the promised land of salmon and furs€¦ · 1.3 science fiction .....14 1.4 telling lies .....16...
TRANSCRIPT
Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte
The Promised Land of salmon and furs
Counterfactual history and Michael Chabon's
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Evelien Corveleyn
Promotor: Dr. Pieter Vermeulen
Masterpaper voorgedragen tot het bekomen van de graad van
Master in de Vergelijkende Moderne Letterkunde
2011
iii
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank my promoter Dr. Pieter Vermeulen for his interesting
ideas, constructive criticism, useful comments and corrections. With his guiding hand I
travelled back to counterfactual history, explored the difficult relations between Israel and
the Palestinian people, and had the opportunity to analyze the extraordinary novel and
mind of a magician of words.
Secondly, I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Philippe Codde, whose inspiring course
and contagious enthusiasm have convinced me to conduct further research in the field of
Jewish American Literature.
And thirdly, I would like to thank everyone else who has advised and encouraged me
while I was writing this dissertation.
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Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................... 7
Hoofdstuk 1. Michael Chabon and his Maps and Legends ........................................... 10
1.1 Genre fiction ....................................................................................................... 11
1.2 Epic fantasy ........................................................................................................ 13
1.3 Science fiction .................................................................................................... 14
1.4 Telling lies .......................................................................................................... 16
Hoofdstuk 2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union................................................................ 19
2.1 Plot outline.......................................................................................................... 22
Hoofdstuk 3. Counterfactual history ............................................................................. 27
3.1 Differences between historical and fictional worlds ............................................ 28
3.1.1 Discourse level ........................................................................................ 30
3.1.2 Counterfactual history as fiction .............................................................. 30
3.2 Historical fiction ................................................................................................. 31
3.2.1 Fictional and fictionalized entities ........................................................... 32
3.2.2 Degrees of historical-knowledge recovery ............................................... 32
3.2.3 Crossing borders ...................................................................................... 33
3.3 Counterfactual thinking ...................................................................................... 33
3.3.1 Types of counterfactuals .......................................................................... 34
3.3.2 Causality .................................................................................................. 35
3.3.3 Plausibility ............................................................................................... 37
3.4 Counterfactual fiction ......................................................................................... 39
3.4.1 Transworld identity .................................................................................. 41
3.4.2 Similarities traditional fiction .................................................................. 41
3.4.3 Popular literature ..................................................................................... 42
3.5 Counterfactual history ......................................................................................... 42
3.5.1 Individuality ............................................................................................ 45
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3.5.2 Subjectivity .............................................................................................. 46
3.5.3 Constraints ............................................................................................... 47
3.6 Evolution of counterfactuals in narrative discourse............................................. 49
3.7 Other examples of narrative counterfactuals ....................................................... 54
Hoofdstuk 4. The Promised Land of salmon and furs.................................................. 57
4.1 Counterfactual history ......................................................................................... 58
4.2 Chess motif ......................................................................................................... 63
4.3 Narrative clues about the counterfactual past ...................................................... 65
4.3.1 Israel and Reversion ................................................................................ 66
4.3.2 Immigration European Jews..................................................................... 68
4.3.2.1 Doomed city ............................................................................................ 70
4.3.2.2 Islands and Indians .................................................................................. 72
4.4 Other recurring motifs......................................................................................... 73
4.4.1 Storytelling .............................................................................................. 73
4.4.2 Penguins .................................................................................................. 75
4.4.3 The United States ..................................................................................... 76
4.5 Jewish identity .................................................................................................... 77
4.5.1 Imaginary Yiddish ................................................................................... 78
4.5.2 Humor and respect ................................................................................... 80
Conclusion....................................................................................................................... 82
Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 85
7
Introduction
What if… there was a Jewlaska? A Jewish settlement in Alaska founded sixty years ago to
house millions of European Jewish refugees; a city called Sitka, on Baranof Island, where
the inhabitants speak Yiddish and swear in English.
What if… this settlement saved four million Jews and only two million were killed during
the Holocaust?
And what if… only weeks before the territory will be reverted to the United States, the
Messiah is found murdered in a cheap hotel room?
These are the premises of Michael Chabon‘s remarkable novel The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union; a hard-boiled detective story set in the present but based on a
counterfactual history. This dissertation will try to investigate what drove Michael Chabon
to include a counterfactual history in his novel and what he tried to accomplish with it.
Especially his treatment of Yiddish and Jewish identity are unusual in this respect and will
therefore also be discussed in this thesis.
After this short introduction, the first chapter will briefly touch upon Michael Chabon‘s
professional career as a novelist, before turning to the discussion of his collection of
essays, Maps and Legends. The essays comment on Chabon‘s views on reading and
writing. They will reveal why Chabon would want to combine the odd genre of
counterfactual fiction with a hard-boiled detective story. As the front cover of his
collection of essays tells us, his readings and writings can be situated ―along the
borderlands‖ of literature. The main subject in these expositions is genre fiction, ranging
8
from epic fantasy to science fiction. The references to the creation of golems, the telling
of lies and the trickster figure will also be discussed.
The second chapter will introduce Michael Chabon‘s novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union. First, it will be explained how his novel came about. One of Chabon‘s motives was
his own American Jewish identity and the search for ―a world of his own.‖ These aspects
are clearly represented in the novel. The discovery of the phrasebook Say It in Yiddish
then helped him construct the remarkable counterfactual world surrounding the Jewish
characters. Secondly, the plot outline will be set out and links will be made with the work
of hard-boiled detective writer Raymond Chandler.
In the third chapter the research field of counterfactual history will be explored. This
part of the dissertation is based on the works of Lubomír Doležel, Niall Ferguson and
Hilary Dannenberg. They primarily try to emphasize the usefulness of counterfactual
thinking and history in historical research. This chapter will be divided into smaller parts
to discuss the different aspects of counterfactual history. These will elaborate on the
differences between historical and fictional worlds, historical fiction, counterfactual
thinking, counterfactual fiction, counterfactual history and the evolution of
counterfactuals in narrative discourse. Different characteristics and types of
counterfactuals will be touched upon, with a particular interest in the phenomena causality
and plausibility. All these elements will try to provide a better understanding of the field
of counterfactual history in consideration of the analysis of The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union. The chapter will conclude with a few other literary and cinematographic examples
in which counterfactuals are used, including Philip Roth‘s The Plot Against America.
The actual analysis of Michael Chabon‘s novel will be given in the fourth and last
chapter. The different aspects of counterfactual history which will have been discussed in
the previous chapter, will then be investigated in the light of the novel itself. Other major
themes within The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – for example Israel, Jewish identity,
nostalgia and Native Americans – will also be analyzed. The discovery of different
motives will then try to connect the different themes and layers of the novel.
9
By the end of this dissertation, I hope that the reader will have gained useful insights in
Michael Chabon‘s views on genre fiction, the useful and less useful characteristics of
counterfactual history and its use in fictional and non-fictional contexts, and, of course,
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which proves to offer a lot more than meets the eye.
10
Hoofdstuk 1. Michael Chabon and his Maps
and Legends
Lies tell the truth;
but the truth they tell may not be that,
or not only that,
which the liar intends.
(Chabon 2008, 72)
Michael Chabon is what you could call an atypical writer. He has written novels,
screenplays, short story collections, essay collections, a book for young adults, and he has
even co-written the story for the movie Spiderman 2. As D. G. Myers notes, Chabon, like
Graham Greene, ―divides his labors into two categories – ‗literary fiction‘ (his preferred
term) and entertainments that he calls ‗unabashed fantasies‘‖ (2008, 580). The second
category includes his books Summerland and Gentlemen of the Roads. The completed
manuscript of his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, served as his master thesis. The
novelist Harris MacDonald, who was his adviser at the time, was so impressed that he sent
the manuscript to his own agent. At the time, the book got the largest advance ever paid
for a first novel; Chabon was only twenty-five. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in
2001 for his third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which deals with
themes like the Holocaust, homophobia, friendship, McCarthyism, and the relationship
between art and political resistance.
11
1.1 Genre fiction
According to J. Madison Davis ―his books show a remarkable ability to be comfortable in
exploiting the delights of genre writing and yet incorporate enough imaginative variation
on the genres to be taken seriously by the literary establishments‖ (2008, 10). His
combined interest in genre fiction and in serious literature is documented in a book called
Maps and Legends, which is, as the back cover tells us, ―a love song in 16 parts – a series
of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories
to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy‖ (Chabon 2008).
Maps and Legends gives us as readers a good introduction to Chabon‘s views on genre
and genre fiction. He is in favor of a return to the basics of storytelling, leaving the
canonized literature on the background, but maintaining a ―wide-ranging affection.‖ He
acknowledges that popular fiction has obtained negative connotations these days, as
intelligent and educated people cannot be seen anywhere near entertainment. ―They must
handle things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs,‖ he remarks
with a bitter sense of humor. One of the main reasons why people tend to distrust
entertainment is its tendency to be ―easily synthesized and mass-produced.‖ Chabon
continues that ―its benefits do not endure, and so we come to mistrust them, or our taste
for them‖ (2008, 4). Another reason which Chabon puts forward is the alleged passivity of
entertainment. The intense exchange between reader and writer, or more generally
between entertainer and public, got lost somewhere along the way, especially since the
introduction of the Internet. According to Chabon, the most efficient genre for
reconnecting the writer and the reader is the short story. Nevertheless, as a short story
writer, he is aware of the pitfall of restricting oneself to one particular genre. Maps and
Legends proves to be a useful attempt to explain the genre awareness among authors.
One of the problems in this context is the term ‗genre‘ in itself. In the heyday of short
story writing you still had a whole catalogue of genres to choose from: ―the ghost story;
the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, science fiction,
or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story‖
(Chabon 2008, 6). Due to the introduction of the new mass media, the choices have
12
become more limited. The ―more plot-centered literary genres‖ got the upper hand and
genres like science fiction or the hard-boiled detective story disappeared to the
background, to the regret of Michael Chabon. Genre has simply become a mere
―marketing tool‖ (Chabon 2008, 7-8).
In ‗Trickster in a Suit of Lights,‘ one of the essays in Maps and Legends, Chabon
explains to us why genre fiction is excluded from canonical literature: ―a genre implies a
set of conventions – a formula – and conventions imply limitations (the argument goes),
and therefore no genre work can ever rise to the masterful heights of true literature, free (it
is to be supposed) of all formulas and templates‖ (2008, 8). However, the most important
aspect of these conventions, according to Chabon, is that they are meant to be flouted,
mocked, inverted, broken and ignored. Writers should not lose sight of ―the cycle of
innovation, exhaustion, and replenishment.‖ In this respect he turns to the example of
Walter Benjamin and his essay ‗The Storyteller,‘ which makes the distinction between the
―trading seaman,‖ who employs ―miracle tales, legends, and tall stories from abroad,‖ and
the ―resident tiller of the soil,‖ who depends upon ―the sharp-witted wisdom tales, homely
lore, and useful stories of a community.‖
Benjamin implies that the greatest storytellers are those who possess aspects, to
some extent, of both characters, and I was thinking that it might be possible to argue
that in the world of the contemporary short story the ‗naturalistic‘ writers come
from the tribe of the community-based lore-retellers, while the writers of fantasy,
horror, and sf1 are the sailors of distant seas, and that our finest and most
consistently interesting contemporary writers are those whose work seems to
originate from both traditions (Chabon 2008, 11).
This brings us back to the point Chabon tried to make earlier. Conventions need to be
broken; the boundaries of genres need to be crossed. Writers should not be afraid to move
around in no man‘s land, ―the places between genres‖; they should be allowed to play
around in a landscape of fantasy and invention. But, as Chabon notes, the most important
boundary that needs to be crossed is ―the one that lies between wild commercial success
1 Science fiction.
13
and unreserved critical acclaim‖ (2008, 13). These ideas about authorship and fiction are
also reflected in Chabon‘s own work.
The first short story Chabon ever wrote was a Sherlock Holmes tale with the narrative
voice of Dr. Watson. This reminds him that popular fiction tends to have ―this open-ended
quality,‖ which invites the reader ―to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure‖
(2008, 44). Therefore, he continues, each work of literature could be understood as ―fan
fiction.‖ Chabon admits that he therefore never quite understood the notion of the anxiety
of influence, defined by Harold Bloom.
Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the
stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving – amateurs –
we proceed, seeking out the blank pages in the map that our favorite writers, in their
greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers –
should we be lucky enough to find any – some of the pleasures that we ourselves
have taken in the stuff we love; to get in on the game. All novels are sequels;
influence is bliss (Chabon 2008, 45 - own emphasis).
1.2 Epic fantasy
Another genre that is believed to be located in the no-man‘s land of literature is epic
fantasy. However, it should not be located in the outskirts of literature, according to
Chabon: ―it is from the confrontation with mystery that the truest stories have always
drawn their power‖ (2008, 55). Although the history of epic fantasy started off with
Milton‘s masterpiece Paradise Lost, it has lost its appeal during the last decades. Epic
fantasies tend to be understood as stories for children, and if they are not particularly
meant for children, the label ‗fantasy‘ scares most adult readers away. In this context
Chabon analyses Philip Pullman‘s The Golden Compass, which draws from Milton‘s
Paradise Lost. In The Golden Compass, like in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, history
has taken a different course. For example, ―the Holy See was transferred from Rome to
Geneva‖ and ―at some point John Calvin became pope‖ (Chabon 2008, 59). Furthermore,
science is viewed as ―a subject fit for philosophers and above all theologians – the study
of fundamental particles is known there as experimental theology.‖ Further on, it also
14
becomes clear that the story relies on the ―many-worlds hypothesis:‖ ―an endlessly
ramifying series of possibility-worlds, diverging and diverging again with each alteration
in state, each tiny choice made, each selection of B over A: this may or may not be
physics, but it is indisputably storytelling‖ (Chabon 2008, 61).
All these different characteristics only add up to the difficulty of categorizing this
novel, and the other novels within the series His Dark Materials. Chabon states that
―Pullman‘s use of such avant-garde scientific notions as the multiverse and dark matter
might incline one to slap the label of ‗science fiction‘ onto his work along with ‗epic
fantasy,‘ ‗YA2,‘ and ‗alternative-world fiction‘‖ (2008, 61). Chabon signals one problem
in his analysis of the novel. Some of its characters are rather inhuman, while the story
proclaims to be about humanity. This is an issue which Chabon himself has had to deal
with during his own writing.
That‘s the trouble with Plot, and its gloomy consigliere, Theme. They are, in many
ways, the enemies of Character, of ‗roundedness,‘ insofar as our humanity and its
convincing representation are constituted through contradiction, inconsistency,
plurality of desire, absence of abstractable message or moral. […] Plot is fate, and
fate is always, by definition, inhuman‖ (Chabon 2008, 71 - own emphasis).
1.3 Science fiction
Chabon could not postpone mentioning the genre of science fiction. Most of his writing is
more or less situated within this genre, although, as might have become clear by now, he
would not like to put a particular label on his work. Stories about the end of the world, and
its aftermath, in particular are quickly regarded as science fiction. This subgenre, post-
apocalyptic science fiction, is one of the few subgenres within science fiction that can be
explored by mainstream writers ―without incurring too much damage to his or her
credentials for seriousness,‖ according to Chabon (2008, 96). When a mainstream writer
2 Young adult fiction.
15
uses this mode of science fiction, critics will often refer to it as a ‗parable‘ or ‗fable,‘
instead of science fiction. This is not really problematic since the genre is often used as a
means of satire on society anyway. Post-apocalyptic science fiction also has a tendency
towards naturalism, which makes it more attractive to curious readers, ―without risking
the stain of geekdom.‖ The possibility of the end, or destruction, of the world has only
grown in the twenty-first century, and with it the interest in post-apocalyptic writings. In
any case, science fiction remains risky business for a mainstream writer, as this quote by
Alan Cheuse about Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road illustrates: ―I‘m always thrilled when a
fine writer of first-class fiction takes up the genre of science fiction and matches its
possibilities with his or her own powers‖ (Chabon 2008, 98). Chabon confesses that ―most
science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted
to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world‖
(2008, 137).
The sense of nostalgia lingers in Chabon‘s essays. Years of mass production, marketing
and new media have left their traces in the literary field. With his expositions, Chabon
wants to preserve the wide-ranging catalogue of genres which was so important to him
when he started writing.
The erasure of the past and its replacement by animatronic replicas, politicians‘
narratives, and the fictions of advertisers, coupled with the explosive proliferation of
new inventions and altered mores, ought to have produced a boom time for honest
mourners of the vanished. Instead we find ourselves haunting the margins of a
world loud with speculators in metal lunch boxes and Barbie dolls, postmodernists,
and retro-rockers, quietly regretting the alternate chuckling and sighs of an old-style
telephone when you dialed it. We are not, as our critics would claim, necessarily
convinced that things were once better than they are now, nor that we ourselves, our
parents, or our grandparents were happier ‗back then.‘ We are simply like those
savants in the Borges story who stumble upon certain objects and totems that turn
out to be the random emanations and proofs of the existence of Tlön. The past is
another planet; anyone ought to wonder, as we do, at any traces of it that turn up on
this one (Chabon 2008, 123-4).
Reflecting on his own work, he compares his writings to a golem, ―a man of clay
brought to life by enchantment […] by means of magic formulas, one word at a time‖
(2008, 152). Especially the consequences of writing and making a golem come to life
seem similar to Chabon. In his essay ‗The Idea of the Golem‘ Gershom Scholem states
16
that ―like all major creation it endangers the life of the creator – the source of danger,
however, is not the golem… but the man itself‖ (Chabon 2008, 153). It is the way in
which golems ―break free from their creators, grow to unmanageable size and power,
refuse to be controlled‖ that reminds Chabon of his own work.
1.4 Telling lies
Throughout Maps and Legends, Michael Chabon links the writing of fiction not only to
the making of golems but also to the telling of lies. For him, it is all about ―the inevitable
fate of liars to be swallowed up or crushed by their lies; and the risks inherent both in
discounting the power of outright fiction to reveal the truths of a life, and in taking at face
value the fictions that writers of memoir present as fact‖ (2008, 205). In the end, the secret
of successful fiction (and good lies) is the combination of invented details and real ones.
There is however also a big difference between fiction and lies. While reading fiction, the
reader is aware of the invented nature of the story, while the one listening to a lie is not.
The pleasure of reading therefore comes from this awareness and the willingness to
believe it anyway; the author and the reader create a sense of reality together. Of course
there are always people who take fiction (too) seriously. Chabon gives a funny example in
‗Golems I have known,‘ the last essay of Maps and Legends.
On the signing line after the first public reading I did from my novel The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union, which presents among other deceptions an entirely fictitious,
entirely Jewish modern-day city of Sitka, Alaska, an apparently intelligent and
literate woman approached me to say that she had been to Sitka on a cruise and was
astonished to learn now that she had somehow missed seeing all of those Jews up
there. She didn‘t remember any of the tall buildings either. She was not challenging
me on my facts, and she was not joking. She was simply wonderstruck by her own
failure to have seen all of that from the deck of her cruise ship. Listening to me read
the first chapter of the novel – fully advertised as such by me in my opening
remarks – was enough to make her doubt her own recollections, to accept my
sophisticated lie over the crude but veracious fragments of her own memory (2008,
209-210).
Chabon admitted feeling surprised, satisfied and triumphant at the same time. He
understood that ―at the most fundamental level,‖ he had indeed ―been trying to deceive
17
her, along with every reader the novel would ever find, into the most passionate and
foolish belief‖ (2008, 210). At that moment, and every time he takes up his pen, Chabon
becomes the famous trickster figure, moving ―along the knife-narrow borderland between
those two kingdoms, between the Empire of Lies and the Republic of Truth.‖
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Hoofdstuk 2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
“And Palestine? When Messiah comes,
all the Jews move back there? To the promised
land? Fur hats and all?” “I heard Messiah cut a deal with the beavers,”
Berko says.
“No more fur.”
(Chabon 2007, 127)
When asked about the story behind The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon says
it all started with the discovery of a phrasebook, Say It in Yiddish, edited by Beatrice and
Uriel Weinrich. This is undoubtedly true, but in fact it started a long time before that
remarkable discovery.
For a long time now I‘ve been busy, in my life and in my work, with a pair of
ongoing, overarching investigations: into my heritage – rights and privileges, duties
and burdens – as a Jew and as a teller of Jewish stories; and into my heritage as a
lover of genre fiction (2008, 158).
We have already discussed his investigation into genre fiction extensively in the
previous chapter, but his search for a ―world of his own,‖ as an American Jew, is still
untouched. His search, and those of millions of other Jews, can be related to the search of
the Jewish people for their ideal homeland. Chabon states that ―history has proven that we
will never be happy or safe, never be able to fulfill ourselves as a people, without a
country of our own‖ (2008, 160). During the early days of Zionism the search was rather
20
active; speculations were being made about countries in Africa and Australia, ―any place
where nobody would mind, or notice, or care.‖ Since then the ideal homeland has never
been located and is, according to Chabon, as imaginary as the Promised Land.
This is where the discovery of Say It in Yiddish opened up even more questions in
Chabon‘s investigation. The phrasebook is part of a series Say It in… books, including Say
It in French, Say It in Swahili, and Say it in Hindi, which were designed to help tourists
with an unknown language. When Chabon discovered Say It in Yiddish he didn‘t quite
believe the book was real: ―[i]t was like a book in a story of Borges, unique, inexplicable,
possibly a hoax.‖ What struck him the most was that it proclaimed to contain ―up-to-date
practical entries:‖ ―[t]he Weinreichs have laid out, in painstakingly categorized numerical
entries, the outlines of a world, of a fantastic land in which it would behove you to know
how to say, in Yiddish: 250. What is the flight number? 1372. I need something for a
tourniquet. 1379. Here is my identification. 254. Can I go by boat/ferry to - ?‖ (Chabon
1997, 67). He started wondering about what the exact purpose of the phrasebook could
have been, when there is not even a particular country where you could use Say It in
Yiddish.
A few years later Chabon wrote a controversial essay about the phrasebook,
‗Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts,‘ imaging a world, or a country, where it could be put to
good use. Since there is still a noticeable amount of people who speak Yiddish, the essay
was soon considered as offensive and denigrating. Patricia Cohen notes that Chabon was
attacked ―for mocking the language and prematurely announcing its demise‖ (2007, 6).
However, the country he invented, Yisroel or Alyeska, was the immediate starting point for
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
I can imagine a different Yisroel, the youngest nation of the North American
continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a
resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (I once read that Franklin Roosevelt was
briefly sold on such a plan.) Perhaps after the war, in this Yisroel, the millions of
immigrant Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Austrian, Czech and German
Jews held a referendum, and chose independence over proffered statehood in the
United States. The resulting country would be a far different place than Israel. It
would be a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars, and one long day of
summer. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and
almonds, in such a place.
21
This Yisroel – or maybe it would be called Alyeska – I imagined at the time as a
kind of Jewish Sweden, social-democratic, resource rich, prosperous,
organizationally and temperamentally far more akin to its immediate neighbor,
Canada, than to its more freewheeling benefactor far to the south. Perhaps, indeed,
there might have been some conflict, in the years since independence, between the
United States and Alyeska (1997, 68; 2008, 168).
Nevertheless, Chabon was rather heartbroken when his essay was received badly. But
one reviewer complained that he was still being too nice and that he should take Philip
Roth, who was already a source of inspiration to Chabon at that moment, as an example in
this respect. As a novelist, Roth explores the Jewish and American identities of the
characters in his work in a rather provocative manner. In addition, he has also written two
counterfactual novels, The Counterlife and The Plot Against America, which will be
discussed further in section 3.7. Chabon thought about this remark and decided that he
was driven by the wish of being a ―nice Jewish boy.‖
Because if you are a nice Jewish boy, as Rav Philip Roth has conclusively proven,
you are also, on some level, a mazik: there‘s a devil in you, driving you to say, and
to do, and to write things that you know you must or ought not say, do, or write
(Chabon 2008, 179).
Eventually, he decided to write those things he knew he should not write: ―if I could
outrage a few people with one little essay – how many could I piss off with an entire
novel?‖ (2008, 179).
And that is how The Yiddish Policemen’s Union was born. And indeed, it managed to
―piss off‖ a lot of people. D.G. Myers stated that ―if his novella was inappropriate the
reason is that Chabon had never given a moment‘s thought to the question of
appropriateness, and not much more to what he was trying to say. His conceptions of
genre and style were too rigid to allow for much beyond genre-bending and stylistic play‖
(Myers 2008, 583). Luckily for Chabon, others described his novel as brilliant and
spectacular. According to Davis, ―The Yiddish Policemen’s Union incorporates almost all
the ingredients of the traditional hard-boiled detective novel faithfully and without
condescension, proving the continuing vitality of the form, while it takes the form into a
brilliantly imaginative realm of alternate history‖ (Davis 2008, 10).
22
As Davis points out, the novel is set in an alternative version of reality. In this world,
sixty years before the main story of the novel begins, the Slattery Report of 1940 was
voted to be implemented. The report, produced by Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the
Interior in the Roosevelt administration, included a plan to rescue Jewish European
refugees who were being prosecuted by the German government in the run-up of the
Second World War. The United States would provide land in Alaska for the Jews to live
on for the next sixty years. In reality, the report caught the attention of Roosevelt, but was
eventually turned down in Congress. The novel deals with this ‗small‘ misfortune by
slightly changing the historical record. The turning point from real history can be
pinpointed to the death of Anthony Dimond, a member of Congress in charge of Alaska
territory, who was supposedly responsible for the Slattery Report being turned down. In
the novel, we read that he got run over by a taxi. Subsequently, the narrator informs us,
the Alaskan Settlement Act was not killed in committee, as happened in actual history. A
temporary settlement for European Jews was set up in Sitka, a city located on the Alaskan
coast. Thanks to this settlement ‗only‘ two million Jews were killed in the Holocaust,
instead of the six million that were killed in reality. This fact also distinguishes Chabon‘s
novel from other alternative histories about the Holocaust. In The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union the Holocaust still happened and not all the European Jews were saved. As it will
be discussed further in section 4.3.1, the settlement was only temporary; after those sixty
years Reversion would set in and the United States would reclaim the Alaskan territory
inhabited by the Sitka Jews.
2.1 Plot outline
Already on the first page we meet the protagonist of the story, homicide detective Meyer
Landsman, and the body whose death he will be investigating for the rest of the novel.
Chabon proves that first impressions are everything: from the very beginning of the novel
Landsman is being depicted as an alcoholic, insomniac, workaholic, poor but honest man,
and the reader will keep associating him with these characteristics for the rest of the novel.
Curiously enough, this is exactly how Raymond Chandler depicted the ideal detective in
his essay ‗The Simple Art of Murder.‘ The perfect detective should also be sympathetic
23
and nonjudgmental and should hate dishonesty and hypocrisy, according to Chandler, who
is famous for his own hard-boiled detective stories. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
―seems like a conventional Chandleresque novel but Chabon takes his novel to a higher
plane through the use of an alternative history, a frequent device of science fiction‖ (Davis
2008, 11).
The dead body of the young man in room 208 of the Hotel Zamenhof, ―a crap-ass
hotel‖ (Chabon 2007, 3) where Landsman has been staying since the death of his sister
Naomi, is first identified as Emanuel Lasker. Next to the body lies a cardboard chess set;
apparently the victim was in the middle of a game when he got shot. Later on in the story,
Landsman and his partner Berko Shemets will discover that the body is actually Mendel
‗Menachem‘ Shpilman. Mendel is the son of the Verbover rebbe Heskel Shpilman, the
head of a group of Hasidic Jews who run a criminal organization in and around Sitka—
The Alaskan Godfather, you could say. Furthermore, many people believed that Mendel
was the new Tzaddik ha-Dor, the Messiah, who is born once in every generation.
Since Reversion will take place in only a few weeks, and Sitka General will be
dissolved, Bina Gelbfish - Landsman‘s ex-wife - was ordered to close any open cases
before the Burial Society, the transition task force, will visit the precinct. Since Landsman
and Berko still have eleven open cases, they are not allowed to start investigating Mendel
Shpilman‘s case, and it gets filed as a cold case. By now the reader can already predict
that Landsman will disobey orders, and he convinces Berko to help him.
They start their search in The Einstein Café, known as a meeting place for amateur
chess players. They meet Alter Litvak, who knew Landsman‘s dad, Isidor, and two
suspicious looking Verbovers. Landsman and Berko get more and more interested and
they decide to continue their search on Verbov Island, the home of the Verbovers. Once
they arrive, they meet with Zimbalist, the boundary maven, who is in charge of the eruvin3
3 An eruv (plural eruvin) is a symbolic area around Jewish homes and communities. An eruv allows Jews to
carry certain objects (like keys, tissues, dogs, baby carriages) out of their houses on the Sabbath, which would
otherwise be forbidden by the Torah.
24
on Verbov Island. He is the one who identifies the body as Mendel Shpilman, the son of
the rebbe.
The three of them set out to meet the Verbover rebbe. When they are finally allowed to
see him, they are surprised to see and hear that the rebbe is not in the least surprised about
the death of his son. Over twenty years ago, on the day of his wedding to the daughter of
the Shtrakenzer rebbe, Mendel disappeared. The Verbover rebbe never saw or heard from
his son again: ―[m]y son has been dead to me for many years, Detective. Many years. I
tore my clothes and said kaddish4 and lit a candle for his loss long ago‖ (Chabon 2007,
140).
While investigating Mendel‘s case further, Landsman obtains additional information
about another open case, whereupon he leaves to investigate the lead. Without back-up,
Landsman arrives at the place where the suspect was last seen. Not surprisingly he gets
shot, but manages to shoot and kill two suspects of two open cases. Unfortunately, Bina
pulls his badge and gun, which makes it even harder for Landsman to continue his
investigation about Mendel Shpilman.
Against all odds, he manages to talk to Mendel‘s mother, Batsheva Shpilman. She tells
Landsman about the day of Mendel‘s wedding. After Mendel had disappeared, he came
back once more, to say goodbye to his mother. Since then she has only heard from him
occasionally, when he was in trouble or needed money, ―circumstances that, in Mendel‘s
case, may his name be for a blessing, tended to coincide‖ (Chabon 2007, 226). The last
time she heard from her son was six months ago. He told her that he was going to
disappear and that he would not be able to call her. She heard a loudspeaker on the
background which leads Landsman straight to Yakovy airport.
At the airport, he discovers that his sister Naomi, who was a professional pilot, flew
Mendel to Peril Strait the night before her plane crashed into Mount Dunkelblum. He also
finds out that somebody with a lot of power went into his sister‘s file and removed the
4 A prayer as part of the Jewish mourning ritual.
25
flight plan from her fatal flight. Another pilot tells Landsman that there is an honor ranch
in Peril Strait, called Beth Tikkun, where ―religious Jews that get hooked on drugs and
whatnot‖ (Chabon 2007, 243) can retreat. Reasons enough for Landsman to check it out.
When he arrives at the centre, he meets Dr. Roboy and Dr. Fligler and he pretends that
he has an addiction and wants to be cured. Unfortunately, they quickly see through his
cover. He ends up cuffed to a bed frame in a tiny cell. He manages to escape and flees the
scene. The Tlingit Inspector Willie Dick comes to his aid and shows him an even more
remarkable find than Beth Tikkun: a green patch of land filled with cows, two things
which Sitka Jews have not seen in ages. There is one extraordinary cow among the other
Ayrshires cows, a red heifer, which is a pretty scarce traditional sin offering. Since it has
become clear to Landsman and Berko that the United States are also involved, they decide
to visit Hertz Shemets, Berko‘s father and the first Jew to enter the FBI.
Hertz tells them that the Verbovers are planning to resurrect the Temple of Jerusalem,
so the Jewish people can move back to their homeland once Reversion sets in. To
resurrect the Temple, they first need to blow up the Dome of the Rock, which is the shrine
that was built to cover up the ancient Temple. Once it is out of the way, and the Temple is
revealed, the red heifer will be offered. The myth says that the Messiah will then be
obliged to come. The plan was to hold Mendel at the ranch, cure him from his drug
addiction, and bring him to Jerusalem once the shrine was gone. Instead he escaped with
the help of Naomi, who got killed for doing so. Now the Messiah himself is murdered, the
Verbovers still want to go on with the plan. Landsman and Berko also find out that Alter
Litvak used to work for Hertz Shemets as an expert in demolition. Landsman and Berko
connect the dots and start the search for Alter Litvak.
While they are interrogating Alter Litvak, who tells them he got a mission from the
president of the United States to resurrect the temple of Jerusalem, they hear that the
Dome of the Rock has been attacked. While the Verbovers are partying, Bina tries to
arrest them. But when the American secret services show up, it is them who get arrested.
In the interrogation room, Landsman cuts a deal with Cashdollar. He will not tell anyone
about the involvement of the United States if they give him back his gun, badge, and all
the necessary papers to stay in Sitka after the Reversion. In addition, Cashdollar confesses
26
that his predecessor ordered for Naomi to be killed, but that they had nothing to do with
the murder of Mendel.
By the end of the novel, Berko‘s father admits helping Mendel Shpilman commit
suicide. He waited until Mendel was down on heroin, and shot him in the head. After this
surprising confession, the novel ends on a happier note and reminds us of a true
Hollywood story. Bina and Landsman get back together and they decide to tell the press
the whole story after all. An open but happy ending.
27
Hoofdstuk 3. Counterfactual history
To fully understand the meaning of the counterfactual history in The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union, this chapter will elaborate on counterfactual history as a research field. Theorists
and historians like Lubomír Doležel, Niall Ferguson and Hilary Dannenberg, who have
published several works on this subject, believe that counterfactual reasoning can be
useful in historical research. This chapter will try to point out the main characteristics of
counterfactual histories, in fictional and non-fictional settings, with a particular interest in
the difference between these fictional and non-fictional settings. In addition, this chapter
will also give an overview of the evolution of the use of counterfactual histories in
narrative texts.
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3.1 Differences between historical and fictional worlds
For me, history is the total of all possible histories.
[…] The only error, in my view, would be to choose
one of these histories to the exclusion of all others.
That was, and always will be,
the cardinal error of historicizing
(Braudel, cited in Doležel 2010, 33)
Counterfactual history, and history in general, is narrative in nature. Nevertheless, a
distinction between fictional and historical worlds should be made. The question Lubomír
Doležel asks himself is ―whether the possible worlds of history and fiction are identical in
their function and global structure or show some marked differences in these respects‖
(2010, 33). He believes that there are quite a number of differences, but according to him
the four most important ones are the functional differences, the basic structural
differences, the agential constellations and the treatment of incompleteness.
As for the functional differences between historical and fictional words, Doležel argues
that ―fictional worlds are imaginary alternates of the actual world,‖ while ―historical
worlds are cognitive models of the actual past‖ (2010, 33). In other words, history uses a
narrative framework for constructing an accurate image of the past without being
fictional. At the same time, every historical world remains, like its fictional counterpart, a
subjective construct. ―Its author is a person with his or her individual persuasions, scope
of knowledge and focus, ideological position, theoretical framework,‖ Doležel continues.
While this is undoubtedly true, people tend to rely more often on a historian‘s story rather
than on a fictional text dealing with the same subject.
One of the causes is the basic structural difference between historical and fictional
worlds. The historian can test his hypothesis to real and reliable sources, while a fictional
story is mainly based on the inventions of the writer‘s mind. In philosophical terms, this is
an epistemological concern: there is no way of knowing or justifying ―beliefs of what
might have happened. […] The merely possible is not something we can test, and it is not
something we can use the techniques of historians to analyze‖ (Bulhof 1999, 145).
29
Doležel states that ―the fiction makers are free to call into fictional existence any
conceivable world. The borderline between physically possible and physically impossible
worlds presents no obstruction to their imagination‖ (2010, 35). Historians on the other
hand are forced to use only physically possible worlds, which accounts for the second
difference between historical and fictional worlds.
There is also a major difference between the agents of fictional and historical worlds,
which bring us to the third difference, agential constellations. A peculiar genre in this
respect is historical fiction. One of its features is the interaction between fictional persons
and counterparts of historical persons. But precisely this feature makes the world of
historical fiction a fictional world and not a historical world. According to Doležel
―fiction makers practice a radically nonessentialist semantics; they can alter all, even the
basic, individuating properties of the actual-past persons when transposing them into a
fictional world.‖ On the other hand, ―the persons of historical worlds bear documented
properties‖ (Doležel 2010, 36-37). Because the traits of these historical characters are
based on documents, they can be incomplete and fragmented as opposed to fully
developed fictional characters.
The fourth and last major difference between fictional and historical world is their
specific treatment of this incompleteness. ―The fiction writer is free to vary the number,
extent, and functions of the gaps; his choices are determined by aesthetic (stylistic) and
semantic factors‖ (Doležel 2010, 37). The gaps in fictional texts are created by the writer,
as a part of the world he is creating. They are therefore ―ontic‖ in nature; they cannot be
filled because there is simply nothing to fill them with. In contrast, the lacunae in
historical worlds are ―espistemic‖ in nature; the gaps are the result of the limitations of
human knowledge. Once historians discover new elements concerning one of their
subjects, they can subsequently fill in the gaps. If the gaps cannot be filled, ―the historian
is challenged to ‗fill‘ them by plausible conjectures‖ (Doležel 2010, 39). When this
happens, they will clearly identify their speculations as mere speculations, and assign
them with a degree of probability by means of expressions like ―perhaps, it is possible, it
is probable, conceivably, […] ‖ (Trevor-Roper cited in Doležel 2010, 39) and so on.
30
3.1.1 Discourse level
Next to the four major differences, there is also a difference on the discourse-level
between the two types of worlds. Doležel explains that fictional worlds are ―products of
poiesis. By writing a text the author creates a fictional world that was not available prior
to this act‖ (2010, 41). Furthermore, ―fictional texts lack truth value; they are neither true
nor false‖ (Gottlob Frege, cited in Doležel 2010, 41), which will be an important
argument in our discussion about counterfactual history. Fictional texts are in a certain
sense ―liberated from truth valuation.‖ Historical worlds on the other hand are products of
―noesis, of knowledge acquisition.‖ They serve as models of the actual world and
therefore need to be true; they are constative (they describe a world that really existed)
while fictional texts are performative (they bring a new world into existence).
3.1.2 Counterfactual history as fiction
One of the most important points Doležel tries to make is that ―all worlds of
counterfactual history, whether constructed by historians or by fiction makers, whether
their function is cognitive or aesthetic, are semantically fictional‖ (Doležel 2010, 122 -
own emphasis). They cannot be seen as a representation of the past, because the
counterfactual history never existed. Counterfactual history always starts with a false
proposition, such as ―Martin Luther King was not killed,‖ ―The United States of America
did not intervene in World War II,‖ or ―Napoleon did not die at Sancta Helena but
escaped to America.‖ It can be likely, probable or plausible, but it will always be false.
But, ―the falseness of counterfactual statements about the past presupposes the existence
of factual, that is, true, statements about the past,‖ such as ―Martin Luther King was
killed.‖ There wouldn‘t be historical counterfacts without real historical facts.
However, if the counterfactual premise is situated within the construction of a fictional
world, it cannot be considered true or false any more. No truth conditions can be imposed
on fiction. The definition of fiction allows the fiction writer to freely create a world in his
imagination, without any constraints. It is up to him or her to make the world as fictional
or as reality-based as he or she wants to. It should however be noted that for the fictional
world to be convincing, the author should try to be consistent in his construction of that
31
fictional universe, even when he or she is free to start from any premise he or she wants.
This can be seen as the only constraint posed on a fiction writer while constructing his
fictional world.
As all of the differences between historical and fictional worlds show us, it all comes
down to ―the freedom of the fiction maker and the constraints imposed on the historian‖
(Doležel 2010, 39). But, according to Doležel it is important to understand that ―historical
reconstruction does not re-create the past in actuality but in represented possibility."
3.2 Historical fiction
As it was mentioned before, history in itself tends to be narrative in nature. It has always
been said that ―the historian‘s primary role is to impose a narrative order on the confusion
of past events‖ (Ferguson 1999, 64). In fact, one of the primary reasons why we think in a
counterfactual way is because we have a certain ―urge for narrative liberation from the
real world‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 110). In reality, this means imposing a new kind of
determinism on the past: ―the teleology of the traditional narrative form.‖ According to
Aldes Wurgaft, history could benefit from counterfactual history because of its ―ability to
show us possibilities beyond the horizon of teleology‖ (2010, 368).
The telos of history has always been the present; it is the ending-point in historical
discourse. In this respect, the historical story could also be written or narrated from the
end to the beginning, like in a traditional fictional narrative. But, as Ferguson states, ―the
past – like real-life chess, or indeed any other game – is different; it does not have a
predetermined end. There is no author, divine or otherwise; only characters. […] There is
no plot, only endings, since multiple events unfold simultaneously, some lasting only
moments, some extending far beyond and individual‘s life‖ (1999, 68). Musil also
believes in the non-teleological course of history: ―the end is unknown at the beginning of
the journey: there are no rails leading predictably into the future, no timetables with
destinations set out in black and white‖ (Ferguson 1999, 70).
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3.2.1 Fictional and fictionalized entities
Historical fiction is composed of two domains: ―[t]he first domain is made of fictional
entities that do not have counterparts in the actual past. The second domain, which is, in
fact, the defining feature of the genre, is constituted by fictional entities that have
counterparts in actual historical agents, historical events, past economic, political, and
cultural conditions, physical settings, and so on‖ (Doležel 2010, 84). Although both
domains are fictional, Doležel uses the terms ―fictional entities‖ and ―fictionalized
entities‖ for respectively the first and second domain. The fictional agents can be divided
into two other groups: a group of agents who bear the name of a historical person who
really existed, and a group that does not have that privilege. The proper names have
obtained a peculiar status in this respect: they do not simply refer to the historical person
and they are not just a name, but they assign all the connotations of this historical person
to the fictional character, even when this character has almost nothing to do with the real
historical figure.
3.2.2 Degrees of historical-knowledge recovery
According to Doležel there are ―three degrees of historical-knowledge recovery in the
reception of historical fiction.‖ The first degree of historical-knowledge recovery occurs
when the author of the historical fiction only invokes known knowledge of the past. This
way the reader can distinguish real from fictional entities and fictional from fictionalized
entities. Therefore the reader can evaluate the history as ―accurate, mythologizing,
legendary or counterfactual.‖ The second degree takes place when the reader wants to
know more about the fictional world described in the text. Inspired by the work of
historical fiction the reader will conduct further research and expand his knowledge of the
subject. The third and last degree occurs when ―the fictional world is confronted with
contemporary historical worlds that reconstruct the same period, events, and so on‖ (2010,
86). This last method treats fictional works as historical documents and it constrains the
specific freedom of fiction. Historical fiction is in no way useful to give an adequate
historical (and therefore true) view of the actual past.
33
3.2.3 Crossing borders
In postmodern fiction, authors do not aspire to give an accurate account of the past. Their
actual aim is to transgress the borders of history and deliver alternative histories. Doležel
states the following:
In this respect, and in this respect only, postmodern historical fiction is like falsified
history, the major distinction between them being that falsified history serves
perverse political purposes, while postmodern historical fiction is an aesthetic game
of unleashed imagination. The ultimate result is the creation of a richer, more
varied, often more exciting past (2010, 88).
Chabon crosses the borders between genres with great ease, but with The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union he proves he an also transgress the borders of history. His
counterfactual history undoubtedly creates a ―richer, more varied, often more exciting
past,‖ as Doležel notes.
3.3 Counterfactual thinking
Counterfactual thinking has gained recognition in the past decades. It is now seen as a
fundamental characteristic of the human mind, for example by Fauconnier and Turner
who state that ―our species has an extraordinary ability to operate mentally on the unreal‖
(cited in Dannenberg 2008, 110). Counterfactual thinking enables us to construct
alternative scenarios for what really happened and by doing so to discover the importance
of a particular event in our lives or in world history. The phenomenon appears in most
instances in the form of counterfactual conditionals, e.g. ‗If he had told me what he knew,
I wouldn‘t have made the wrong decision‘ or ‗If she had studied more, she wouldn‘t have
failed the test.‘ They express a certain need of humans to ―ponder possible actions that
might have prevented an actual event from happening or brought about a different actual
event‖ (Doležel 2010, 102). We can think counterfactually before acting, considering the
possible outcomes of our actions before they have happened, or after, evaluating what has
happened.
34
In the most basic definition, a counterfactual is generated by ―creating a nonfactual or
false antecedent. This is done by mentally mutating or ‗undoing‘ a real-world event in the
past to produce an outcome or consequent contrary to reality‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 111).
The term ‗outcome‘ or ‗consequent‘ indicates the result of the change after a period of
time. In addition, people tend to mentally change an extraordinary experience more
spontaneously than an everyday event. Therefore, Dannenberg states, ―counterfactuals are
often generated in dramatic or exceptional situations, and traumatic or negative outcomes
in particular tend to trigger counterfactuals‖ (2008, 111). In this respect, it is a small step
from changing the outcome of a personal experience to altering a historical event.
Furthermore, ―negative events are also more likely to capture the attention […] than
positive ones‖ (Olson, Roese and Deibert, cited in Dannenberg 2008, 125). This is what is
called ‗negative coincidence.‘ In this way counterfactuals can ―intensify the reader‘s
emotional response to tragic plots.‖ But it can also be the other way around: tragic plots
are also more likely to generate counterfactual ―replotting‖ by the reader, ―even if no
counterfactual is articulated in the fictional discourse‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 126).
3.3.1 Types of counterfactuals
There are of course different types of counterfactuals. One of the main distinctions that
can be made is the difference between downward and upward counterfactuals. Downward
counterfactuals are those which imagine a worse outcome than in reality, and upward
counterfactuals invent a better outcome, an improvement of reality. Next to this first
difference, a distinction can also be made between ―self-focus‖ and ―external focus.‖ They
both refer to a counterfactual ―in which the self is the central focus but either as a
perpetrator (self-focus) or as a victim (external) of circumstances‖ (Dannenberg 2008,
112). A third distinction, between ―behavioral‖ and ―characterological counterfactuals,‖
indicates whether ―a person‘s behavior or character is the focus of the counterfactual
mutation.‖ Characterological counterfactuals ―merely condemn the self rather than
provide insight into specific actions by which the outcome might be changed‖ (Mc
Mullen, Markman, and Gavanski, cited in Dannenberg 2008, 112). However, in
counterfactual fiction this distinction will be one between ―story and character-based
counterfactuals.‖
35
It is not difficult to imagine that certain emotions accompany counterfactual premises.
Emotions like satisfaction and regret are the most frequent ones. According to
Dannenberg, ―upward counterfactuals constructing a better possible world stimulate
regret, whereas downward counterfactuals of a world that could have been much worse
create satisfaction‖ (2008, 112). Still, regret remains prevalent because people tend to
ponder more on something they did not do, than on something they actually did do.
Because this feeling is so frequent, there are different types of regret. Two of them are
―hot regret‖ and ―wistful regret.‖ This distinction depends on whether ―regret is
experienced intensely but briefly in response to a transiently important event that is then
quickly forgotten or whether a deeper emotion is harbored as a result of a long-term
preoccupation with ‗roads not taken‘ in life‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 113).
3.3.2 Causality
In addition to the emotions, causality is also a very important factor in counterfactual
thinking. Because counterfactual statements cannot be empirically tested, the discovery of
causal relationships is of utmost importance. According to Bulhof, ―cause and
counterfactuals are in fact a two-way street:‖ we use a counterfactual to prove that
something was in fact the cause of something else, and we use the fact that something was
a cause of something else to prove the truth of the counterfactual (1999, 150).
Furthermore, Aldes Wurgaft notes that Walter Benjamin was one of the first to understand
that a historian should not ―tell the sequences like counting the beads of a rosary‖ but
should understand the present in relationship to the past. ―It is precisely such a
relationship between past and present that counterfactual history can help us to cultivate,‖
states Aldes Wurgaft (2010, 378).
Paradoxically enough, Benjamin also believed that historical materialism - which he
understood as a critical engagement with the past - should ―break those causal connections
that historicism establishes between different historical moments.‖ However, Benjamin
seems to mean that historians should try to appreciate the ―present-ness‖ of a historical
moment, disconnected from the previous knowledge they have about the outcome.
According to Benjamin, a specific moment in history bears its own meaning within itself,
it is a ―monad.‖ It should only be interpreted with reference to the moment itself and the
36
interpreting historian. According to Aldes Wurgaft, Benjamin therefore proposes a ―total
suspension of causal considerations.‖ This is in stark contrast with counterfactual history,
which ultimate aim is to learn more about causal relations (Aldes Wurgaft 2010, 380).
As Bulhof states, ―the study of history is not merely a study of what happened. It is a
study of why something happened‖ (Bulhof 1999, 147). If we would only focus on what
happened, we would miss the causes and therefore the importance of key events. We
would only have a juxtaposition of different events in history. Counterfactuals are
therefore used to reveal certain causal relationships within history. Dannenberg states that
[t]he use of causally based arguments within counterfactuals is a key strategy in the
creation of immersive narrative, which simulates real-world cognitive explanatory
patterns in the presentation of fictional events. Many counterfactuals thus satisfy the
basic human cognitive desire for systems of causal connection, and this can be seen
as a contributory factor to the significance of their pervasive presence in people‘s
mental lives. Counterfactuals are thus deeply meaningful mental operations
precisely because they enable the human mind to construct cogent causal
connections within narrative sequences that make sense of life (Dannenberg 2008,
114).
Some historians might be more careful about causality because they want to believe
that their subjects were motivated by inscrutable, personal decisions rather than them
being another element in an endless causal chain. According to Aldes Wurgaft, ―we want
to emphasize the agentive sides of our protagonists, never reducing their ideas to mere
reflexes of social and cultural conditions‖ (2010, 365).
Worlds which are constructed in a logical and causal way will make the reader believe
that the fictional world is actually the real world, because the discovery of causal links is
fundamental in the human process of making sense of things. In addition to this,
imagining that things could have gone differently only adds to the ―apparent reality of
actual events in the fictional world, making it seem to be an autonomous system as
opposed to fictional construct‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 122). This results in an important
difference between discursive and narrative forms of counterfactual fiction. The
discursive forms, ―manifest in the counterfactual essay, seek historically logical and
closed causal chains‖ while the narrative forms ―deal with more entertaining aspects of
counterfactual speculation‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 117).
37
Counterfactual historical worlds in narrative fiction are completely autonomous worlds.
The narrator believes that the fictional world he describes is real, because for him it is the
actual world. In most fictional narrative discourse the counterfactual world is therefore not
a hypothesis but a fact. Because of this, the narrator does not elaborate on any details
about the fictional past. For him history is history, and he does not need the history of his
fictional universe to tell the story he wants to tell; especially when the story is set in the
present, the past does not really matter. So in many cases the details about the historical
counterfactual are only implied by the narrator, because the main focus is on the narrative
plot. In other words, the narrators tend to withhold the causal links that lead to the
fictional present. This is a powerful narrative creation because it plays with the reader‘s
desire for causal explanation. The reader enters the story in medias res and has to try to
figure out the counterfactual past that leads to the fictional present. It is therefore the
reader who ―brings the historical frames to the text and undertakes the cognitive
operations of differentiation and identification of transworld relations between the explicit
counterfactual world of the text and the implicit real-world one from which it deviates‖
(Dannenberg 2008, 127-128).
3.3.3 Plausibility
According to some logicians counterfactuals should be evaluated on the basis of their
plausibility and not their truth value. Tim De Mey and Erik Weber for example state that
most professional historians try to follow a certain set of rules which enhances the
plausibility of their reasoning. One of the most established rules is the ―minimal-rewrite-
of-history rule‖ which makes the historians ―specify antecedents that require altering as
few well-established historical facts as possible‖ (De Mey and Weber 2003, 28).
Rescher and Adams therefore suggest ―arranging counterfactuals on a scale defined by
the degree of their probability in the actual world‖ (cited in Doležel 2010, 103). David
Lewis on the other hand believes that counterfactual conditionals can be considered true
―at some possible world different from the actual world‖ (Doležel 2010, 103). But since
this line of thought is not generally accepted and there would be no way of verifying the
38
plausibility of such a conditional, we will restrict ourselves to the typology proposed by
Doležel, based on the premise of Rescher and Adams.
The continuum ranges from values one to zero. Value one stands for fully plausible
counterfactual conditionals and value zero for implausible counterfactuals. The four most
important points on the scale are
(1) ―Fully plausible counterfactuals are confirmed by hard evidence from the actual world: ‗If
Oswald did not kill Kennedy, then someone else did.‘ It is a historical fact that President
Kennedy was killed. If the main suspect, Oswald, did not commit the crime, then somebody
else did.‖
(2) ―Plausible counterfactuals are confirmed by some evidence from the actual world: ‗If Hitler
had won the war, the Germans would have settled the Slavic East.‘ Historical evidence of
existing plans and experimental resettlements makes it highly probable that the Nazis would
have pursued this course of action had they achieved victory in World War II.‖
(3) ―Implausible counterfactuals have a consequent that is highly improbable in the actual
world: ‗If Oswald did not kill Kennedy, somebody else would have‘ The idea that Kennedy‘s
life had to end by his being killed is quite far-fetched. […]‖
(4) ―Totally implausible counterfactuals gave a consequent of zero probability. […] The most
typical case of this kind is anachronisms that violate the chronology of events: ‗If Napoleon
had had a couple of tanks he would have won the battle of Waterloo‘‖ (Doležel 2010, 103-
104).
Another distinction which can influence the plausibility of the counterfactual history is
the distinction between ―short-term‖ counterfactuals and ―long-term‖ counterfactuals.
Short-term counterfactuals stand for alterations of one particular event and the immediate
possible consequences. Long-term counterfactuals on the other hand consider the
consequences of the alteration after a certain period of time. However, the more time
passes after the adjustment, the more we start speculating and the less we are sure of our
speculations. Nevertheless, especially the long-term counterfactuals will be of great
importance to our research question since Michael Chabon constructs a possible world
decades after the counterfactual decision to transfer the European Jews to Alaska.
39
3.4 Counterfactual fiction
Counterfactual thinking and counterfactual fiction are most frequently mentioned while
discussing science fiction. Science fiction and counterfactual historical narratives are seen
as alternate, or alternative history. Alternate history ―is sometimes used in contradiction to
‗parallel history‘ or ‗parallel worlds‘ to refer to a frame in which many alternate worlds
can be simultaneously held, sometimes interacting with each other‖ (Dannenberg 2008,
117). The big difference however between science fiction and counterfactual historical
fiction is that ―science fiction projects a future that differs substantially from the actuality
of the author‘s present; counterfactual historical fiction modifies the past to project a
present that differs substantially from the actual state of affairs‖ (Doležel 2010, 107).
A special relationship between science fiction, which invents a future world, and
counterfactual history, which invents a past world, is created when the reader reads a
science fiction book at a moment in time after the fictional future time of the text. Then
the fictional future world becomes a counterfactual world of the past. An example of this
is Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Since 1985 this text cannot longer be seen as a
possible future world but has to be understood as a counterfactual historical narrative.
Counterfactuals are especially popular in the form of stories about time travelers. Time
travelers often create the causal links between the multiple worlds of the text. In most
science fiction stories their actions change an element of the past which generates a
different outcome in the course of history. One of the most remarkable examples in this
respect is Ray Bradbury‘s A Sound of Thunder, which tells the story of a time traveler
who accidentally steps on a prehistoric butterfly and thus changes the entire course of
history. Apparently butterflies are a popular motif in this specific field of research,
because in chaos theory it is assumed that one beat of a butterfly wing can, under the right
conditions, cause a storm after a certain period of time. In other words, small causes can
have big consequences. This phenomenon is called ‗the butterfly effect‘.
‗Chaos‘ in chaos theory does not stand for anarchy; as Ferguson notes, ―it does not
mean that there are no laws in the natural world‖ (1999, 77). Everything that happens in
40
the world only seems chaotic because the laws are so complex; it is impossible for anyone
to correctly predict what will happen in the future. Small events can have huge
consequences, which are in most cases unpredictable. Although it is impossible to predict
the future and everything seems chaotic, there is still a certain structure which governs this
world. Events are always triggered by ―initial conditions.‖ Precisely these conditions are
the subject matter of counterfactual history. ―There are countless possible conditions; and
in order to be able to examine the possibilities in our search for the true conditions of a
trend, we have all the time to try to imagine conditions under which the trend in question
would disappear‖ (Popper, cited in Ferguson 1999, 80).
When we discuss science fiction and counterfactual history, the possibility of multiple
worlds comes to mind. According to Dannenberg, ―there are single and multiple-world
forms of ontological hierarchy, depending on whether the ontological system of the
fictional world admits the possibility that more than one world can be actual‖ (2008, 120).
She distinguishes three main tendencies:
(5) ―The realist ontological hierarchy.‖ In reality there is only one world, so in the realist
ontological hierarchy there can also be only one world. The counterfactual world is therefore
the only real world of the text.
(6) ―The semirealist ontological hierarchy.‖ A very good example of this is science fiction.
There can be several real worlds within the text, but they are connected in a plausible and
causal way.
(7) ―The antirealist ontological hierarchy.‖ Again, there are several actual worlds, but this time
they are not interconnected in a logical way. Analogical relationships instead of causal
relationships determine the different worlds.
Next to the difference between science fiction and counterfactual fiction, Doležel also
directs our attention to the differences between the historical aspect and the fictional
aspect of counterfactual fiction. I will use examples from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
to clarify Doležel‘s prototypical differences. The first difference Doležel proposes can
also be read as a short definition of the genre of counterfactual historical fiction: ―[t]he
fictional world deviates from the historical world because at some point in the near or
distant past an event contrary to well-attested historical facts occurred.‖ For example, in
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the proposal by Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the
Interior under Roosevelt, to help the refugees from Hitler‘s Europe and bring them to
Alaska was passed instead of turned down. Secondly, ―the fictional world is characterized
41
by a social and political order that is substantially different from the order of the
corresponding historical world.‖ For example, in 1948 the three-month-old republic of
Israel was destroyed. And thirdly, ―the fictional world is furnished by objects that are not
found in the actual historical world.‖ In the case of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, we
can think of the supposedly inhuman prison in Ellensburg, Washington, and the Jewish
settlement in Sitka.
3.4.1 Transworld identity
When characters have counterparts in another world, the term ‗transworld identity‘ is
used. Here we can observe another difference between science fiction and counterfactual
history. Dannenberg states that ―in realist fiction counterparts are hypothetical versions of
characters constructed by counterfactual speculations,‖ while ―in science fiction
counterparts can be alternate versions of a fictional character in a transworld journey
narrative,‖ and ―in historical counterfactuals a counterfactual historical figure‘s
counterpart is located in real-world history.‖ Characterological counterfactuals, which
have been discussed before, ―automatically generate different character versions, since the
antecedent itself concerns a hypothetical alteration in character.‖ Therefore,
characterological counterfactuals do not produce ―full transworld identicality between a
character and his or her counterfactual counterpart‖ (2008, 121-122).
3.4.2 Similarities traditional fiction
Another characteristic aspect of counterfactual historical fiction is that the fictional
characters - not the fictionalized characters - act within a detective story, adventure story
or science-fiction story, strikingly similar to their counterparts in traditional fiction.
Aspects like ―personal relationships, struggles and quests‖ are treated with equal
importance. But these narrative patterns tend to diminish the probability of the historical
setting. ―The most prominent of these narrative stories,‖ according to Doležel, ―is the
story of the rebel and his failure.‖ This will become even more clear when we will discuss
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and in particular the adventures and life of the main
character, detective Meyer Landsman.
42
3.4.3 Popular literature
All the previous characteristics ―link counterfactual historical fiction closely to popular
literature‖ (Doležel 2010, 110). This is in all probability one of the reasons why
counterfactual history as a research subject within the human sciences is not regarded
highly. As E.H. Carr famously but dismissively put it in the most widely read modern plea
against the use of counterfactuals What is History?, historians frequently regard
counterfactual history as ―a mere parlour-game with the might-have-beens of history, a
red herring.‖ E.P.Thompson has even gone so far as to compare counterfactual fictions as
―mere ‗Geschichtswissenschlopff’, unhistorical shit‖ (Ferguson 1999, 4-5).
3.5 Counterfactual history
It may be a bad habit to rewrite history
as it never was, to alter the course of major events
so as to imagine what might have happened.
But although a sleight-of-hand like this may be an
illusion, it is not pointless. In its own way, it
measures the weight of events, episodes and actors
who were believed, or believed themselves,
to be responsible for the entire course of history.
(Fernand Braudel, cited in Doležel 2010, 116-7)
Doležel observes that ―actual human history drags counterfactual history along as its
shadow.‖ Notwithstanding, the use of counterfactual and alternative conditionals have
proven their usefulness if we want to understand the course of history completely.
According to Johannes Bulhof, ―they help identify causes and hence help explain events
in history. They are used to defend judgments about people, and to highlight the
importance of particular events‖ (1999, 145 – own emphasis). It is only when we assess
what historical characters could or could not have done differently that we can describe
them as for example a good or bad leader.
43
If we use modal arguments to support our assessments about important causes, it is
easy to see that we would use them to make judgments in history. We judge the
actions of people, as well as the people themselves, not merely by what they did, but
by what they could have done (Bulhof 1999, 157).
In a way counterfactuals provide the past with all its possibilities and monitor how
history would have proceeded in case of any one of these possibilities. However,
historians can never gather all the possible alternatives and therefore understand the
complete human history. Nevertheless, as it was discussed earlier, it remains crucial to
understand the importance of the plausibility of these possibilities. History simply cannot
work with, for example, anachronisms, as in the example of Napoleon‘s tanks.
Another kind of counterfactual history which has ―hardly or any cognitive
significance‖ is purely imaginary counterfactual history. These histories appeared very
frequently in the postmodern era. The traditional historical novel
fills in the ‗dark areas‘ of history, that is, those aspects about which the ‗official‘
record has nothing to report without contravening actual written history. By
contrast, the postmodernist use of history and of real-world historical figures
involves stark contradiction of the historical record, illicit merging of history and
the fantastic, and the use of blatant anachronisms. […] Either it supplements the
historical record, claiming to restore what has been lost or suppressed; or it
displaces official history altogether (Dannenberg 2008, 118).
According to Collins, ―the counterfactual imagination is in fact rather limited‖ (2007,
248). Apparently counterfactuals can be categorized in only a few types. Collins refers to
the work of Brian Lowe, who studied five hundred books within the counterfactual history
genre. His findings are as following:
32% of the books are of military origin: ―if a war of battle had gone differently;‖
25% political: ―if a close election or legislative decision had gone differently;‖
15% individual leadership: ―if a famous individual had died sooner, or lived
longer;‖
11% religious: ―if a religious leader like Luther had died at a different time;‖
7% technological: ―if a particular technology had or had not been invented;‖
6% migration: ―if a particular migration had not happened;‖
4% miscellaneous
(Collins 2007, 248)
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It is striking that economic changes are not a subject of counterfactuals. This can be
explained by the fact that economic processes cannot be pinpointed to one specific
historical event, but rather as the outcome of a concurrence of different conditions.
The method used for constructing a counterfactual world of the past is quite simple:
―take counterparts of historical persons and get them involved in nonfactual,
undocumented, imaginary political and/or military actions.‖ (Doležel 2010, 114)
However, the individual is only interesting if he or she is or was a ―leader of social,
historically relevant acting or as an occasional agent of historically significant events.‖
But even then it is unlikely that one single person is the single cause of a great event.
A famous example in this respect is the theory of Cleopatra‘s nose. It is a reductive
theory that emphasizes a trivial change with enormous consequences. Blaise Pascal
believed that if Cleopatra had had an uglier nose and therefore a less seductive appearance
and personality, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony would not have been romantically
interested in her. Marc Antony would not have lost the Battle of Actium; he would not
have killed himself in despair; Cleopatra would not have killed herself and Egypt would
have remained most powerful, instead of being assimilated in the Roman Empire. Another
example could be the statement of Peter Gray, who believed that psychoanalysis ―would
have been taken more seriously if it‘s founder had not been a Jew‖ (Ferguson 1999, 15).
These examples are very frequently used to demonstrate the uselessness of counterfactual
reasoning by emphasizing its humorous connotation.
Randall Collins seems to be quite cagey towards counterfactual historians. He believes
that they base their arguments on only two assumptions. The first one is that there are two
kinds of ―arenas‖ in society: one which has rapid turning points, like the military, political
and religious field, and one which has not, like the economic, cultural and organizational
field. Furthermore, the first ―arena‖ tends to dominate the second one. The second
assumption historians make according to Collins is that they believe that ―political
patterns are determined by single, dramatic events (a military victory, an election, the
presence of a particular leader), and that these political patterns, once set, determine
economic patterns and, presumably, cultural ones‖ (2007, 250). Collins for his own part
believes that ―the notion that history comes to a stop, that everything can be frozen at a
45
particular moment makes for dramatic storytelling, but it is a rhetorical device, not a
serious sociological analysis.‖ He notes that historians make two mistakes in this respect:
they assume that ―casual conditions are pinpointed, rather than spread out across a wide
range of situations that make up a structural pattern, and they assume that causality is
rigidly linear rather than stochastic‖ (Collins 2007, 252).
3.5.1 Individuality
Another trope which historians frequently use is the historical individual who (by being
killed or not being killed) makes all the difference. Collins notes that by using this trope
they assume that ―we already know what that individual will do, the individual is a fixed
essence.‖ Because we know the qualities which these historical persons had before they
died or were killed, we assume that these qualities would have dominated the rest of their
lives too. We assign the counterfactual Hitler, Churchill and Luther with so-called
―Hitleresque, Churchillian or Lutheran‖ qualities. Collins presents three arguments against
this method:
(1) ―Individuals play roles in large-scales public processes that are not very unique.‖
(2) ―Charisma arises in troubled times, in conditions of social crisis, in disruption of the old
social order.‖ In fact, charisma is a means of social movement mobilization. There is no
charisma without a crowd. The speaker receives his energy from the crowd and then
channels it back into the crowd. Therefore, ―charismatic leaders are replaceable.‖
(3) ―All individuals, not just charismatic leaders, are socially formed. The individual decision
has consequences only because it takes place in the midst of social structures.‖ (Collins
2007, 256-259)
The Russian formalist theorist Osip Brik even believed that ―if Cervantes had not lived,
nevertheless Don Quixote would still have been written.‖ According to the formalist
theory, literary works are a result of a concurrence of plots and rhetorical tropes, and these
devices travel from text to text. Authors use these devices because they have come to
them through history and tradition. They change and adapt them to their will but in the
end they remain the same (Collins 2007, 259).
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This is not only the case with literary works but also with mental thoughts. Politicians‘
thoughts are ―part of a longer chain of symbolic utterances.‖ The thoughts consist of parts
of conversations which the particular politician had with other persons, with himself, and
conversations he or she will have in the future. According to Collins, ―a politician
considers a decision by using concepts circulating in a social network; he or she
formulates ideas by a personal style of thinking that has been shaped by the emotional
energies of his or her special trajectory through a series of interaction ritual chains‖
(Collins 2007, 261-262).
3.5.2 Subjectivity
Not only the imagination has its influence on the counterfacts, as ―the author‘s
contemporary political and religious preoccupations‖ (Ferguson 1999, 11) play an
important part as well. Some instances tell us more about the modern views on history
than about the actual history as it was. Ferguson calls this ―retrospective wishful thinking‖
(1999, 11). According to Aldes Wurgaft, historians who dedicate their work to the life of
Walter Benjamin tend ―to save him from his misfortune and mistakes for their own,
essentially ahistorical reasons, and their use of counterfactuals usually says more about
their own personal motivations than about Benjamin himself‖ (2010, 368).
According to Collingwood, ―historians could write only from the vantage point, and
with the prejudices of their own present‖ (Ferguson 1999, 49-50). This can be seen as a
mild form of determinism - which counterfactual history tries to escape - but it definitely
―excluded any discussion of counterfactual alternatives.‖ In the 1950s and 1960s there
was even a close relationship between anti-determinism in historical research and political
conservatism. E.H. Carr for example was known to be a socialist historian, which would
explain his aversion of counterfactual history and defense of determinism. He believed
that ―everything that happened has a cause or causes, and could not have happened
differently unless something in the cause or causes had also been different‖ (Ferguson
1999, 53). But this statement paradoxically shows his acceptance of counterfactual
history. As if he suddenly discovered this ambiguity in his course of thought, he continues
by stating that ―the historian‘s task is simply to explain why one course was eventually
47
chosen rather than another and to explain what did happen and why‖ (Ferguson 1999, 54).
Nevertheless, even Carr could not help using a counterfactual conditional when he
thought of whether ―Lenin, if he had lived through the twenties and thirties in the full
possession of his faculties, would have acted less tyrannically‖ (Ferguson 1999, 55).
It has however been proven that counterfactual history can help us to avoid the ―pitfall
of historical analysis‖ which Michael André Bernstein and Gary Saul Morson call
―backshadowing.‖ It is ―the tendency to see the historical events only in light of their
eventual denouement carried to the degree that a moment‘s primary significance is simply
its contributions to a later, more ‗critical‘ moment: every story is dominated by one such
telos.‖ It is again very clear that certain historians which are in favor of the use of
counterfactuals are so because of their aversion of the teleology imposed on history. It
might be true that, because we already know the consequences of a certain historical
event, it is almost impossible to see that historical event disconnected from the outcome.
But Bernstein and Morson propose ―sideshadowing‖ as a countermeasure to
backshadowing. Historians can ―sideshadow‖ by ―foregrounding a specific event by
emphasizing the possible trajectories that extend from it. Sideshadowing restores a sense
of possibility even to a story whose outcome we already know‖ (Aldes Wurgaft 2010,
370).
3.5.3 Constraints
One possible problem which we have already briefly mentioned, arises when fictional
propositions about the past are considered as real historical evidence. The questions which
surfaces in Doležel‘s exposition is whether ―fictions provide knowledge, and if so, under
what conditions?‖ Some believe that fiction is a true representation of the world and
therefore communicates ―knowledge about human affairs, the human psyche and human
history‖ (Doležel 2010, 124). But the contrary has been argued. Niall Ferguson‘s
collection (1999), according to Doležel ―the foundational work of the new conception of
counterfactual history‖, has formulated a list of constraints for counterfactual propositions
to be submitted to. They strive to ―tame fictionality‖ and aim for a high cognitive value of
the counterfactuals.
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The constraints are formulated on the basis of three criteria. First of all, ―the
counterfactual has to be ‗plausible,‘ ‗probable,‘ or ‗credible.‘‖ Anachronisms should be
avoided. Secondly, ―the plausibility or probability of a counterfactual has to be
determined in its appropriate context, that is, the context preceding the actual historical
event. The historian must place him- or herself in the position of the contemporaries to
whom the various possible alternatives were still available, for whom the selection was
not closed by the actualization of one of them.‖ And thirdly, ―the possible alternatives
have to be preserved in some sort of record‖ (Doležel 2010, 125). Only those alternatives
that were probable in the past are worth considering.
Therefore, Ferguson is not in favor of long-term counterfactuals, for they are a clear
example of ―unconstrained imagination.‖ The best type of counterfact, according to
Ferguson, is one which refers to an action that was actually considered - and recorded -
but not performed, by prevention or failure. For example, the counterfactual ―What if Nazi
Germany had defeated the Soviet Union?‖ can be supported by ―German plans for the
Germanization of Central and Eastern Europe and from experimental ‗ethnic cleansing‘
that was actually carried out in Poland‖ (Doležel 2010, 125). When the right
counterfactual conditions are found, Ferguson believes they need to be used in order to
say anything about the past ―without invoking covering laws, if only to test our causal
hypothesis‖ (Ferguson 1999, 81). They are not mere fantasy, ―they are simulations based
on calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world
(hence ‗virtual history‘)‖ (Ferguson 1999, 85).
The past was once the future, and people from the past must have thought about what
the future would bring, just like we do. They must have considered multiple possibilities,
just like we do. And some of them must have written some of these possibilities down. Of
course we know that only one of their possibilities has come true, but for contemporaries
all the possibilities were equally possible. Exactly those alternatives are useful in
understanding the past and offer an additional cognitive value, according to Ferguson.
Furthermore, we should ―attach equal significance to all the outcomes thought about,‖ just
as they did. We should even assign more importance to outcomes which they did
anticipate than those which they did not anticipate. But, we should always keep in mind
49
that ―what actually happened was often not the outcome which the majority of informed
contemporaries saw as the most likely‖ (Ferguson 1999, 88).
Putting all of the points previously discussed together, the main question is which
counterfactual questions should be asked. We can argue that counterfactual assertions can
only be used in historiography when they are constructed with the help of a ―controlled
imagination.‖ Only then can they acquire a sufficient cognitive value. Alternative worlds
formulated with uncontrolled and free imagination should therefore not be used as
historical evidence, but can nevertheless work within a fictional framework, as, for
example, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. But as we will see further on, the
background story of this book can be considered as much more than just fiction, for the
intention of Harold Ickes was real - and recorded. There are nevertheless a large number
of possible counterfactual questions that can be asked. However, as we have seen, in
practice there is only a small amount of questions that would be useful when asked.
3.6 Evolution of counterfactuals in narrative discourse
In contrast to the other two authors whose works were used as the basis for this chapter on
counterfactual history, Hillary Dannenberg (2008) provides us with an overview of the
evolution and history of counterfactuals in narrative texts. Her aim is to show her readers
that counterfactuals can have various functions within a text and that those functions
evolved together with the evolution of narrative texts themselves. Counterfactuals only
started to appear when the novel had established itself as the dominant literary genre. In
Renaissance fiction counterfactuals were merely used as a rhetorical device in speeches.
From the eighteenth century onwards however, they were increasingly used as ―a key
realist strategy both in the representation of characters‘ consciousness and in
heterodiegetic narration‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 137). However, after a while - especially in
the twentieth century - counterfactuals were used autonomously in the context of alternate
history, to contradict a historical fact. When science fiction then became a full genre,
counterfactuals abandoned their use as ―a prop of realism‖ once and for all.
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In Renaissance texts counterfactuals mostly appeared in speeches of the characters.
They were only used to prove the impressive power of the gods and the pointlessness of
counterfactuals. The Renaissance authors and readers still believed in the teleological
nature of history; history could not have enfolded itself in any other way. You simply had
to accept the authority of the gods. However, the counterfactuals were also very
frequently used to ―highlight the intellectual and rhetorical sophistication of key
characters and to focus the attention on the role of individual characters‘ actions within
the overall development of the plot‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 183). Although the plot remained
highly deterministic, the ability to think in a counterfactual way was proof of an
intellectual and enlightened mind.
One of the forms in which counterfactuals were used by the characters in the eighteenth
century was the fictional autobiographic narrative. Self-focused counterfactuals are used
to make the cognitive processes of the autobiographical character more visible. They
formulate both ―short-term responses to exceptional circumstances and long-term
evaluations of ‗roads not taken.‘‖ Dannenberg observes that the example of Richardson‘s
Pamela is very remarkable in this respect. The work in itself is very class-conscious, and
as a result of this Richardson only gives Mr. B. ―the rhetorical sophistication of extensive
counterfactualizing‖ (2008, 187). This seems to agree with what we discussed earlier, the
fact that the ability to think in a counterfactual way was proof of an intellectual and
educated mind. In Clarissa, which was published about eight years later, Richardson gives
both the heroine Clarissa and Anna Howe, both educated and articulate young women, the
ability to counterfactualize.
After a while the narrators started to articulate the counterfactual thoughts instead of
the characters. Henry Fielding was one of the first to experiment with this. A large part of
his ―overt heterodiegetic narratorial style‖ consisted of externally focused counterfactuals.
Most of the counterfactuals, in for example Tom Jones, appear in the form of asides,
commenting on possible alternative branches in the action. These subsidiary
counterfactuals have a ―cumulative effect:‖ ―they subtly reinforce the comparative
actuality (reality) of the narrative world in contradistinction to less actual possibilities; by
sketching unactualized possibilities, they assert that events ‗really did happen‘ like this
51
and not in any other way‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 190). Next to this Fielding also cleverly
uses counterfactuals to ―foreground his role as world-creating author.‖
Counterfactuals become more and more functional in the nineteenth century. Thomas
Hardy, for example, uses upward counterfactuals to ―intensify the sense of tragedy‖
(Dannenberg 2008, 199). This is especially striking in his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Tess already imagines a different outcome for the tragic love story between her and Angel
Clare at the very beginning of the novel. It is only a very brief counterfactual thought,
which will be elaborated once they finally do meet each other, but it already offers the
reader the possibility to create an alternative course of events. Like in most of Thomas
Hardy‘s works, the novel is full of missed opportunities which invite the reader to
construct a happier outcome, but especially the one at the beginning leaves its impression
on the rest of the tragic plot.
In the nineteenth and twentieth century the belief in the ―divinely preordained course‖
of history is abandoned, and as a result the use of counterfactuals drastically increases.
The thought that history could have been ―radically different‖ prevails. The first novels in
the nineteenth century who employ alternate histories are of course still cautious. They
still find themselves within the realm of realism and ―do not attempt to construct fully
autonomous alternate worlds‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 200). As a result there is always a link
to actual history present. Dannenberg states that counterfactual history was then
considered as a sort of ―secret history‖ within the lager official history. In due time the
counterfactuals were being narrated as actual events and their alternative nature was no
longer emphasized, for example in Edmund Lawrence‘s It May Happen Yet: A Tale of
Bonaparte’s Invasion of England.
The more radical experiments with alternate historical worlds are reserved for the genre
of science fiction in the beginning of the twentieth century. One of its main characteristics
is the construction of multiple possible worlds in one text, as we have seen before.
Dannenberg states that ―real-world history is therefore represented as just one of many
equally actual alternative‖ (2008, 205).
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Another area of research which evolved out of the growing interest in counterfactuals
was historiographic metafiction. Especially Linda Hutcheon wrote renowned works about
the subject. Historiographic metafiction concerns itself with historiographic referentiality
and with the fact that we cannot access what has happened in the past any more. As Julian
Barnes states, the past is ―a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat‖
(Barnes, cited in Dannenberg 2008, 218). According to Hutcheon, history and fiction are
both discourses and because they both write the past, they ultimately also construct it.
Because of its constructed character, history therefore loses a part of its truth value.
However, ―Hutcheon does not deny actual existence to the past; she does not reduce it to
the status of the text‖ (Doležel 2010, 89).
Some historiographic metafictions ―embed multiple alternate historical narratives or
counterfactual biographies of real-world historical figures within the text‖ (Dannenberg
2008, 218). The main difference between normal counterfactual histories used in science
fiction and historiographic metafiction, is that the latter uses them to prove to the reader
that one particular historical character cannot be held responsible for changing the entire
course of history. As we have seen earlier, that is precisely what science fiction tries to put
forward when describing time travelers who change history by, for instance, stepping on a
rare kind of insect.
According to Ackroyd, ―belief becomes the crucial criterion for the distinction of
historical versions: counterfactual history is only counterfactual by virtue of its being
identified as such‖ (cited in Dannenberg 2008, 219-220). He and Dannenberg both agree
on the fact that authority is attributed to historical texts in a rather random matter. The
human desire for ―cognitive security‖ makes us trust only those texts with a sense of
authenticity or authority. But as it is fairly easy to attribute this extra value to a text, this
desire has proven to be quite illusory.
In conclusion, counterfactual thinking is a typical ability of the human mind but
counterfactual histories only started appearing in Renaissance fiction. The speeches which
used the counterfactuals gradually made way for real alternate storylines. However, in the
first stage this was only a small device in the great realm of realism. First, they were only
enounced by the narrator, then by the more intellectual characters, and eventually every
53
character could pronounce counterfactual thoughts. Authors like Fielding, Richardson,
and Hardy all participated in the early stage of the evolution of counterfactual history. In
the course of the twentieth century complete alternate histories started to develop, later
making way for the genre of science fiction. Then it was only a small step to the cultural
mainstream of the late twentieth century and twenty-first century.
54
3.7 Other examples of narrative counterfactuals
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
(Robert Frost, cited in Ferguson 1999, 71)
This short part will deal with a few other examples of stories based on counterfactual
premises that can be situated in the mainstream literature and popular culture of the
twenty-first century.
Philip Roth has already been mentioned as one of Chabon‘s literary examples. He has
written several awarded novels which deal with a variety of themes like the question of
authorship and American-Jewish identity. Two of these novels, The Plot Against America
and The Counterlife, are based on a counterfactual premise.
The Plot Against America was published a few years before The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union. It creates a fictional world where the American aviator Charles Lindbergh defeated
Roosevelt in the election of 1940 and ―lead the United States onto an isolationist path‖
(Schmunk, 2004). Subsequently, Anti-Semitic activities increase quickly, inspired by the
events in Germany. The difference with Chabon‘s novel is that ―the novel‘s historical
plotting ultimately bends history back to the real-world course of events in the 1940s‖
(Dannenberg 2008, 221). However, the last chapter of The Plot Against America
contradicts its own happy ending by emphasizing the ―continuing volatility of race
relations in American society‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 222). Rosenfeld states that ―the fact
that Roth, one of America‘s most celebrated and accomplished writers, chose to write a
work of alternate history […] affirms the genre‘s arrival into the American cultural
mainstream‖ (cited in Dannenberg 2008, 222).
The Counterlife is one of Roth‘s first novels. The story is not based on a counterfactual
history as in The Plot Against America, but is nevertheless based on different versions of
55
the life of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth‘s alter ego, and his brother Henry. In this
novel, the counterfactual premise is used to depict multiple variants of Jewish cultural
identity. There are no clues as to which version of Zuckerman‘s life is the real one; a
―constant process of counterfactual reversals‖ leaves the readers guessing which variants
are the counterfactual fantasies and which are the actual character versions (Dannenberg
2008, 213-214).
Counterfactual premises also occur in movies. An early example is Frank Capra‘s It’s a
Wonderful Life. On Christmas‘ Eve, George Bailey‘s guardian angel shows him how his
community would look like if he had not been born. The story depicts a downward
counterfactual world, which makes George realize he has a good influence on his town
after all.
Another remarkable example in this respect is the movie The Butterfly Effect. The title
refers to the phenomenon in chaos theory which was already discussed before, which
states that small initial events can have enormous consequences. By travelling back to the
past, the main character Evan Treborn tries to change the course of his and his friends‘
lives. The movie thus presents several counterfactual views of the present, but most of
them turn out to be downward counterfactual views, even though Evan only has good
intentions for changing the past.
These examples, and many other, prove that there are several ways to deal with a
counterfactual premise. Some deal with a counterfactual history while others portray
different counterfactual versions of a character‘s life. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is
undoubtedly situated in the first group. The next chapter will analyze the different aspects
of its counterfactual history.
57
Hoofdstuk 4. The Promised Land of salmon
and furs
These are strange times to be a Jew.
(Chabon 2007, 4)
As noted before, the story of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in the present but
based on a counterfactual history. In 1939, Roosevelt‘s Secretary of the Interior Harold
Ickes proposed setting up a settlement on Alaskan territory for the prosecuted European
Jews. The proposition, called the Slattery Report, made it to Congress in 1940 but was
rejected. However, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the proposition got accepted, thus
opening up the district of Sitka to the European Jewish refugees. This counterfactual
history is only occasionally implied by the narrator, leaving the reader guessing as to what
really happened in the counterfactual past.
It is not surprising that the narrative voice does not elaborate about the past. For him
(or her), the omniscient third person narrator, the fictional world of the story is the only
possible world. The past of that world is rather unimportant to him, since he does not need
it to tell the story he wants to tell successfully. The main focus is on the narrative plot, as
we are dealing with a detective story. The narrator therefore tends to leave out any causal
links between events, even if the exploration of such links is one of the goals of
58
counterfactual history in a non-fictional setting. This only enforces the desire of the
readers for an explanation and triggers their thoughts about what might have happened.
In addition, one of the basic aspects of fiction, as opposed to history, is that the author
is free to be as incomplete or complete as he or she wants to. The gaps in the story serve a
particular purpose; in the case of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union it is clear that Chabon
deliberately leaves these gaps unaddressed since he wants his readers to think and guess
while the story gradually takes its form. However, some believe that this might not be as
deliberate as it seems. Dubrow states that ―one does not read a Chabon novel to learn how
the narrative will conclude. Chabon is one of the most accomplished prose stylists of his
generation but, as previous novels have proven, plot is neither his highest priority nor his
forte‖ (2008, 145). In other words, Dubrow believes that the gaps in The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union serve an aesthetic (stylistic) purpose rather than a semantic one.
4.1 Counterfactual history
Chabon does not only cross the boundaries between different genres, but also between
history and alternative history. His counterfactual construct can even be regarded as
plausible, since there is hard evidence that Harold Ickes actually suggested opening up
Alaskan territory for the Jewish refugees. The only aspect that makes Chabon‘s
counterfactual world less plausible is the fact that the fictional present is situated sixty
years after the alteration in history. Long-term counterfactuals are considered far less
plausible since the years that have passed only increase the speculations and the
uncertainty of the speculations. Nevertheless, Chabon does seem to agree with the
ultimate requisite of alternative history: believing that small events can have enormous
consequences. The rather small event of Dimond‘s counterfactual death changed the
extent of the Holocaust, the end of World War II, the lives of two generations of European
Jews and Tlingit Indians and the future of Israel in the novel.
As we have seen before, certain theorists believe that one particular historical event or
character cannot be held responsible for changing the future course of history. Historical
59
events are a concurrence of circumstances rather than an individual, isolated event caused
by a single person. They would not assume that the translocation of the European Jews to
Alaska only depended on the refusal or approval of Anthony Dimond. In this case we can
even be sure that it was not. Other representatives of Congress did not approve either.
However, Chabon did not write The Yiddish Policemen’s Union to claim that Dimond was
indeed the only obstacle of the Slattery Report. Chabon‘s novel is in the first place fiction,
only depending on a counterfactual history for the frame of the story. He simply invented
a place where the inhabitants still spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, and proceeded
from there. The fact that a similar political proposal had been made in the past, supported
Chabon‘s original idea.
In the chapter on counterfactual history it was noted that negative events and
experiences are more likely to be the subject of counterfactual thinking, history and
fiction. This ‗negative coincidence‘ is said to intensify the emotional response of the
reader. Therefore, the upward counterfactuals (inventing a better outcome than reality)
appear more frequently than their opposite, the downward counterfactuals. However, in
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union this distinction cannot be made that easily. At the time of
the establishment of the interim Jewish settlement in Alaska, the counterfactual story
could have been seen as an upward counterfactual, saving four million Jews from their
death in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. But when we take a closer look at
the world they live in today, at the dark and gruesome Sitka on the verge of Reversion,
leaving the Jews once again without a home and without a Messiah, it could be argued
that the story has taken a downward turn during those sixty years since the first boats
arrived in Alaska. This should not however be too surprising, since this downward
evolution constructs a city where a hard-boiled detective story can take place. As
Raymond Chandler states in his essay ‗The Simple Art of Murder,‘ the world of a
detective story should be ―a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule
cities‖ (Myers 2008, 583). According to Myers, the name ‗Verbover‘ is derived from the
Bobover Óasidim, ―the nineteenth-century Galician dynasty largely destroyed in the
Holocaust and resurrected in Borough Park.‖ Since ―Óasidic dynasties are to the Jews
what mafia crime families are to Italians‖ the link with the Verbovers in Chabon‘s novel
is easily made.
60
In addition, Chabon admitted that the name ‗Mendel‘ is also based on a real person‘s
name. Patricia Cohen states that ‗Mendel‘ came from ―the son-in-law of Joseph Isaack
Schneersohn, Menachem Mendel Schneerson [sic], whom many within the Chabad-
Lubavitch sect believe was the messiah‖ (Cohen 2007). This is an example of a fictional
character who takes over the name of a real historical character, and the connotations
attached to that particular name, but whose life is entirely fictional. Other examples of this
kind of fictional agents in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union are Harold Ickes, Anthony
Dimond, Emanuel Lasker, Tartakower and Jan Timman. Harold Ickes was the Secretary
of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, but in reality he was not successful
regarding the Slattery Report; Anthony Dimond was responsible for the failure of that
same Report, but he was not killed by a taxi driver; the name Emanuel Lasker, originally
referring to a real chess player like Tartakower, serves as a pseudonym for Mendel
Shpilman; and while Jan Timman is a famous Dutch chess genius, he did not lose the
world championship to Melekh Gaystik, since the latter is a fictional character and the real
world championship of 1980 was won by Anatoly Karpov. One of the basic characteristics
of a story based on a counterfactual history is that fictional characters interact with
fictionalized characters, like Ickes, Dimond and Timman. Only Melekh Gaystik really
interacts with the fictionalized Jan Timman, but fictional characters like Meyer
Landsman, Berko and Hertz Shemets, Bina Gelbfish, and so on, live their fictional lives
due to the fictionalized historical personages like Ickes and Dimond.
However, the characters of the detective story act and behave in the same manner as
characters of a detective story set in normal history would. They have the same personal
relationships, difficulties and quests. Even popular detective storylines reappear in
counterfactual stories. The story of the rebel and his subsequent failure occurs quite
frequently within hard-boiled detective stories, and also in The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union. In the beginning of the novel the readers will view Landsman as the rebel on his
way to his downfall, but as the story continues Mendel Shpilman begins to fit the
description more and more. He was the rebel, leaving home and everything behind, but in
the end he gets addicted to heroin and gets killed. It could be argued that Landsman and
Mendel have more in common than meets the eye. They are both rebels, fleeing from the
norms of society. However, Landsman still has a support system, his partner Berko, who
61
looks out for him and makes sure he (more or less) follows the right track. Mendel is not
that lucky, even though he meets Naomi along the way.
According to Dubrow, not only the actions and behavior of the characters are rather
similar to those of characters in non-counterfactual settings; the city of Sitka also seems
strangely familiar to other metropolises in this world. There are the same distinctions
between good and evil, cops and criminals, crowded city and deserted countryside, the
wealthy and the poor, etc. Furthermore, in the city of Sitka you can also find ―the same
tensions between the secular and religious, between the assimilated and the Orthodox‖
(Dubrow 2008, 145-146).
When we analyze The Yiddish Policemen’s Union further it is clear that Chabon‘s story
has an external focus: a counterfactual ―in which the self is the central focus as a victim of
circumstances‖ (Dannenberg 2008, 112). Landsman is clearly ―a victim of
circumstances.‖ Not only those circumstances derived from the counterfactual world he is
living in (the upcoming Reversion for example), but also the circumstances of his own
personal life (the death of his sister Naomi, the end of his marriage with Bina, etc.).
Nevertheless, the novel is not character-based but story-based. It is not Landsman‘s
behavior or character that has been counterfactually altered, but the world, and thus the
story, surrounding him.
The circumstances in which Landsman finds himself professionally and personally
evoke certain feelings in Landsman. Regret is undoubtedly one of them. Regret also
serves as one of the main emotions linked to counterfactual history. Counterfactual
thinking and counterfactual history are often reactions to feelings of satisfaction or regret,
as I noted before. Satisfaction occurs with downward counterfactuals, while regret is the
reason for the construction of upward counterfactuals. However, The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union does not fit these descriptions entirely. As we will see in section 4.3.2.1 the
nostalgic and melancholic mood of the novel make it appear as a downward
counterfactual world, while the original aim of inventing a safe haven for millions of
Jewish refugees steers towards an upward counterfactual.
62
In Landsman‘s personal life he seems to experience a counterfactual moment himself,
after he and Bina decide to abort their possibly disabled child5. Bina had asked Landsman
to ask the doctor ―whether there was some use, some aim or study, to which the half-
grown bones and organs might be put‖ (TYPU6, 376). However, Landsman stammers
while trying to ask this difficult question, and the doctor assumes he wants to ask
something else.
‗Whether there was any visible defect?‘ the doctor said. ‗No. Nothing at all. The
baby appeared to be normal.‘ He remarked, too late, the look of horror blooming on
Landsman‘s face. ‗Of course, that doesn‘t mean there was nothing wrong‘ (TYPU,
376).
He never told Bina what the doctor said. By the end of the novel he wants to tell her
―the story7 that has been telling him for the past three years‖ (TYPU, 375). It is clear that
he suffers from a great sense of guilt and doubt. Even though it is not said explicitly in the
narrative text, he seems to wonder what would have happened if he had told Bina; or what
would have happened if they had not aborted their child; or what would have happened if
he had tried to find out what happened to the little body, which ―was something he had
neither the heart nor the stomach to investigate‖ (TYPU, 376). This passage could be read
as a metafictional moment in the novel. Chabon lets his main character experience a
moment of counterfactual thinking, to draw the readers‘ attention to the counterfactual
history of the novel itself. But since it is not explicitly mentioned that Landsman indeed
engages in a moment of counterfactual thinking, this is only a cautious assumption.
5 This event could also refer to Chabon‘s wife Ayelet Waldman, who wrote about her own decision to abort a
child in the same situation (Lambert 2007, 2). 6 Michael Chabon (2007) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
7 Cf. section 4.4.1.
63
4.2 Chess motif
Chess is a recurring motif in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. According to Davis, ―using
chess as a source of arcane clues is not uncommon in mysteries‖ (2008, 11). In addition,
as mentioned before, Ferguson also refers to chess while arguing that the past is without
telos, without a predestined ending:
The past – like real-life chess, or indeed any other game – is different; it does not
have a predetermined end. There is no author, divine or otherwise; only characters.
[…] There is no plot, only endings, since multiple events unfold simultaneously
(1999, 68).
In other words, the game of chess has the same characteristics as the past;
characteristics which permit the construction of counterfactual histories. These histories
go against the grain of determinism, the belief that everything is scheduled to happen in a
certain way.
Mendel Shpilman was, next to the supposed Messiah, also a chess genius. When they
find him dead in his hotel room, there is a cardboard chess game on his bedside table. The
game of chess also links Mendel to the Zimbalist, who taught him how to play. In
addition, it marks the beginning of Mendel standing up to his father, since playing chess
was not allowed, and playing with strangers even less so. More importantly, it connects
him to Landsman, who grew up with a father and uncle who both excelled in chess. The
game drove Landsman away from his father, like it did with Mendel and his father, even
though it was for different reasons. Landsman disliked the game after years of being
forced to play, while Mendel loved the game so much he needed to rebel against his father
in order to play.
In addition, it could be argued that Mendel was used by the Verbovers as one of their
chess pieces in their game to regain the power in Israel. In this respect, Mendel, being the
64
Messiah, was not the king8 but a simple pawn; when he is murdered, the Verbovers still
go on with their ‗game‘.
Since chess is such an important aspect of the novel, there are plenty of references to
the game to be found in the narrative text. The game seems to be a constant factor in
Landsman‘s thoughts. His room number, for example, provokes a rather poetic stream of
consciousness which soon digresses to chess:
The door to his room hums its simple lyric: five-oh-five. It means nothing. Lights in
the fog. Three Arabic numerals. Invented in India, actually, like the game of chess,
but disseminated by Arabs (TYPU, 372 - own emphasis).
There is also a link between the game of chess and the death of Landsman‘s sister
Naomi. After she helped Mendel escape from the ranch in Peril Strait, her plane crashes9
into Mount Dunkelblum. Arthur Dunkelblum happened to be a Belgian chess master, who
played from the 1920s until the 1970s.
Another example can be found when Landsman is being interrogated by what looks
like an American secret service. They want to find out what he knows or believes to know
about the American involvement in the attack on the Dome of the Rock. Once again, their
questions remind him of chess:
Their questions are like the fundamental moves of the six different chess pieces,
endlessly recombined until they number with the neurons in the brain (TYPU, 363 -
own emphasis).
The motif of chess and the chess game seems to have rather negative connotations.
Melekh Gaystik and Landsman‘s father killed themselves, Mendel Shpilman was
murdered by Hertz Shemets (also a chess player) and Alter Litvak is the man behind the
operation to blow up the Dome of the Rock. Chess is the cause of several problems, which
is emphasized by Landsman himself by the end of the novel, when he discovers that the
chess game on the bedside table actually stood for a problem:
8 The king is the most powerful chess piece.
9 Naomi‘s crash could also refer to the plane crash of the writer Amanda Davis, a close friend of Chabon.
65
‗It wasn‘t a chess game,‘ Landsman says after a moment. ‗On the board in
Shpilman‘s room. It was a problem. It seems obvious now, I should have seen it, the
setup was too freaky. Somebody came to see Shpilman that night, and Shpilman
posed him a problem. A tricky one‘ (TYPU, 400).
As they all brainstorm about the possible meanings of Mendel‘s chess game, the only
possible answer seems to be that the chess game, or the ―problem,‖ is linked to Mendel‘s
personal life:
‗They call that Zugzwang,‘ Landsman says. ‗Forced to move. It means Black would
be better off if he could just pass.‘
‗But you aren‘t allowed to pass, are you? You have to do something, don‘t you?‘
‗Yes you do. Even when you know it‘s only going to lead to you getting
checkmated‘ (TYPU, 400).
When the chess clues begin to seem rather farfetched, Chabon inserts a humorous
comment from Ester-Malke to lighten the mood. She seems tired from dealing with the
drama from the investigation, especially now that the game of chess seems to be involved:
―‗Oh,‘ says Ester-Malke, rolling her eyes. ‗Chess‘‖ (TYPU, 404).
4.3 Narrative clues about the counterfactual past
Even though the counterfactual past is only implied by the narrator, there are a few
moments in the narrative text where Chabon allows the narrator to reflect on the past.
Subsequently, he gives the readers the clues they are so desperately looking for. When the
narrator informs the reader of certain historical events, there seems to be a shift in focus,
leaving the reader pondering about history for one moment, before turning back to the
present. So in a way, for the reader, there are two investigations running through the
novel: finding out what really happened in the counterfactual past, and solving the Mendel
Shpilman case. According to Rimmon-Kenan, ―uncertainty is at the basis of the dynamics
of reading‖ (cited in Rovner 2011, 148). Continuing on this quote, Rovner states that
66
Allohistory10
tends to share this principle with the detective-mystery novel; this may
largely account for the prevalence of detective topoi […] in classic counterfactuals
that deal with Jewish fate. […] Whether it is a crime or the past that is being
examined, both are enigmas that the detective – and reader – must solve by
accumulating and arranging incidental details (2011, 148).
As stated above, there are only a few instances in the text where the narrator allows us
to have a quick peek at the counterfactual history of the story. The first one, and
undoubtedly the most important one is already situated in the first chapter:
On the first of January, sovereignty over the whole Federal District of Sitka, a
crooked parenthesis of rocky shoreline running along the western edges of Baranof
and Chichagof islands, will revert to the state of Alaska. The District Police, to
which Landsman has devoted his hide, head and soul for twenty years, will be
dissolved. It is far from clear that Landsman or Berko Shemets or anybody else will
be keeping his job. Nothing is clear about the upcoming Reversion, and that is why
these are strange times to be a Jew (TYPU, 7).
This paragraph incorporates the moment when the reader understands that the fictional
world of the story has taken a different course in history than our world. The reader is
introduced to the phenomenon of Reversion, which evokes more questions than it solves.
What is Reversion? What does it mean for the story? Where did it come from? All these
questions will keep the reader on edge throughout the entire story. But since Reversion is
so important to the fictional present, these questions will be answered when the main story
unfolds.
4.3.1 Israel and Reversion
There is only one paragraph in the book which reveals the downfall of the counterfactual
Israel leading up to the immigration of millions of Jews and the subsequent Reversion.
There are several references to the doomed year of 1948, but only in the following
paragraph do we find an explanation why it was such a terrible year for the Israeli Jews
and why these are ―strange times to be a Jew.‖
10
Synonym for counterfactual history.
67
Nineteen forty-eight: Strange times to be a Jew. In August the defense of Jerusalem
collapsed and the outnumbered Jews of the three-month-old republic of Israel were
routed, massacred, and driven into the sea. As Hertz was starting his job at Foehn
Harmattan & Buran11
, the House Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs
began a long delayed review of status called for by the Sitka Settlement Act. Like
the rest of Congress, like most Americans, the House Committee was sobered by
grim revelations of the slaughter of two millions Jews in Europe, by the barbarity of
the rout of Zionism, by the plight of the refugees of Palestine and Europe. At the
same time, they were practical souls. The population of Sitka Settlement had
already swollen to two million. In direct violation of the act, Jews had spread up and
down the western shore of Baranof Island, out to Kruzof, all the way up to West
Chichagof Island. The economy was booming. American Jews were lobbying hard.
In the end, Congress granted the Sitka Settlement ‗interim status‘ as a federal
district. But candidacy for separate statehood was explicitly ruled out. NO
JEWLASKA, LAWMAKERS PROMISE, ran the headline in the Daily Times. The
emphasis was always on the word ‗interim.‘ In sixty years that status would revert,
and the Sitka Jews would be left once again to shift for themselves (TYPU, 29 –
own emphasis).
This is an important paragraph in the novel. It refers to several remarkable elements
within the novel. First of all, the narrator mentions ―the slaughter of two million Jews.‖
This estimate is far less than the actual six million Jews who were killed in reality. It is
also a clear counterfactual moment; the reader immediately realizes that he or she is
dealing with a counterfactual history. However, Chabon chose not to save all the Jews, as
many other counterfactual histories about the Holocaust do. In my opinion, this only adds
up to the credibility of his counterfactual statement. The Holocaust still happened; Chabon
just provided it with another denouement.
Secondly, a reference is made to the interim status of the Jewish settlement. The
narrator of the story emphasizes the waiting of several characters and the people of Sitka;
they are waiting for the end, you could say. This experience could be a reference to the
difference between Christianity and Judaism, or the difference between the First and
Second Coming. Christians believe that the Messiah has already come in the shape of Jesus,
but the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah. The interim status of the settlement could
therefore refer to the entire Jewish history as an interval between the First and Second
11
Reference to the Alpine, Saharan, and Siberian winds.
68
Coming; the Jews in reality wait for the Second Coming like the people of Sitka wait for the
Reversion.
Thirdly, the doomed year of 1948 in the novel could also refer to the year of 1948 in
our history. In 1948, the state of Israel was founded, but as a direct result of this the
Palestinian people who already lived there were being displaced. This event is
commemorated every year on the 15th of May, the day after the Israeli independence day.
This year, the protests against the Nakba12, or the Catastrophe, ended in a bloodshed.
Twelve Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces.
In this respect, the Line in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the border between the
Tlingit Indians and the Sitka Jews, is also of great significance. The Line is almost
certainly a reference to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The border between Israel and the
Palestinian territories has always been much-discussed and heavily guarded. Only recently
has the President of the United States, Barack Obama, shown his support for the
Palestinian demand that the borders of their future Palestinian state should be based on the
borders of 1967, before the Arab-Israeli War. This would mean that a few areas which
Israel conquered in 1967 would be regarded as Palestinian territory again.
In Chabon‘s novel, the republic of Israel did not survive. The Israeli Jews are forced to
keep on searching for their ideal homeland. Their endless search and imaginary homeland
will be discussed further in part 4.4 which elaborates on the aspect of Jewish identity in
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
4.3.2 Immigration European Jews
The truth about the immigration of the European Jews is not all that clear from the
narrative text. The first useful view on this part of Sitka‘s past is when the narrator tells
the reader about how Hertz Shemets, Berko‘s father, arrives in Alaska in 1941.
12
The Palestinian term for the founding of Israel.
69
Not quite two years later, Hertz Shemets, his mother, and his kid sister, Freydl,
arrived on Baranof Island, Alaska, with the first wave of Galitzer settlers. He came
on the notorious Diamond, a World War I-era troop transport that Secretary Ickes
ordered taken out of mothballs and rechristened as a left-handed memorial, or so
legend has it, to the late Anthony Dimond, the Alaska Territory‘s nonvoting
delegate to the House of Representatives. (Until the fatal intervention on a
Washington, D.C., street corner of a drunken, taxi-driving schlemiel named Denny
Lanning – eternal hero of the Sitka Jews – Delegate Dimond had been on the verge
of getting the Alaskan Settlement Act killed in committee) (TYPU, 27).
The Diamond is not the only humorous wink at the Slattery Report, Harold Ickes or
Anthony Dimond. There are ―Ickes colleges‖ (TYPU, 291), a ―Harold Ickes Federal
Building‖ and an ―Ickes Highway‖ (TYPU, 180) in Sitka. European Jews immigrating to
Alaska had to carry an ―Ickes passport‖ (TYPU, 28) reminding them that they could not
go anywhere else since the normal quotas on Jewish immigration remained in force. When
they arrived they were brought to ―Camp Slattery‖ (TYPU, 28) in Sitka, in order to
‗acclimatize‘ for six months in huts and barracks.
Those first refugees mockingly called themselves Polar Bears, partly because the real
polar bears and the expected Eskimos were nowhere to be found: ―No polar bears. No
igloos. No reindeer. Mostly just a lot of angry Indians, fog and rain‖ (TYPU, 38). The
settlement was just one big area of barren land, where even farming was impossible:
―when the Alaskan Development Corporation dispensed tractors and seeds and sacks of
fertilizer to the fugitive boatloads, Jews of the District have dreamed and despaired of the
Jewish farm‖ (TYPU, 291). Most of the usable lands are in the hands of the Tlingit
Indians, and they did not get along with their new neighbors. Once in a while they did
manage to get their hands on a green patch of land.
Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that
reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import
livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of
doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would
languish and fail (TYPU, 291 - own emphasis).
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This passage can be read as a clear reference to a kibbutz, the Hebrew word for a
communal settlement. The first kibbutzim13 were established in 1909, thirty-nine years
before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Their founders were young Jewish pioneers, mainly from Eastern Europe, who
came not only to reclaim the soil of their ancient homeland, but also to forge a new
way of life. Their path was not easy: a hostile environment, inexperience with
physical labor, a lack of agricultural know-how, desolate land neglected for
centuries, scarcity of water and a shortage of funds were among the difficulties
confronting them. Overcoming many hardships, they succeeded in developing
thriving communities which have played a dominant role in the establishment and
building of the state (Jewish Virtual Library, 2007).
As the passage from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union points out, in contrast with the
kibbutzim, the colonies build by the Sitka Jews were destined to fail.
4.3.2.1 Doomed city
The ―streak of doom‖ is also very noticeable in the rest of Chabon‘s novel. The city of
Sitka used to be rather glamorous, even though the first Jews who arrived in Alaska could
not be more disappointed. But the city grew out to be ―a pinnacle of Jewish civilization in
the north‖ (TYPU, 2). Unfortunately, after the World‘s Fair of 1977, the city slowly lost
its shine. Landsman was fourteen at the time and still keeps a souvenir shot glass of the
Fair to remind him of better days. The Safety Pin, ―the looping aluminum spike on its
windswept island,‖ (TYPU, 48-49) also evokes its fair share of nostalgia in Landsman.
Now the view of Sitka is quite depressing: ―night is an orange smear over Sitka, a
compound of fog and light of sodium-vapor streetlamps. It has translucence of onions
cooked in chicken fat‖ (TYPU, 9). A few years after the World Fair the new world chess
champion Melekh Gaystik shot himself in the head, leaving a note saying ―I liked things
better the way they were before‖ (TYPU, 83). This feeling seems to prevail in others‘
thoughts too. Especially since the Reversion is closing in on the people of Sitka, many
have fled the Jewish city.
13
Plural of kibbutz.
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Only Verbov Island seems to have escaped the deterioration. The district even reminds
the reader of Manhattan, N.Y.:
The women sport head scarves and glossy wigs spun from the hair of the poor
Jewesses of Morocco and Mesopotamia. Their coats and long dresses are the finest
rags of Paris and New York, their shoes the flower of Italy. Boys careen down the
sidewalks on in-line roller skates in a slipstream of scarves and sidelocks, flashing
the orange linings of their unzipped parkas. Girls hobbled by long skirts go along
braided arm in arm, raucous chains of Verbover girls vehement and clannish as
schools of philosophy. […] ‗Look at this place,‘ Landsman says. ‗It‘s hopping.‘
‗Not one empty storefront.‘ ‗And more of these no-good yids than ever‘ (TYPU,
101).
Landsman cannot help but be suspicious towards the Verbovers. They must know
something about the Reversion that the rest of the people do not know. Otherwise they would
have packed everything they have and left by now. It all looks too much like a ―Disney shtetl‖
(TYPU, 106). Berko has picked up the rumor that the rebbe obtained green cards for
everyone, but Landsman still does not believe that one man could have so much power.
However, when the story unfolds, we discover that the Verbovers indeed knew something the
rest did not: that they were going to transfer to Israel once the Dome of the Rock was out of
the way.
Mendel Shpilman was the one who brought some of the spiritual wealth of Verbover Island
to the rest of Sitka: ―there was something in Mendele. There was a fire. This is a cold, dark
place, Detectives. A gray, wet place. Mendele gave off light and warmth‖ (TYPU, 141).
Landsman feels a stab of jealousy every time he meets and interviews someone who was
lucky enough to receive a blessing from Mendel; ―he thinks of all the times he must have
walked right past Mendel, all the chances that he missed‖ (TYPU, 235). But eventually the
dark city rubbed off on Mendel too. He left his home and Verbov Island, ―tendering his
resignation‖ (TYPU, 226). The expectations of the Jewish people were too high, ―he could not
be what that world and its Jews […] wanted him to be, what his mother and father wanted him
to be‖ (TYPU, 226). He does not want to be the useful object they made of him anymore; they
only wanted him to fit their purposes. He succeeds to escape for almost twenty years, but
when Alter Litvak finds him again, ―they intend to restore him to practical use‖ (TYPU, 280).
Escaping for the second time costs him his life. Naomi once said to Landsman that ―she hated
Jews for their meek submission to fate, for the trust they put in God or the gentiles‖
(TYPU, 232), but the most Jewish Jew of them all, the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, did not agree
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with his fate. ―Every Messiah fails the moment he tries to redeem himself‖ (TYPU, 335)
Alter Litvak wrote, and apparently he was right.
4.3.2.2 Islands and Indians
According to Rovner, the use of islands in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union brings an
additional meaning to the story. In reality, several islands were in the running to become
the new Jewish homeland, for example Tasmania and Madagascar. ―Likewise,‖ Rovner
states, ―the metaphor of an island apart suits the assertion of Jews being essentially Other
in respect to non-Jews‖ (2011, 145). The islands therefore serve a double cause: non-Jews
can isolate Jews by putting them on an island, but the Jews can also expand their
―separatist assertion of exceptionalism.‖ In the novel as in reality, the city of Sitka is
situated on Baranof Island, Alaska, and close to Chichagof Island. Not only the islands,
but also Alaska is a remote part of the world, ruled in the first place by the harsh weather.
Fictionally transferring the Jewish people to Alaska underlines their solitary nature.
In this sense, the link with the Tlingit Indians is quite remarkable. Rovner believes that
―Native Americans are a Doppelganger for the Jews, a diasporic people, persecuted,
proselytized and subject to genocide‖ (2011, 146). Even though this observation is
undoubtedly true, there are nevertheless some remarkable differences between Jews and
Native Americans that should be mentioned. The first important difference is that the
Native Americans were killed for territorial reasons; they inhabited lands which the
colonists wanted for themselves. The Jews on the other hand were killed for religious and
political reasons; because they wanted to be somewhere other people already lived. In
addition, due to the diseases which the colonists brought with them from the European
mainland, the extent of the genocide of the Native Americans exceeds that of the
Holocaust with large numbers. Another remarkable difference is that the Jews profile
themselves as individualistic and exceptional, while the Native Americans, partly because
they had no other choice, blended into the American population and culture. This could be
seen as one of the reasons why the Jewish relationships with other cultures are so difficult.
Berko Shemets, Landsman‘s partner, incorporates both the Jewish and Indian side of
Sitka. He is the son of a Tlingit mother and Jewish father. He converts to Judaism after the
death of his mother during the Synagogue Riots. The Riots started when somebody threw
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a Molotov cocktail in a Jewish synagogue that was built on a patch of land on the Tlingit
side of the Alaskan territory. In the novel we learn that Berko‘s father, then an FBI agent
responsible for the Jews not crossing The Line, was almost directly responsible for the
Riots. Alter Litvak, who did the dirty jobs for Hertz, was the one who threw the Molotov
cocktail. Dubrow notes that the relationship between the Jews and the Tlingit reminds the
reader of the uneasy Christian-Jewish interactions in Eastern Europe, not too long before
their supposed migration to Alaska (2008, 145). She continues that ―Jewish encounters
with other cultures and communities have always resulted in provocative fusions‖ (2008,
146). This tension is also clearly noticeable in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
4.4 Other recurring motifs
4.4.1 Storytelling
By creating a fictional story based on a counterfactual history, Chabon also resists the
determinism proposed by several historians. But more importantly, he wants to tell a
story. A detective story to be exact; a genre he has only visited once before in The Final
Solution, which ―tried to combine Sherlock Holmes with a Holocaust narrative‖ (Myers
2008, 582). Creating a second detective story, flavored with ―though-guy Yiddish‖ (Myers
2008, 583), asked for an additional effort on Chabon‘s part. Chabon notes that ―in many
ways, the book was an exercise in restraint all around. The sentences are much shorter
than my typical sentences; my paragraphs are shorter than my typical paragraphs. I wrote
in a prose style that I had never written in before‖ (Chabon 2008, 214).
The importance of storytelling is also referred to in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in
particular concerning police and detective work. From the very beginning of their
investigation, Landsman and Berko need to rely on stories of Mendel Shpilman, since
they did not know him personally. For example, when Zimbalist identifies the body,
Berko is quite shocked: ―Mendel Shpilman. Dear God. I heard some stories‖ (TYPU,
119). These ―stories‖ refer to Mendel being the Messiah and his blessings which cured or
saved several people. Not only Zimbalist‘s friend was cured from cancer after he had
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given Mendel‘s blessing to her, but others were also lucky enough to be blessed by the
Messiah. These blessings of course serve as great stories.
There was a maid whose womb had been made barren by a botched operation in
Cebu when she was a girl. Mendel took one of those dolls he made his sisters from
felt and a clothespin, pinned a crayoned blessing between its wooden legs, and
slipped it into her pocket. Then months after that, Remedios gave birth to a son.
There was Dov-Ber Gursky, their driver, secretly ten thousand dollars in the wrong
with a Russian finger-breaker. Mendel handed Gursky a five-dollar bill, unbidden,
and said he hoped it might help. Two days later, a lawyer in St. Louis wrote to
inform Gurksy that he had just inherited half a million from an uncle he never knew
(TYPU, 215).
Further on in the story, Cashdollar firmly believes that it is the duty of law enforcement
to ‗tell stories‘:
―This man, my predecessor. He used to say, ‗We are telling a story, Cashdollar.
That‘s what we do.‘ […] ‗Tell them a story, Cashdollar. That‘s all the poor suckers
want.‘ Only he didn‘t say ‗suckers‘‖ (TYPU, 364).
But in the end, the story seems to be too powerful to be controlled from the outside:
―The story, Detective Landsman, is telling us. Just like it has done from the
beginning. We‘re part of the story. You. Me‖ (TYPU, 365).
The word ‗story‘ is also one of the last words of the novel. When it is clear that Bina
and Landsman will give their marriage another try, Landsman decides to tell the press
about the American involvement in the terrorist attack on the Dome of the Rock. He calls
Brennan, the reporter who ended Hertz Shemets‘ career and says ―I have a story for you‖
(TYPU, 411). This is a remarkable open ending, leaving many paths of the novel
undiscovered. It does however create a link with the beginning; Landsman will tell
Brennan the same story as the narrator told us. The narrative text will repeat itself within
its fictional context. We cannot say however that Landsman is the narrator of the story and
thus creates a closed circle between the beginning and the end. The extradiegetic third
person narrator is omniscient and treats Landsman‘s character as any other in the novel.
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4.4.2 Penguins
Penguins are another recurring motif. It seems that even though there are no penguins to
be seen in the dense area of Sitka, they keep returning in the narrative text to mock the
high expectations of the Jews about the Alaskan territory. For example, one of the
customers of the Polar-Shtern is a man called Penguin Simkowitz, ―a bottom-rung bet
runner […] who mishandled a lot of somebody‘s money a few years back and was beaten
so badly by shtarkers14 that it addled his brain and speech‖ (TYPU, 147). In addition,
penguins, just like chess, seem to linger in Landsman‘s thoughts and dreams:
Landsman pursues Albert Einstein across the milk-white, chalk-white ice, hopping
from square to shadowed square across relativistic chessboards of culpability and
atonement, across the imaginary land of penguins and Eskimos that the Jews never
quite managed to inherit (TYPU, 372 - own emphasis).
Not only Landsman, but Bina also seems to be reminded of the empty hopes to
encounter penguins in the new homeland up in Alaska.
And Bina, sitting up in bed, propped on an elbow, watching him, sort of the way she
watched those kids go after that hapless penguin piñata (TYPU, 399 - own
emphasis).
However, the references to penguins seem to be most frequent with regard to ―the
golden man in the penguin sweater who will not tolerate a mess‖ (TYPU, 269, 273). By
the end of the novel, Landsman - and the reader - discovers that this man is Cashdollar,
who seems to be the personification of the American government and secret services. He
is followed by an army of Men in Black, even though they are not dressed as their name
would suspect. Thick sweaters and baggy pants substitute for the suits, which could refer
to the harsh Alaskan weather.
14
Tough guys.
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4.4.3 The United States
Cashdollar is only one example of a whole string of references to the United States. His
name is quite remarkable. When you split his name up into cash and dollar, it reveals the
prime concerns of the United States in the novel. In addition, by emphasizing the
involvement of the United States in the terrorist attack, Chabon attributes rather negative
connotations to the US. It is not common for American authors to portray their home
country as one of the perpetrators. This is only emphasized further by the lingering
distrust of the Jewish population in Sitka for the Americans. Already at the very beginning
of their settlement the European Jews dug tunnels under the city as a precaution for the
moment when the Americans might turn on them.
‗A Warsaw tunnel,‘ Shpringer says. ‗They go all through this part of the
Untershtat.‘ […] ‗When the greeners [sic] got here after the war. The ones who had
been in the ghetto at Warsaw. At Bialystok. The ex-partisans. I guess some of them
didn‘t trust the Americans very much. So they dug tunnels. Just in case they had to
fight again. That‘s the real reason it‘s called the Untershtat‘ (TYPU, 22).
The Line which marks the border of the interim Jewish settlement reminds the reader
of the border separating the United States and Mexico. American Jews living on the other
side of the Line are even called mexicans.
He‘s Larry Spiro, a skinny, stoop-shouldered Jew from Short Hills, New Jersey. A
mexican [sic], as the Sitka Jews call their southern cousins; mexicans [sic] call the
Sitka Jews icebergers, or ‗the frozen Chosen‘ (TYPU, 238).
In addition, the immigration of the Jews on boats like the Diamond is rather similar to
the waves of European settlers making their way to the United States by the end of the
19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Camp Slattery could then be seen as the
substitute for Ellis Island, N.Y., where the European immigrants arrived.
In the novel, President Kennedy married Marilyn Monroe, making her the first lady of
the United States. This fact is only mentioned briefly; it is no surprise to the narrator of
the story and in the end it has nothing to do with the story. Another fact which is only
mentioned matter-of-factly is the bombing of Berlin in 1946. A nuclear bomb was
dropped on Berlin, thus ending the Second World War which lasted a whole year longer
than the Second World War in reality.
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The telephone in Mrs. Shpilman‘s room which connects her instantly with a telephone
in the rebbe‘s office could be understood as a reference to the red telephone connecting
the White House of the United States and the Kremlin of Russia during the Cold War.
On a deal table sat a black telephone with no dial. If she picked it up, an identical
phone would ring in her husband‘s office. In ten years of living in this house, she
had used it only three times, once in pain and twice in anger (TYPU, 217).
Like the red telephone between the US and Russia, the black telephone in the Shpilman
house has also only been used occasionally.
4.5 Jewish identity
Some would state that Chabon engaged in ‗retrospective wishful thinking‘ while writing
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Theorists and historians like Ferguson believe that
authors write according to their ―contemporary political and religious preoccupations‖ and
that they cannot escape ―the prejudices of their own present‖ (Ferguson 1999, 11, 49-50).
In addition, because the novel is fictional and therefore a subjective construct, the author
is guided by his own ―individual persuasions, scope of knowledge and focus, ideological
position and theoretical framework‖ (Doložel 2010, 33). In the case of The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union these remarks can be considered as true. From Maps and Legends it
became quite clear that Chabon is interested and at the same time concerned about his
Jewish religion and the search of the Jews for a new homeland. ―Next year in Jerusalem‖
is a popular saying when toasting on the New Year, which illustrates their seemingly
endless search for a safe haven. Many Jews still feel like Bina in The Yiddish Policemen’s
Union when she found out about the involvement of the US in the scheme of Alter Litvak:
―[w]e are here on sufferance. Houseguests‖ (TYPU, 375).
However, Chabon seems to join them in their search of the ideal Jewish homeland by
creating his own fictional one while also pointing out the uselessness and the danger of
this search. By the end of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the Jews end up without a
home once again, led by (empty) promises for a new home in Israel.
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The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew
in Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only
in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a
century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists
and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and
the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to
bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall,
severed heads on telephone poles. Observant Jews around the world have not
abandoned their hope to dwell one day in the land of Zion. But Jews have been
tossed out of the joint three times now – in 586 BCE, in 70 CE and with savage
finality in 1948. It‘s hard even for the faithful not to feel a sense of discouragement
about their chances of once again getting a foot in the door (TYPU, 17).
During the centuries in which the Jews kept looking for their ideal homeland, the idea
of a home eventually turned into a kind of fata morgana. Chabon refers twice to this
remarkable phenomenon in his novel. He mentions the ―mirror made of weather and light
and the imagination of men raised on stories of heaven‖ (TYPU, 289) for the first time
when, in 1897, the party of the Italian mountaineer Abruzzi saw ―a city in the sky‖ from
the slopes of Mount Saint Elias. Ten years later, the explorer Peary tried to find Crocker
Island which he and his men saw in the sky the day before. The second time the
phenomenon is mentioned is when the Temple, built to scale, ―shimmers like a fata
morgana‖ (TYPU, 331) in Buchbinder‘s scale model of the hilltop of Jerusalem.
4.5.1 Imaginary Yiddish
Chabon is not only creative regarding the content of his novel but the language use in The
Yiddish Policemen’s Union is also quite inventive. The novel is written in English, but
soon the reader realizes that the characters are talking Yiddish to each other instead of
English. There are however still a few Yiddish words in the text. To be exact, the words
sound Yiddish; Chabon‘s Yiddish is as fictional as the rest of the story. This is one of the
reasons why Chabon was criticized after the publication of his novel.
The characters use the word sholem for a gun, while sholem is the Yiddishization of the
Hebrew word shalom, which means peace. According to Rovner this is a reference to ―the
American Western and pulp idiom that refers to a gun as a ‗peacemaker‘‖ (2011, 145).
Telephones are called shoyfers, the Yiddishization of shofar, which is ―a ram‘s horn
blown in ritual practice to call Jews to assembly‖ (Rovner 2011, 145). In The Amazing
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Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, beat cops were called pie hats; in The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union Chabon translates his made-up term accordingly to latkes (pancakes).
On a more general level, Yiddish is the most popular language among Jews in
Chabon‘s counterfactual present. Hebrew is only spoken by a small number of people, in
contrast with the Hebrew language of our world. It thus seems that Chabon reversed roles
between Yiddish and Hebrew in his counterfactual universe.
It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those
hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German
Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the
painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as
Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts
meeting annually in lonely halls (TYPU, 286).
Our history tells us that the Zionists generally preferred to speak Hebrew, and refused
to speak Yiddish. According to them, the Yiddish language was influenced by the
Christian persecution. Once the republic of Israel was founded, many Zionists stopped
speaking their mother tongues and changed their names to Hebrew equivalents. It thus
seems that the narrator wants to portray the ones caught speaking Hebrew as direct
descendants from the original Zionists, and therefore linking them with their plan to
resurrect the Temple of Jerusalem. To emphasize this even further, the narrator points our
attention to the fact that Cashdollar, an American accomplice in the Verbover plan,
―pronounces Shpilman‘s Hebrew name ‗Men-ashy‘‖ (TYPU, 364-365).
Even Landsman‘s name is an inventive wordplay. Myers (2008) points out that to call
someone a landsman in Yiddish is to say ‗he is one of us.‘ Clearly, Landsman is not one
of them. He is a Jew, but he is ―a mocking asshole‖ (TYPU, 37), as opposed to his partner
Berko, who is ―a believer‖ (TYPU, 37).
There are however other inconsistencies in Chabon‘s novel regarding the vocabulary,
rules and laws of the Jewish religion. According to Myers he confuses a talmid hakhem,
―a scholar of Jewish law, who is often a child prodigy,‖ with a zaddik, ―the mature leader
of an Óasidic community who is distinguished less by scholarship than piety.‖ He also
uses the terms tzaddik ha-dor and messiah ―as if they are interchangeable‖ but they are
80
not. Furthermore, ―he arranges a Óasidic wedding on the Sabbath‖ and ―he places
customers in a kosher restaurant at adjoining tables, eating corned beef and cheese
blintzes‖ (Myers 2008, 586). Myers clearly condemns Chabon for wrongly using these
Jewish terms and habits. You could however also interpret this as a sense of parody. We
should not forget that one of the main objectives was to continue writing on the idea of a
new Yisroel, which already produced its fair share of controversy after the publication of
his essay ‗Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts.‘ I do not believe that he wanted to be correct in
his usage of these terms and habits. On the contrary, it would not be surprising if he
deliberately made these ‗mistakes‘. Once again, fiction does not need to be correct. The
author has the right to construct a fictional world and story as he or she wants to.
4.5.2 Humor and respect
Even though the atmosphere of the novel is rather grim, Chabon treats the Jewish aspects
of his novel with a great deal of humor. A good example of this is one of Berko‘s witty
comments: ―‗they keep on making new Jews,‘ Berko says, stirring a spoonful of jam into
his glass. ‗Nobody is making places to put them.‘‖ (TYPU, 112). As becomes clear from
this example, the humor in Chabon‘s novel seems to have a slightly bitter undertone,
which agrees with the atmosphere of the novel. Another example is when, further on in
the story, Landsman seems to have found a clever solution to the problem of the already
crowded city: ―[y]ou want to go to the moon with me, Bina? I hear they still take Jews‖
(TYPU, 190). There are numerous examples of other humorous observations and one-
liners, but Chabon also dares to show his respect for the Jewish people and their ―wide
range and persistence of the race.‖
Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the
bubble of air in the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the
ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand,
from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical,
organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared (TYPU, 155 - own emphasis).
Nevertheless, ―the bubble of air‖ again refers to the imaginary nature of their ideal
homeland, which raises doubts as to whether we should read this paragraph in an ironical
way.
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In conclusion, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union seems to be much more than a hard-
boiled detective story based on a counterfactual history. References are being made to a
wide range of topics, from the game of chess to the political situation and history of Israel.
But most importantly, the characters incorporate different aspects of Judaism, which could
then carefully be linked to Chabon‘s own views on Jewish identity. In addition, his
―playful handling of language‖ and ―the accumulation of specific concrete detail,
precisely rendered scenes, and nuanced character development‖ (Dubrow 2008, 145) only
add up to the remarkable nature of this novel.
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Conclusion
At the beginning of this dissertation, the discussion of Maps and Legends let us become
acquainted with Michael Chabon‘s views on genre fiction. But more importantly, he told
us about his search for his ―own world,‖ a search he shares with millions of other Jews.
He also elaborated on how his novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union came about and how
the discovery of the phrasebook Say It in Yiddish made all the difference. When he
realized that the search for an ideal Jewish homeland was rather futile, he saw no better
solution than to create his own Promised Land in his mind. His Alyeska saved four
million Jews but after sixty years turned out to be a grim image of what it once was. When
the future Messiah is murdered, all hope seems lost.
The analysis of the novel has tried to demonstrate that the counterfactual aspect of The
Yiddish Policemen’s Union seems to hide behind the hard-boiled detective story of the
novel, but that it is nevertheless very much present in different references and themes. Its
counterfactual premise might not be plausible enough to contribute to historical research,
but it is so confidently integrated in the novel that the reader has no difficulty accepting it
as real. The willing suspension of disbelief is a key aspect in the narrative use of
counterfactuals, and Chabon succeeded in transporting his readers from the real to the
surreal with skilful precision.
But in the end, the novel is most remarkable for its treatment of the different aspects of
Jewish identity. In particular the dark, nostalgic tone which dominates the novel draws the
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attention of the reader. Due to the approaching Reversion the Sitka Jews will soon have to
start looking for yet another homeland. In this respect, the ironic tone seems to point to the
uselessness of the endless search for a new or ideal Jewish homeland. In addition, the
main character mockingly experiences his religion and distrusts those who still believe
fanatically in their faith, including the coming of the Messiah. The references to the
difficult situation between Israel and the Palestinian territories then seem to raise doubts
about the Jewish religion in general.
I do not believe however that Chabon wanted to offend any Jew with this novel. His
aim could simply not have been to denigrate Judaism. The ironic tone is therefore almost
always accompanied with a sense of humor and underlying respect. The use of the chess
motif also seemes to lighten the mood. In my opinion, Chabon only wanted to draw the
attention of the reader to certain irregularities within Judaism he himself, being a Jew,
struggles with.
We cannot forget that Chabon had to construct a rather grim world to fit in this hard-
boiled detective story. The counterfactual premise started out hopeful but needed to lose
its shine for the story to be convincing. In the light of several terrorist attacks in reality the
novel could not, in my opinion, have ended happily. This dissertation did not go as far as
linking the novel to 9/11 but Chabon clearly gave the impression that his novel was not
meant to be a fairytale.
Nevertheless, the end remains remarkable. Many questions are left unanswered. Where
is Alter Litvak? Who is Cashdollar exactly? What will happen when Reversion sets in?
Will the Temple of Jerusalem be resurrected successfully? And will there finally be an
ideal Jewish homeland? Although some have argued that this might not have been
deliberate, I believe that these questions remain unanswered for a reason. In
counterfactual history as in normal history, paths remain undiscovered, roads untaken and
choices unmade. Everyone has his own answers. The future of the counterfactual Sitka
Jews and the Jews in reality is still unknown.
84
But as the Jewish-American writer Sarah Glidden has recently said in an interview as a
result of the publication of her new comic book How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or
Less,
[m]ore Jewish Americans are understanding that in order to make Israel into the
place that they want it to be – a democracy, just state, at peace with its neighbors –
in order to get there, you have to question it (De Redactie.be, 2011).
85
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