The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Meyer Landsman is the novel’s protagonist. He is a homicide detective at Sitka Central Police Department who takes on the murder case of Mendel Shpilman when he sees that Mendel died while in the middle of a chess game. This circumstance resonates with Landsman, whose early life was shaped by his relationship to chess. Landsman’s backstory reveals his uneasy relationship with his father, Isidor, who survived the Holocaust, settled in Sitka, and taught Landsman to play chess. Just when Landsman built up the courage to write a letter to his father about how he didn’t enjoy the game, Isidor died by suicide, causing his son to believe that he had disappointed his father to the point of suicidal ideation. Isidor’s true motivations are ambiguous, but Landsman interprets them using the note Isidor left behind, which was a poetic ode to chess. Years later, Landsman realizes that the letter he sent his father didn’t reach him before his death. Isidor’s death thus remains a mystery, and Landsman sees echoes of it in Mendel’s death.

Landsman is a stereotypical hardboiled detective, akin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in