The Yiddish Policemen's Union

I broke two of my cardinal principles to read this book. One is that I don't read fiction. Life is too short to spend it not learning what little I can before I croak. So only non-fiction. The other is that when I break rule number one and read fiction, it may never be by a living author. Years ago I learned from a book maven (Lois Harzfeld) about the expertise of working as a buyer in a used bookstore. It surprised me that there is no worse, more unsaleable, dog in a bookstore than last year's bestseller. It is unclear to me whether this signifies that we the public are mindlessly fickle in our herdthink, or that we like the current bestseller from force of suggestion by the marketers. When they think the market is saturated they stop pushing it and start selling us some other book, and we forget about the first one.

Hillel once observed that no one knows for sure whether he has had a happy and righteous life until he is safely dead. My own sense is that the Sage of Jabneh may have been overly conservative. For instance, does Ralph Nader have to be completely dead before we can conclude that he is an egocentric prick? But I digress.

Hillel was right however about authors. One never knows for sure whether a writer is any good or not until he is dead, preferably for a generation or three. And even then there are uncertainties. Now, as in his lifetime, there are many who say Anthony Trollope was the worst of all Victorian writers, that "Barchester Towers" and everything else he ever wrote was wordy pompous drivel. And others who have made it into a PBS mini-series.

So it was an act of faith, and of confidence in a friend, that I read Michael Chabon's "Yiddish Policemen's Union". As I have already noted in an entry here, I recommend it to everyone and particularly to Jews. I am sorry to be joined in my opinion by my bete noire, the New York Times, which is running it as a serial in their so-called newspaper.

One advantage I have discovered about reading living authors, as I discovered in the case of Michael Chabon of Berkeley, is that they have their own websites, which long-dead authors generally do not. http://www.michaelchabon.com

I was surprised to learn that I don't just enjoy fiction. I NEED fiction, especially the novel. The fact is that one life and one world are not enough. As to whether the author still breathes or not, I can refer back to the experience of a climbing partner who drove an ancient BMW 2002 with 312,000 miles on it, or so he claimed. It was horribly noisy and semi-useless as transportation so we had to take my Toyota Tercel wagon econobox whenever we wanted to go anywhere distant. But Robert just loved that thing for its acceleration, its handling on winding mountain roads, for being a BMW, just loved it. It finally sank in from watching him that it was really and truly worth something to get that much pleasure from a car, no matter how impractical. I have been so ironclad focussed on reliability and practicality all my life that I wound up driving a Toyota Tercel wagon (even now I drive a Camry wagon). Even if Chabon and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" are forgotten in ten years, or in two, or even next year, I got pleasure from it now.