events, place judgment, and react accordingly:

  Kalb . . . then turned to Bruno, his arms outspread, as if asking for assistance. But Bruno felt no inclination to help him. . . . He determined to inform Kalb that he would not help him. Even if somehow he could have done so, even if he understood what danger it was that now approached. (Final 118)

  In fact, it seems that the entire mystery is depicted from a bird’s-eye view as detached, aloof, and ultimately futile acts of detection unfold throughout the plot. Therefore, the focalizations of Bruno the parrot transcend their status as mere narrative anomalies and become emblematic of the entire mystery, in which anything is possible but nothing falls into place. It is hardly accidental that Bruno’s reiteration of the German numbers is the only mystery that the old man cannot solve; it is Chabon’s symbolic gesture which endows a nonhuman voice with the key to the mystery and at the same time denies the only Jewish character from having a voice.

  Detecting the Gaps: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

  In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s generic mix of alternative history and detective fiction essentially transforms a murder investigation into a powerful metaphor about the violent nature of exile. Many of the conventions of the hard-boiled detective genre are employed in this novel, such as the alcoholic detective who is the product of a tough urban surrounding and the lone wolf whose personal life is crumbling—“He picks up the shot glass that he is currently dating. . . . According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself” (Yiddish 2).

  However, it seems that Chabon utilizes these generic traits in order to draw a parallel between his protagonist and the Jewish fate. One of the most prominent examples is the fact that the recently divorced Detective Landsman is living in a shabby hotel, a transitory residence that offers him no emotional or financial security, which is analogous to the fragile state of the Jewish autonomy in Sitka.

  The novel begins with an ironic statement that places Landsman in stark contradiction to his namesake; he is, for all intents and purposes, a man without a home—“Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered” (1). The symbolic meaning of Landsman’s nine-month period of homelessness also contributes to the thematic structure of the analogy; Landsman is a born-again loner who is constantly trying to suppress his misery through a mixture of workaholic and alcoholic tendencies, just as the Jewish autonomy in Sitka is struggling with the new possibility of its annihilation—“Nothing is clear about the upcoming Reversion, and that is why these are strange times to be a Jew” (7).

  The latter phrase is repeated throughout the narrative by various characters, granting it an ironic tone; the reader is faced with the inevitable conclusion that the present tense of the axiom is subverted by past events that haunt the narrative (most notably the Holocaust) and the intangible future that will follow the Reversion. In addition, the Jewish settlement of Sitka is threatened by the cultural perils of assimilation with the neighboring Tlingit population, as well as the hovering danger of losing their sovereignty to the United States. These parallels raise the inevitable comparison between murder and exile in relation to Jewish identity and become the existential case that the novel attempts to solve.

  The novel certainly flirts with the possibility of failure—Landsman’s failed marriage and the Reversion as a national failure to secure a Jewish homeland are the most prominent ones—by evoking the generic traits of the hard-boiled detective fiction, which inevitably create “a dystopia, or at least a saga of failure and ambivalence” (Kravitz 99). Other notable failures seem to collide and morph into the monumental impossibility of being a Zionist, or in other words, being a Jew in possession of the Holy Land:

  Naomi’s flying, Shpilman’s messianic tendencies, a search for a homeland, and Landsman’s desire to detect and live a meaningful life, all seem reduced to the same impossibility that a salmon discovers while swimming upstream, attempting to fulfill the role of an “aquatic Zionist.” (Kravitz 107–8)

  At the conclusion of the novel, it is clear that these failures are first and foremost symbolic; everything is falling apart in order to shed light on the minuscule redemptions that Landsman is able to procure—the messiah isn’t coming but his murder case has been solved, the Reversion hasn’t been aborted but Landsman finds his true home with Bina, his ex-wife.

  Jewish Caseload: Metaphorical Mysteries

  Both narratives use the paradigm of detective fiction in order to solve a localized case, which then becomes emblematic of the Jewish condition. The muted helpless boy in The Final Solution is emblematic of the Jewish fate during the Holocaust, and the murdered chess prodigy thought to be the messiah of his generation in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union represents the despair of Alaska’s Jewry as they face the prospect of exile.

  Yet both detectives essentially fail to solve the “bigger” mystery—the old man solves the murder case of the British intelligence officer and finds the missing parrot but is unable to decipher the meaning of the German numbers, and
Landsman solves the murder case but fails to stop the Evangelical-Zionist scheme to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to enable the appearance of the messiah on Mount Temple, or the ominous process of Reversion. These failures seem to indicate that the detective story within both narratives should be treated as an elaborate metaphor, and as such, their sole value is in the illustration of the Jewish “case” rather than the resolution of the particular case which the detectives are asked to solve.

  These failures also constitute a generic subversion of the detective story because both narratives do not follow the pattern that was established by Edgar Allan Poe—providing an array of possible solutions from which one solution is proven to be right:

  The detective story must be developed in such a manner that there are many tempting and possible solutions placed before the reader which are eventually proven false, and a highly improbable solution revealed at the conclusion which is proven correct. (Kushigian 28)

  The Final Solution follows this pattern as several possibilities are attributed to the German numbers, but it eventually subverts this convention when the solution is not delivered by the detective. One of the leading possibilities of the sequence is a German naval cipher, which also has an “intertextual link to ‘His Last Bow’ . . . what Holmes is purporting to deliver to the German spy in Conan Doyle’s story is, precisely, the ‘naval signals’: ‘semaphore, lamp code, Marconi’” (Craps and Buelens 571).

  Another possibility is that the sequence is in fact a number of a Swiss bank account owned by Linus’s father, but this possibility is also revealed to be false when the solution is presented to the reader and “it turns out that the numbers recited by the parrot are the numbers on the boxcars in which Linus’s parents were carried off to their deaths as part of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’”(Craps and Buelens 571). When it is revealed that the solution of the mystery in tied up with Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the original meaning of the numbers loses its importance and they become a form of testimony, an eyewitness account of the atrocities. Furthermore, since the solution is offered only to the reader, he or she is placed with the burden of uncovering the symbolic meaning of the numbers, a task that could not be completed by the detective.

  In the case of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, no alternative solutions are offered throughout the plot, nor does the narrative resolve the great mysteries that befuddle the detective, whether it is the zealous plot to hasten the coming of the messiah or the prevention of Sitka’s Reversion to the United States. All that remains is to treat them as symbolic failures in relation to Jewish identity; the failure to acknowledge imminent danger, the failure in religious deliverance, and the failure to prevent exile.

  However, the detective genre is also a suitable frame to depict such failures, since its generic conventions are founded on the acts of masking and unveiling:

  Detective fiction is characterized by the instability of the sign: within the world of the hard-boiled detective, nothing is as it seems. It is therefore unsurprising, perhaps, that this narrative frame has proved a popular choice for contemporary authors in their exploration of the issues arising from the legacy of the Nazis. (Richardson 165)

  Indeed, the thematic significance of failure within the specific context of each text produces eerily similar results—there is no grand-scale redemption; the fate of the Jews remains uncertain. At the same time, the Jewish protagonist, the individual, manages to momentarily escape the existential plight of his people; it is a brief and symbolic victory and a very personal one.

  In the last passage of The Final Solution, Linus recovers his voice and faintly utters the sequence of German numbers, essentially imitating Bruno the parrot, whose repetitive muttering of the sequence litters the text. In the last passage of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Landsman is finally free from the burden of nationalities and gains a metaphysical home bounded by love and language, as Bina’s husband and as a Yiddish policeman:

  But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue. (Yiddish 411)

  In fact, while the two texts deal with the hazardous existence of the Jewish people and the Holocaust is featured as the backdrop of The Final Solution and as the catalyst for the creation of the Jewish autonomy of Sitka in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it is the personal struggles of the characters that shed light on what it means to be a Jew. It seems that for Chabon, the plight of the collective is often analogous to the predicament of the individual, whether it is the fragility of the mute Jewish boy, the cognitive downfall of the old man, or Landsman’s existential loneliness. However, Chabon’s protagonists have a chance for small-scale redemption, while their communities face the inevitability of their demise.

  The Lone Jew: Poe of the Holocaust and the Yiddish Chandler

  While The Final Solution is best characterized by the demise of the detective’s cognitive abilities, subverting Poe’s archetype that “places the mind in the forefront and thus gives the detective a Raison d’être” (Moore 21), The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is written in the image of its protagonist—the pessimistic, cynical, and depressed detective who is a unique mixture of hard-boiled Chandlerian traits and Jewish clichés—“Landsman is a tough guy, in his way, given to the taking of wild chances. He has been called hard-boiled and foolhardy, a momzer, a crazy son of a bitch” (Yiddish 10).

  Much like Sitka, Landsman is a body of contradictions, especially concerning his Jewish identity; he is an atheist—“To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery” (Yiddish 130)—but at the same time completely in awe of Jews who seem to embody the determination of his tribe, as depicted in the Old Testament:

  You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. (Yiddish 155)

  In addition, Chabon casually mentions a “Yiddish translation of Chandler” (Yiddish 305) that Landsman comes across in his uncle’s house, Hertz Shemets, but there is nothing casual about it; this fusion of hard-boiled detective story and the language of Jewish immigrants is emblematic of the entire plot. Landsman is essentially an attempt to create a Yiddish Philip Marlowe, an attempt that ultimately does not succeed since Landsman’s true redemption does not pertain to his career as a detective or his ability to solve yet another murder case but rather through his reconciliation with Bina, his former wife. Philip Marlowe’s love life, on the other hand, is often described as ambiguous; his romantic affairs are often fleeting and do nothing to suspend his loneliness (Brunsdale 526–27).

  The Crying Cowboy: Hard-Boiled American Masculinity

  In its American context, Landsman’s particular strain of masculinity is influenced by the depiction of the male protagonist in twentieth-century literature, most notably by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner (Roth 81). The broken-down masculinity that is so evident in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is in fact a precursor of the genre, which has been borrowed from mainstream fiction:

  Behind the dead eyes and the tight voice of the hard-boiled detective is self-disgust and rage; behind these, tears; and behind this, tenderness and a desire to trust. It is a model of abused innocence, a familiar version of maleness in so much twentieth-century literature. (Roth 86)

  Landsman is deeply saddened by the collapse of his marriage, not only due to the loss of love but rather due to the identity crisis it creates. It is often remarked throughout The Yiddish Policemen’s Union that Landsman’s
sense of identity is not cultural or national but rather stems from his sense of belonging with Bina, a woman he spent most of his adult life with and who is also an old-school Jew.

  Such a male protagonist is absent from The Final Solution; both the boy and the old man represent different stages of male frailty, neither of which corresponds with the hard-boiled masculinity of the detective genre. Linus is the helpless boy who has escaped the atrocities of the Nazi regime, and the old man is a retired detective who exhibits first signs of dementia; both differ from the tough image of a man in his prime, isolated by his personality and profession to the extent of immersing himself in alcohol and his fledging detective career, as is the case with Landsman:

  Landsman relies on three techniques. One is work, but work is now officially a joke. One is alcohol, which makes the drop come faster and go deeper and last longer but helps him not to care. The third is to have a bite. (Yiddish 146–47)

  Another interesting commentary on masculinity in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union has to do with problematic father-son relationships; both Landsman and Berko, his partner and cousin, grew up alongside a flawed father figure and both carry some resentment toward their absent fathers. Such is the estranged relationship between Berko and his father Hertz Shemets:

  “Every damn day of my life, I get up in the morning and put this shit on and pretend to be something I’m not. Something I’ll never be. For you.”

  “I never asked you to observe the religion,” the old man says, not looking up. “I don’t think I ever put any kind of—”