The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel

"Yes. There is a small but important subgenre of alternate Israel novels. There’s a novel by Simone Zelitch called Judenstaat , which imagines that after the war what became East Germany instead became the Jewish homeland. It makes a certain kind of sense; you could imagine that happening. In this one, in Chabon’s telling, it’s Alaska. It’s given over to the world’s Jews as a homeland but on a 50-year lease. The novel is set on the eve of the handback, so imagine Hong Kong in 1997. The protagonist is a policeman—not an unlicensed policeman, an actual policeman—trying to solve a murder on which the actual police authority has effectively given up, on the eve of the state’s dissolution. The murder is bound up with the overall project of pursuing a Jewish homeland, the contradictions and complexities of Zionism, its militaristic arm, its socialist arm, and the questions of what Jewish identity are. Both Chabon and I are Jewish. I support a two-state solution in Palestine and oppose apartheid in Israel. This is a book that speaks in a very sly and important way about what it means for there to be an indigenous population in a land that is given over as a form of reparation, and how those tensions play out. The fact that he has set it on the eve of this dissolution, this last-chopper-out-of-Saigon moment, makes for urgency. In these cases—and in every case of settler colonialism and truth and reconciliation, be that in Canada, where I’m from; in the United States, where I live; in South Africa; in Israel; in Australia—there is this temptation to kick the can down the road, to say, ‘There’s some stuff here we can’t resolve, and let’s see if time makes that easier to solve.’ But because this is the eve of the handback, all of these questions need to be resolved or forever buried. The liquidation of this temporary arrangement creates an urgency in circumstances where, far too often, we treat urgent things as not being urgent at all. The fact that it’s a murder that no one wants to pursue, that it involves factional and sectarian differences both within the Jewish faith and within Jewish culture and politics, and that it is played out against seized indigenous land that was seized long before it became a Jewish homeland, which is part of a wider issue of colonialism and settlerism in the Americas, all makes for a really rich foment. The voice is great. The voice is a wise, smartass, Lenny Bruce-ish, Jewish, Yiddish voice, and it’s a voice I love. I grew up speaking Yiddish. It was my father’s first language. I went to socialist Yiddish school at the Workmen’s Circle. Yiddish is an amazing language that has—even more so than English—this hybrid character. It has no formal grammar, it is all dialectical. I know we have the Queen’s English and Received Pronunciation, but those are relatively modern inventions. There is no formally correct English, Yiddish, even less so. There’s a phrase in Yiddish that’s really telling, which is ‘he speaks a beautiful Yiddish.’ Which is to say, the speaker borrows, on the fly, words from other languages and innovates grammars and structures that incorporate those borrowed words in ways that make for delightful wordplay, that are expressive, funny, and interesting. That carries over into the book itself. It’s a very Yiddish book. It could be Sholem Aleichem in translation. Or Rosa Luxemburg, for that matter. It’s terrific. The final thing I want to say about this novel is that it has one of Will Staehle’s all-time great covers—just an astoundingly good cover. Staehle is the artist who does all of my covers now as well. I love what he does with mine. If you want to get a sense of the versatility that Staehle has in his work, compare this cover to the cover of any of my books. You would never believe that they came from the same artist. Throw in a couple of his other ones—he does Victoria Schwab’s covers, and Charlie Jane Anders’s covers—and lay them out like a tarot deck. Ask yourself, how could one person be so versatile as to produce all of these brilliant, distinctive, extremely eye-catching covers? None of them are seemingly of a piece with each other. Absolutely. Someone called it Panama Papers fanfic. It’s a noir detective novel in that tradition I was talking about earlier. Marty, like Pessimal, is an unlicensed tax inspector. He’s a forensic accountant who spent forty years in Silicon Valley unwinding the weirdest, most baroque scams that tech bros can come up with. At 67, he is at the end of his career. He, at one point, has taken in trade for his services a luxury tour bus that a rockstar had fitted out for a perpetual end-of-life tour that he reckoned he would have to take because his manager had stolen all of his money, which is a thing that actually happens to rockstars all the time. Leonard Cohen toured till he dropped dead for that reason. George Clinton’s still on the road, not merely because he’s an unstoppable funk god but because his scumbag manager stole all his money. Marty’s 37-foot luxury tour bus is called The Unsalted Hash. He drives it from the tip of Baja, California, up to the Oregon coastline, and inland, too, taking retirement on the installment plan, working when his savings get low, and he’s called back for one last job. An old pal, who’s a brilliant, storied cryptographer—from the days when crypto meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency—has, very unwisely, decided to float his own cryptocurrency . Because he’s very good, it becomes a very successful cryptocurrency and is soon worth more than a billion dollars. But because he is prone to the hubris of very talented people, he has hidden in this cryptocurrency system a backdoor that would allow him to move the money around, should it become necessary—should there ever be an error revealed in his maths that allows someone to start stealing things from his blockchain. What’s been stolen is the keys themselves, and with those keys the criminals can take everything—more than a billion dollars. Of course, much of the money in that blockchain belongs to the kinds of money launderers and criminals who don’t take those losses lightly and who will hunt down Marty’s friend and flay him alive if their money goes missing. Marty agrees to find the keys, which turns out to be easier than you might imagine, because the low-level goons who are charged with stealing these keys are Millennials and so most of it just ends up on Instagram. But he then has to contend with the fact that the two criminal gangs who double-crossed each other and the various US three-letter agencies who are complicit to one degree or another in all of these shenanigans blame him. Marty has spent his whole career playing on the red team. In security, the people who attack are the red team and the people who defend are the blue team. Attackers need to be quite methodical and uncover a single mistake that the defenders have made and figure out how to exploit it. Defenders have to be perfectly methodical and make no mistakes that the attackers can discover. When Marty goes from hunting for the keys to being hunted for having found them, he switches from the red team to the blue team—the place he does not want to be. The book is mostly the story of how he figures out how to get back on the red team and how to go after the bad guys. It’s a very pacy novel. As you might imagine, if you’re the kind of person who writes eight books during lockdown, my partner cannot keep up with everything I do. My wife has got plenty to do. While she enjoys my books, she’s definitely not going to be able to read all of them. With this one, when I finished it, I handed it to her. I’d written it in six weeks flat. It came battering out of my fingertips. I said, ‘Darling, I think I’ve really got something here. Would you mind reading the first couple of pages?’ I rolled over in bed at two in the morning, and she was sat up in bed with her phone. I said, ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ She said, ‘I just had to figure out how it ended.’ Then, I sent it to my editor. My editor is a lovely chap and has edited every novel I’ve ever written. I’ve known him since I was a teenager. He’s an older brother figure to me, and we are great pals. He would not think that I was disparaging him if I were to note that he is not the world’s most reliable email correspondent. He is prone to taking a very long time to get back on routine matters. When I sent him the book, I figured it’d be a month or two before I heard back from him. Instead, I heard back the next morning: ‘That was a fucking ride. Whoa.’ He immediately bought two more. I had just written the last adventure of Marty Hench, and now he wanted two more of them. There’s precedent for how to manage this. When Queen Victoria offered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a knighthood to bring back Sherlock Holmes, he brought Holmes back over Rickenbacker Falls. I didn’t want to bring Marty back over Rickenbacker Falls. My editor is a very powerful man in New York publishing but he can’t offer me a knighthood. Instead, I decided I would tell the story backwards, that I would go back in time to all of Marty’s earlier adventures. I discovered as I started doing this that there is a huge advantage to it. If you tell the story backwards, you have no continuity problems because causality runs in the other direction. If there’s a detail that appears later, you can always put it in. Backshadowing actually becomes foreshadowing when you’re writing the books backwards. “Conspiracies play a large part in noir” There are two prequels. The next one is The Bezzle . It will come out in February 2024. The one after that is Picks and Shovels , and it will come out in January 2025. I’m working on a couple more, and they each visit a different time in tech history—the different inflection points when we lived through these bubbles, these periods that seemed promising and sometimes were promising, including the web, the various deaths of VR, and so on and talk about what was going on in the scammiest, most self-deluded, frothiest, most bubble-licious parts of the tech sector, and how the people who dreamt of a technology that would be a force for liberation and connection contended with the money changers who showed up hoping that technology would be a source of control and extraction, and how they lost that fight, and how the forces of finance won that fight and made tech into, as Tom Eastman says, “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.” To a certain extent, although the point of this book is not to smuggle a tutorial in through a detective story. For one thing, it was pretty clear, even when I wrote this, that crypto was moving out of the spotlight and would wither away over the coming years. It’s really a tutorial in how technology and technical talk can be a smokescreen for all kinds of jargon. Think of the towel in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . If you’ve got the towel, they’ll assume that you’ve got everything else. We all know that technology can be transformative. We’ve all lived through multiple cycles of tech transformation, and it’s that fact that makes stories or crimes in which grifters show up and say, ‘Here is the next transformational technology,’ sound plausible. Cryptocurrency is an especially virulent version of that because it’s not just about exploiting the fact that we’ve all lived through tech bubbles, it’s also exploiting the fact that we’ve all lived through finance bubbles. Anyone in the United Kingdom has lived through this period in which having the incredible foresight and acumen to have a place to live in the 1970s made you a multimillionaire by the 2000s. We’ve all seen multiple programs on the Beeb and Channel Four about buying and flipping homes. We all have an elderly relative who fancies themselves the second coming of Warren Buffett and think they’re quite good at picking properties, merely for having lived in a place. In a world in which sharp operators make a fortune by selling dodgy PPE down at the pub to a Tory donor, crypto seems very plausible. I just saw an advertisement on the Tube for an unbelievably scammy digital service that lets you rent your driveway to commuters who need a place to park during the day. ‘This is a great way to make back the seven thousand pounds you lost on crypto.’ That’s the actual text of the ad. In the same way scam emails say, ‘I am a police detective investigating a scammer who ripped you off. Please get in touch with me so that I can help you get your money back.’ It’s like a filter to identify and prioritize people who are already vulnerable to this kind of scam. A scam is a way of grooming people to be scammed in the future. That is the Western economy writ large—the American economy especially, and I think the British economy doubly so, whether that’s illegally selling PPE, or the absolute human garbage driving around in Minis emblazoned with the Foxtons logo destroying every neighborhood. There’s a story that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Albania was gripped by a pyramid scheme that everyone, including the finance minister, was involved in. After it collapsed, people said, ‘we knew it was a pyramid scheme, but we figured that the finance minister would bail it out because he was involved in it. We knew it was a scam, but we thought we were on the winning side, not the losing side. We thought we were the scam artists, not the marks.’ Crypto is a way for people who are scam artists to convince other people that they can be scam artists—which is to say, successful gamblers—and in so doing, steal all their money. I have lived in Silicon Valley, and I tried to make it as true to the milieu as I could. That’s a thing many critics have noted favorably. Maria Farrell wrote something quite effusive about this. She’s also the person who identified that a noir story is about an unlicensed cop and that Marty’s an unlicensed tax inspector. It is meant to capture that milieu, that place, as much as, say, The Hobbit is meant to capture The Shire. Even if you’ve never been there, it’s meant to make you understand what life there must be like."

"Yes, this is my favourite recent alternate history. It’s set in the 1980s in a world where a whole bunch of argumentative Jews have been settled in Alaska to get them out of Germany during the Second World War. Michael Chabon, the author, used it to find a place where Yiddish would be a living language. My own folks spoke Yiddish fluently – they spoke it with each other when they didn’t want me to understand what was going on, which was a great incentive to learn some. After my dad died, my mom spoke Yiddish much less, which meant that I have only fragments of it these days, which I do regret. I can read it, with the dictionary and patience, and because I’ve taken some college German too – but only after a fashion. Chabon is just such a marvellous writer. As a writer, sometimes you have to know who’s just better than you are, and Michael Chabon is better than me. Every writer has people like that. Shakespeare looks at Marlowe and thinks, ‘How do I do that ?”. But then of course Marlowe got killed, and Shakespeare didn’t have that kind of competition anymore. It’s a very common reaction for somebody who’s trying to write – they read something and say, “Christ, I can do better than this !” But Marlowe lasts longer! So things even out. Oh, everything in that book fits together. That book is like a Swiss watch, to use an antiquated simile. The other amusing thing is that there’s a spear carrier in the book who’s named Turteltaub. My grandfather translated Turteltaub from the Yiddish – he got tired of people asking what it means. That kind of stuff happened a lot in early 20th century America, as people took Anglo Saxon sounding names to try to fit in – I used to play softball on a team with a guy whose last name was Eagle, whose grandfather had translated it from Adler, and there are bunches of baseball players who played under names they were not born with – like Jimmie Reese was born Hyman Solomon. So I saw Turteltaub, and I did a double-take. I got in touch with Chabon, whom I do not really know, and I asked him, “Hey, did you borrow my name?” And he said, “Yeah, I like your stuff!” – which made me walk on air for quite a while. Peter Beagle did that too, tucked my name in a story. I’ve got a funny last name."