Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's union

“Who the hell are you?” Landsman asked him as the kid stole sideways into the living room. Twisting a billed cap in his hands, taking everything in with his dark, all-consuming gaze. Hertz and Freydl were standing out on the front walk, screaming at each other. Apparently, Landsman’s uncle had neglected to mention to his sister that his son was coming to live at her house.

“My name is Johnny Bear,” Berko said. “I’m part of the Shemets Collection.”

Hertz Shemets remains a noted expert on Tlingit art and artifacts. At one time this hobby or pastime sent him wandering deeper and farther into the Indianer-Lands than any other Jew of his generation. So, yes, his study of Native culture and his trips into the Indianer-Lands were a beard for his COINTELPRO work during the sixties. But they were not only a beard. Hertz Shemets was drawn to the Indian way of life. He learned to gaff a seal with a steel hook, through the eye, and to slaughter and put up a bear, and to enjoy the flavor of candlefish grease as much as that of schmaltz. And he fathered a child on Miss Laurie Jo Bear of Hoonah. When she was killed during the so-called Synagogue Riots, her half-Jew son, an object of torment and scorn among the Raven Moiety, appealed for rescue to the father he barely knew. It was a zwischenzug, an unexpected move in the orderly unfolding of a game. It caught Uncle Hertz off guard.

“What are you going to do, turn him away?” he yelled at Landsman’s mother. “They’re making his life a living hell up there. His mother is dead. Murdered by Jews.”

In fact, eleven Native Alaskans were killed in the rioting that followed the bombing of a prayer house that a group of Jews had built on disputed land. There are pockets in these islands where the map drawn by Harold Ickes falters and gives way, dotted stretches of the Line. Most of them are too remote or mountainous to be inhabited, frozen or flooded year-round. But some of these crosshatched patches, choice and level and temperate, have proved irresistible over the years to the Jews in their millions. Jews want livable space. In the seventies some of them, mostly members of small Orthodox sects, began to take it.

The construction of a prayer house at St. Cyril by the splinter from a splinter of a sect from Lisianski was the final outrage for many Natives. It was met with demonstrations, rallies, lawyers, and dark rumblings from Congress over yet another affront to peace and parity by the overweening Jews of the north. Two days before its consecration, somebody-no one ever came forward or was charged-threw a double Molotov through a window, burning the prayer house to its concrete pad. The congregants and their supporters swarmed into the town of St. Cyril, smashing crab traps, breaking the windows of the Alaska Native Brotherhood hall, and setting spectacular fire to a shedful of Roman candles and cherry bombs. The driver of a truckload of angry yids lost control of the wheel and plowed into the grocery store where Laurie Jo worked as a checker, killing her instantly. The Synagogue Riots remain the lowest moment in the bitter and inglorious history of Tlingit-Jewish relations.

“Is that my fault? Is that my problem?” Landsman’s mother yelled back. “An Indian living in my house, that is something I do not need!”

The children listened to them for a while, Johnny Bear standing in the doorway, kicking at his duffel bag with the toe of his sneaker.

“Good thing you don’t speak Yiddish,” Landsman told the younger boy.

“I don’t need to, dickwad,” said Johnny the Jew. “I been hearing this shit all my life.”

After the thing was settled-and it had been settled before Landsman’s mother ever started with the yelling-Hertz came in to say goodbye. His son had two inches on him. When he took the boy in his arms for a quick stiff hug, it looked like the side chair was embracing the couch. Then he stepped away.

“I’m sorry, John,” he said. He gripped his son by the ears and held on tight. He scanned the boy’s face like a telegram. “I want you to know that. I don’t want you ever to look at me and think that I’m feeling anything but sorry.”

“I want to live with you,” said the boy tonelessly.

“So you have mentioned.” The words were harsh and the manner callous, but all at once-it shocked the hell out of Landsman-there was a shine of tears in Uncle Hertz’s eyes. “I’m well-known, John, as a complete son of a bitch. You’d be worse off with me than living in the street.” He looked around his sister’s living room, the plastic slipcovers on the furniture, the art like barbed wire, the abstract menorah. “God knows what they’ll make of you here.”

“A Jew,” said Johnny Bear, and it was hard to tell whether he meant it as a boast or a prediction of ruin. “Like you.”

“That seems unlikely,” Hertz said. “I’d like to see them manage that. Goodbye, John.”

He gave Naomi a pat on the head. Just before he went out, he stopped to shake hands with Landsman. “Help your cousin, Meyerle, he’s going to need it.”

“He looks like he can help himself.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” said Uncle Hertz. “That at least he gets from me.”

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. He spins theory with his hands, keeps kosher, and sports a penis cut (his father saw to it before abandoning the infant Bear) on the bias. But to look at, he’s pure Tlingit. Tartar eyes, dense black hair, broad face built for joy but trained in the craft of sorrow. The Bears are a big people, and Berko stands two meters tall in his socks and weighs in at 110 kilograms. He has a big head, big feet, big belly and hands. Everything about Berko is big except for the baby in his arms, smiling shyly at Landsman with his thatch of black horsehair standing up like magnetized iron filings. Cute as a button, Landsman would be the first to acknowledge, but even after a year, the sight of Pinky still puts a dent in the soft place behind Landsman’s sternum. Pinky was born exactly two years after Django’s due date-September 22.

“Emanuel Lasker was a famous chess player,” Landsman informs Berko, who takes a mug of coffee from Ester-Malke and frowns into the steam. “A German Jew. In the teens and twenties.” He spent the hour between five and six at his computer in the desolate squad room, seeing what he could turn up. “A mathematician. Lost to Capablanca, like everybody else back then. The book was in the room. And a chessboard, set up that way.”

Berko has heavy eyelids, soulful, bruised-looking, but when he drops them down over those pop eyes, it’s like the beam of a flashlight bleeding through a slit, a look so cold and skeptical it can lead innocent men to doubt their own alibis.

“And you feel,” he says, with a significant glance at the bottle of beer in Landsman’s hand, “that the configuration of pieces on the board, what?” The slit draws narrower, the beam flares brighter. “Encodes the name of his killer?”

“In the alphabet of Atlantis,” Landsman says.

“Uh-huh.”

“The Jew played chess. And he tied off with tefillin. And somebody killed him with a great deal of care and discretion. I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing in the chess angle. I can’t get anything out of it. I went through the whole book, but I couldn’t figure out which game he was playing. If any. Those diagrams, I don’t know, I get a headache looking at them. I get a headache just looking at the board, a curse on it.”

Landsman’s voice comes out sounding every bit as hollow and hopeless as he feels, which was not his intention at all. Berko looks over the top of Pinky’s head at his wife, to see if he really needs to worry about Landsman.