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Talking to Chabon

Michael Chabon’s long-awaited new novel – his first for adults since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in 2001 – is garnering excellent reviews, and Salon has posted a lengthy interview with the author about it. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a detective story set in the fictitious town of Sitka, Alaska, a modern-day hamlet populated entirely by displaced Yiddish-speaking Jews. And according to Salon, this “fiction set in a fantastical place, told in a dying language, poses some of the most poignant, difficult questions about the Jewish homeland.” At one point in the interview, Chabon describes the genesis of the book as follows:

Some moment around the time that I was conceiving of this book I reread Isaac Babel’s short stories and I just felt like there was a stylistic link there between Babel and [Raymond] Chandler. Isaac Babel was a hard-boiled writer; he was tough and deliberately so. He almost wore his hardness as a badge of honor in a way that I felt like I recognized also from Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett. And he was writing around the same time as Hammett and Hemingway; it just didn’t feel like a totally ridiculous comparison to make.

The interview roves all over the place, and includes discussions of Israel, Chabon’s own married life (to a fellow writer), The Lord of the Rings, Barack Obama, and the yet-to-materialize film adaptation of Kavalier & Clay. Unfortunately, Salon does not ask Chabon why his editors failed to deep-six a completely terrible title like The Yiddish Policemen’s Union…

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