The Yiddish Policemen's Union

“Unlike Landsman, Berko Shemets has not made a mess of his marriage or his personal life. Every night he sleeps in the arms of his excellent wife, whose love for him is merited, requited, and appreciated by her husband, a steadfast man who never gives her any cause for sorrow or alarm.”

Berko functions as a foil for Landsman, as demonstrated in this passage, which speaks to the contrast between them. Berko’s steadiness contrasts with Landsman’s chaos, establishing a deep-seated opposition between the two detectives. Berko’s domestic stability and reciprocated love highlight the voids in Landman’s life.

“But in the service of his own small misery, Landsman could be stubborn, too. Satisfied, burning with shame, he would watch unfold the grim destiny that he had been unable to foresee. And Landsman’s father would demolish him, flay him, vivisect him, gazing at his son all the while from behind the sagging porch of his face.”

Landsman’s backstory is shaped by his difficult relationship with his father. This passage demonstrates how Landsman built his stubbornness in the face of his father’s brutal tutelage of the game of chess. The violent metaphors—“flay him, vivisect him”—reveal how deeply Landsman internalizes shame under his father’s stern gaze. Landsman’s mix of pride and shame influences his behavior in adult life, allowing him to approach any challenge with grit, even if the odds are greatly against him.

“Now Ber Shemets, as he came in time to style himself, lives like a Jew, wears a skullcap and four-corner like a Jew. He reasons as a Jew, worships as a Jew, fathers and loves his wife and serves the public as a Jew…But to look at, he’s pure Tlingit.”

Because he was raised and lives in Jewish Sitka, Berko drapes himself with the garments to signal that he is as Jewish as anyone else in the district. The repetitive parallel clauses, “like a Jew” and “as a Jew,” underscore the performative nature of his belonging. However, his identity-signaling is undermined by his physical appearance, which betrays the aspect of his identity that he has worked to suppress. The juxtaposition highlights Berko’s alienation.

“‘If it was anything else, Berko,’ Landsman says, apologizing with upturned palms. ‘A deck of cards. A crossword puzzle. A bingo card. […] It had to be an unfinished goddamned game of chess.’”

Landsman cites Mendel’s fixation with chess as the reason he is emotionally motivated to solve Mendel’s murder. Landsman underscores the specificity of chess by listing alternatives, insinuating that there is something fortuitous about his intersection with Mendel. Because chess plays such a key role in his backstory, Landsman believes that he can find emotional closure for his relationship with his father by finding justice for Mendel.

“What difference will it make if he catches the killer? A year from now, Jews will be Africans, and this old ballroom will be filled with tea-dancing gentiles, and every case that ever was opened or closed by a Sitka policeman will have been filed in cabinet nine.”

The threat of Reversion drives a sense of futility in Landsman’s efforts. Landsman knows that all his attempts to bring justice to Sitka will ultimately be neutered by the dissolution of the district. The rhetorical question that opens the passage highlights this futility, while the darkly comic image of “tea-dancing gentiles” juxtaposes catastrophe with banality. This also underscores the trivialization of their impending exile by outsiders.

“The boundary maven’s faith in faithlessness had been shaken by simple question—How is she?—by a dozen words of blessing, by a simple bishop move that seemed to imply chess beyond the chess that Zimbalist knew.”

This passage represents Zimbalist’s conclusion that Mendel Shpilman, being in possession of miraculous powers, may be the Tzaddik Ha-Dor. Chabon draws some irony from the fact that Zimbalist is making his conclusion on the basis of a mundane question. With his ordinary gesture of care, Mendel demonstrates that he is more extraordinary that Zimbalist can fathom.

“Miracles are a burden for tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.”

Heskel downplays the magnificence of his son by highlighting the burden that falls on the Tzaddik Ha-Dor’s shoulders. This passage also marks the irony of Mendel and Heskel’s relationship, as it proves that Heskel understood the pressure that he was placing on Mendel with his expectations. Nevertheless, Heskel chose to prioritize the opportunity that fathering the Messiah would give him over the comfort of his son.

“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 cow hide 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. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.”

Landsman looks to Bina’s bag as a fundamental symbol for her agile character, which deeply resonates with her identity as Jewish. The cartoonish capaciousness of Bina’s bag symbolizes her ability to adapt to the uncertainty of her time, which is why Landsman feels confident that she can even endure the threat of Reversion. He transposes this aspect of her character against the history of Jewish people to emphasize how essential this resourcefulness is to the challenges of being Jewish.

“Set aside whatever general objections I might have worked up over the years to the underlying concept of homicide. Forget about right and wrong, law and order, police procedure, departmental policy, Reversion, Jews and Indians. This dump is my house. For the next two months, or however long it turns out to be, I live here. All these hard-lucks paying rent on a pull-down bed and a sheet of steel bolted to the bathroom wall, for better or worse, they’re my people now.”

Landsman asserts his commitment to the Mendel Shpilman case by asserting his empathy for Mendel as his former neighbor. Landsman’s argument hinges on the fact that they were both residents of the same rundown hotel, which he calls his “house,” grounding solidarity in their shared difficulties. By stressing the need to stand by his people, Landsman turns the Hotel Zamenhof into a metaphor for Sitka itself, suggesting that to seek justice for Mendel would bring a sense of redemption to his own life.

“Isidor Landsman, he knows, would have loved to father a son as gifted as Mendel. Landsman can’t help thinking that if he had been able to play chess like Mendel Shpilman, maybe his father would have felt he had something to live for, a small messiah to redeem him. Landsman thinks of the letter that he sent his father, hoping to gain his freedom from the burden of that life and those expectations. He considers the years he spent believing that he caused Isidor Landsman a fatal grief. How much guilt did Mendel Shpilman feel? Had he believed what was said of him, in his gift or wild calling? In the attempt to free himself from that burden, did Mendel feel that he must turn his back not only on his father but on all the Jews in the world?”

Landsman sees Mendel as the type of son his father would have loved, which speaks to his reliance on his father’s opinion of him. The truth of Mendel’s life allows Landsman to find a new point of comparison between them: They both experienced severe guilt for their inability to live up to their fathers’ expectations, which they desperately hoped to resign.

“Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.”

Chabon uses this aphorism to expose the contradiction of Sitka’s residents’ relationship with the supposed Tzaddik Ha-Dor. Mendel brought about the possibility of their redemption by encouraging them to find blessings in their inner lives. The line universalizes the community’s rejection of Mendel, framing it as inevitable.

“Mendel’s flight was not a refusal to surrender; it was a surrender. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor was tendering his resignation. He could not be what that world and its Jews, in the rain with their heartaches and their umbrellas, wanted him to be, what his mother and father wanted him to be.”

The irony of Mendel’s life stems from the fact that he is widely expected to bring about the settlement of the Jewish diaspora in a permanent homeland. Because he cannot grant this to his parents and his wider community, Mendel is forced to flee, turning him into a refugee from his own people. The image of him fleeing “in the rain with their heartaches and their umbrellas” grounds messianic expectations in mundane details that reflect the demands of others that he found untenable.

“‘It’s not much,’ Landsman says, rain pattering the brim of his hat. ‘But it’s home.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Batsheva Shpilman says. ‘But I’m sure it makes it easier for you to think so.’”

This passage contrasts Landman’s claim that Sitka is “home” with Batsheva’s sharp denial. It represents the fundamental debate that Sitka and the threat of Reversion pose: Either the Sitka Jews satisfy themselves with the home that they find themselves in, or they place their hope in the promise of a permanent homeland. Landsman looks to the Zamenhof as a representation of Sitka because it is the only home he has ever known, even in its decrepit state. Batsheva, on the other hand, tries to disabuse Landsman of this notion, arguing that the perception of Sitka as home merely distracts him from the longing for a better home. This is why she tells him that considering Sitka home is “easier” for him.

“He wishes there weren’t a corner missing from his membership card in the Sitka chapter of the Hands of Esau, the international fraternal organization of Jewish police men. It has a six-point shield in one corner. Its text is printed in Yiddish. It carries no authority or weight, not even with Landsman, a member in good standing for twenty years.”

The novel’s title is referenced in this passage, which describes the card that Landsman uses to feign police authority to the pie shop owners in Yakovy. While this reinforces the futility of his effort in the investigation, it also underscores Landsman’s willingness to seek justice despite the loss of his official authority. The novel effectively becomes a personal quest to seek justice, rather than a procedural execution of the law.

“Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket. All right. Then a lot of wasted years… Then one day some men dig him up and dust him off and take him away to Peril Strait. A place with a doctor, a facility built through the generosity of the Barrys and the Marvins and the Susies of Jewish America, where they can clean him up, patch him together. Why? Because they need him. Because they intend to restore him to practical use.”

The metaphorical “straitjacket” recasts Mendel’s messianic role as imprisonment. This passage encapsulates Mendel’s role in Litvak’s conspiracy while also driving the theme of Using Sacred Tradition to Justify Violence. The phrase “practical use” epitomizes this theme as it suggests that the position of Tzaddik Ha-Dor is important to Mendel’s benefactors only if he can serve a greater agenda. To them, a messiah is a means to an end, and they commodify him for their politics.

“‘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—’

‘It has nothing to do with religion,’ Berko says. ‘It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers.’”

Berko’s embrace of his Jewish heritage has always been his way of honoring Hertz as his only surviving parent. When Berko learns that Hertz played a role in his mother’s death, he resents the fact that he tried so long to please his father by affirming his Jewish identity. By seeking his father’s validation, Berko has unwittingly contributed to the suppression of Tlingit culture in Sitka, dishonoring his mother’s memory. There is irony and humor in his curse—“God damn it”—when he is discussing religion, which highlights his frustration with Hertz and his impact on Berko’s religious choices.

“You are a soldier for hire. You enjoy the challenge and the responsibility of generalship. I understand that. I do. You like to fight, and you like killing, as long as those who die aren’t your men. And, I dare say, after all these years with Shemets—and now, on your own behalf—you are long in the habit of appearing to please the Americans.”

This passage explicates Litvak’s motivations for carrying out the conspiracy to wage war in Jerusalem. Litvak is motivated by the promise of access to military authority, which is a step up from the demolition work he used to do for Hertz. The phrase “You like to fight, and you like killing” shows that he sees violence as a way to make meaning. The rest of the chapter implies, however, that this is a coping mechanism for the death of his wife, which he refuses to confront in a healthy way. Because he does not believe in divine providence, the possession of power helps him to regain a sense of control in a world that he sees as meaningless.

“Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millennia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game—the survival of the Jews.”

The contrast between “fruit of divine wishes” and expensive biotechnology exposes the fabrication of prophecy. This passage elaborates on Litvak’s motivations. To execute his plan, Litvak believes it is necessary to construct a fantasy that resembles Jewish prophetic tradition. Chabon emphasizes this by directly contrasting the popular perception of Litvak’s operation to the reality of his efforts and intentions. These lines underscore the theme of Using Sacred Tradition to Justify Violence.

“I don’t care what is written. I don’t care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son’s throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don’t care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag.”

In this passage, Landsman echoes his motivations for investigating Mendel’s case, but he also affirms his loyalty to Sitka as his homeland. He juxtaposes ordinary realities—like his hat and Bina’s bag—against the grand promises of prophetic tradition to show how the former are more real and valuable to him than the latter. Similarly, he rejects the fantasy of a permanent homeland, instead favoring the reality of his accepted homeland.

“For the first time the traditional complaint, tantamount to a creed or at least a philosophy, of the Sitka Jew—Nobody gives a damn about us, stuck up here between Hoonah and Hotzeplotz—strikes Landsman as having been a blessing these past sixty years, and not the affliction they had all, in their backwater of geography and history, supposed.”

Chabon doubles down on Landsman’s preference for Sitka by framing its existence as a blessing, rather than a curse. Even if other residents felt forsaken by their banishment to a backwater land, Landsman feels lucky to call Sitka home. He sees abandonment as “a blessing” and their obscurity as their protection, which drives Reconciling Fate and Free Will as a theme.

“He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be.”

Landsman’s investigation has forced him to confront his “lack of faith” rather than his infidelity. The wordplay shifts the meaning of faith from relationship fidelity and religious faith to a kind of existential trust that everything “was meant to be.” This lack of faith is also the source of his guilt toward Bina since it clouded his judgment toward the marriage and their pregnancy. His failure to see his marriage as a blessing exacerbates his guilt as the novel reaches its resolution.

“The reason you never developed at chess, Meyerle, is because you don’t hate to lose badly enough.”

Hertz cites Landsman’s lack of competitiveness as a moral failing and the reason he never satisfied his father as a chess rival. However, Landsman’s tolerance for loss also inspired him to solve Mendel’s murder, suggesting that it is not the flaw Hertz makes it out to be. Landsman’s tolerance for emotional pain turns out to be one of his greatest strengths.

“Most of the time Bina has, good and caring woman that she is, offered Landsman the words he wanted to hear. He has prayed to her for rain, and she has sent cool showers. But what he really requires is a flood to wash his wickedness from the face of the earth. That or the blessing of a yid who will never bless anyone again.”

Landsman sees Bina as the sole person through whom he can seek redemption for his flawed character. He equates her to God in this sense, putting himself in the position of a supplicant who begs for her blessing, which she willingly gives. Since Landsman’s closest encounter with God has been through Mendel, he draws a parallel here between Mendel (the yid) and Bina.