The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Two reviews of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union over at The Guardian. In the first Jenny Diski, describing the novel as "ecstatically smart and sassy" writes
Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. (...) Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it.
In the second review, Adam Mars-Jones finds the book "a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart."
The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It's an unwritten rule of the genre (well, it's written now) that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence.(...) Readers can't hope to be absorbed into the delicious texture of the writing if they're subconsciously waiting for another counterfactual shoe to drop.
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