Second Person Singular

Second Person Singular

By Sayed Kashua

I ran across this title only a few months back over as The Boston Bibliophile. It was among a pile of books she has received and the cover caught my eye. How could it not? Look at that masterpiece! The designer should win some sort of award for that cover. Given the narrative, even more so. Upon reading the blurb, I was intrigued enough to put it near the top of my Kindle purchase list. And now I have finished reading it and have begun writing my blogpost on it.... but that's first person singular.

Anyway....

The story begins with an Arab lawyer (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) living in Jerusalem. He's got a perfect life with a sickeningly perfect family. He does his best to assimilate into Israel's fractured society and spends an inordinate amount of time cultivating his intellectual image via books, and cultural exchanges. He is determined not to look the fool in front of his peers and therefore visits his local bookstore regularly in order to consume the literature that he things a man of his stature should read not for any personal reason, but simply in order to say he has read them. Shallow depth, if I may coin a phrase.

It is on one of these visits to the bookstore that the lawyer purchases a used book only to find a note in his wife's handwriting inside the book. The note reads vaguely like a love letter and it is not addressed to the lawyer. The book was previously owned by someone named Yonatan (Jewish). What follows is a very personal account (and a very odd detective story) of how the note ended up in that novel, the lawyer's irrational reactions to the note and a very honest depiction of the human condition under stress.

But before we get into the thematic deconstruction, what struck me most about this novel was its depiction of life in Israel and the relationship between Jews and Arabs as well as the relationships between the ethnicities, gender and age groups. Kashua paints a fascinating picture of everyday life in Jerusalem. It is a Jerusalem populated by educated lawyers, preoccupied professors and ironic art students, none of which harbor any particular ill-will toward each other. While I cannot say for certain whether it is an accurate depiction of modern Jerusalem, it is the only novel I have to go on and I'll assume it is correct until I'm told otherwise. Kashua treats the reader to a surprisingly (to me, anyway) cohesive society which displays far more tolerance and acceptance than I could have ever expected. While religious fervor is hinted at in reference to those living in the Strip and the settlements, Jerusalem is depicted as a cosmopolitan city rife with cultural nuance. For this reason alone, Second Person Singular is worth a look.

Kashua's prose is versatile, shifting between two diametrically opposed voices with each a as well as skillfully oscillating his tone in reference to the lawyer who, as the novel progresses, increasingly falls off the emotional and psychological rails. Furthermore, Kashua toys with the chronological order of events within the narrative. While many readers find this tactic to be needlessly ambiguous, it adds a certain idiosyncratic appeal that places the reader square within the midst of the swirling narrative. The novel becomes an interactive experience whereby the reader is constantly reassessing their position, never allowed to find a comfortable place within the story.

Admittedly, Second Person Singular is not an easy read. It drags the reader through some serious emotional themes including the nature of apathy and the disappearance of the self. But the emotional theme that seems to tie the entire novel together (especially within the narrative concerning the lawyer) is the way in which jealousy can compromise a person's entire belief structure. Throughout the novel the lawyer struggles to maintain his well-crafted system of beliefs in the face of his jealousy. Principles and personal politics seem to fall by the wayside as the story progresses, leaving the reader to question how firm the lawyer is in his convictions and how much is simply a construct of his image. In fact, the lawyer's narrative often borders on the absurd.

This theme in particular was difficult for me since I have a profound lack of sympathy or empathy for those who suffer from jealous rages (no offense intended if you are one of those sufferers, but I just don't get it). For the record, I'm not a sociopath. I do, in fact, experience the full gamut of emotions, but I've never understood jealousy so I found it extremely difficult to identify with the lawyer's irrational and ofttimes inexplicable behavior in relation to the note. I do understand that jealousy, to a certain extent, is cultural. In Taiwan for example, jealousy is often seen as a visual display of love and devotion. One often sees men or women fly into jealous rages (sometimes in public) in order to express their love. Conversely, a lack of jealousy is often perceived as emotional ambivalence and often leads to behavior expressly designed to generate jealousy, which can only end badly, of course. I can only ascertain that Arab culture must have a similar relationship with jealousy given the lawyer's behavior throughout the novel.

Second Person Singular has a lot going for it. As a piece of literary fiction coming out of Israel it has a certain cultural currency for those who enjoy armchair tourism into worlds they may never visit. Furthermore, the intimate nature of the narrative allows the reader access to the psychological core of Jewish and Arab culture in Israel, which is worth something, I suspect. Is Second Person Singular worth the effort? Yes. Should you be rushing out to find a version in hardcover for your personal library? Probably not. Unless you, like me, really get suckered in by cool covers.

It really is a cool cover.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is the answer to a very difficult question:

Does there exist a book that is simply too Jewish?

Oi vey! This might be the one.

But, once you get past all the shlemiels, shaydls and shtinkers Michael Chabon has crafted an interesting, if maddeningly incomplete, narrative.

I say interesting because Chabon has taken a historical footnote and supposed that it actually happened. In this case, Chabon takes the controversial proposal made by Harold Ickes in 1940 that a portion of Alaska be portioned out to Jewish refugees trying to escape the expansion of Nazi Germany. Ickes' Alaska proposal was very real, but it was shot down in the U.S. Senate and European Jews were left to their own devices for another eight years before the creation of the state of Israel. In Chabon's world, thousands flood the icy confines of Baranof Island and over-populate the tiny Russian settlement of Sitka (which becomes a seething metropolis of two million souls) which then goes on to host the 1977 World's Fair (the pinnacle of the Sitka settlement, apparently). As well, there exists constant friction between the Sitka Jews and the Tlingit natives in the area.

I say incomplete because Chabon offers up information about this alternate reality like Ebenezer Scrooge offers a two pence raise on Christmas Eve. Chabon supposes that Israel was indeed created in 1948 but was subsequently wiped off the map within six weeks during the Arab-Israeli War. Therefore, it is the state of Israel that is relegated to the status of footnote and the Alaskan proposal that becomes the defining event for post-war Jews.

Trouble is, the Sitka Settlement is still on American soil and the Ickes proposal was simply a 60 year land lease and the narrative takes place five weeks prior to Reversion. Since the holocaust in Chabon's world was nowhere near as devastating as the one that occurred in reality, worldwide attitudes toward Jews haven't changed much. America (and the Tlingit) very much wants the Jews (or the Frozen Chosen as they are referred to in the novel) out of the Sitka Settlement, forcing the Jews back into their centuries old diaspora where pogroms an ghettos are still very much a reality.

Sounds cool (in a alternate-history way, not in the anti-Semitic way), right?

Well it is.

Except that Chabon only gives out tantalizingly few details about the geo-political situation despite the fact that they become important toward the end of the book. His story focuses on a loser police detective in Sitka who is investigating the murder of a heroin junkie who may or may not have been Messiah (Tzaddik Ha-Dor). The investigation, which begins in the sleaziest fleabag hotel in Sitka blows up into an international incident involving extremist Zionists bent on reclamation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Arabs and, of course, chess.

While the primary narrative was alright (but again, incomplete) I was far more interested in the world that Chabon had created. I wanted more information about the state of the world in his alternate 2007. He mentions the Third Russian Republic and the existence of a country called Irkutsk, which raised all sorts of questions about this alternative world and its relationship with the board game Risk. Apparently the Atomic Bomb was indeed dropped on Berlin at the end of World War II (1946). He noted that the major players in the Middle East were Egypt and Persia (!?!) and that Manchuria existed as an autonomous nation, presupposing that China has fractured into another "Warring States" period. There was something called the "Cuban War," JFK married Marilyn Monroe and Orson Welles completed his opus Heart of Darkness. In one flight of fancy that is not too far off from the truth, America is ruled by right-wing evangelical Christian zealots.

I wanted to know more about this world. What of Japan? What happened with them at the end of the war? Or Korea. Or Greece. Two major international crises that followed the war. How did they play out? Or the United Kingdom or France or Germany or Africa or Greenland. The little tidbits of history Chabon drops are like bread crumbs for a starving man. I was insatiable for information about this intriguing world. So much so that I often lost interest in the primary narrative.

This was all too much for me who would have much preferred a travelogue through Chabon's world at some point in the narrative so that I could place these Alaskan Jews into some sort of political and historical context. This would have really eased my mind about what I was reading instead of constantly trying to guess about what had gone on in the world over the prior 60 years. Alas, Chabon focuses on telling his story of crime, justice and redemption at a personal level and I can't really fault him for that. It's his story and he can tell it any way he wants to and frankly, he does tell it very well (and in Yiddish, too), although it begins to sound a little familiar once you break it down...

Meyer Landsman is a hard-boiled cop in a world full of Raymond Chandler characters (if Raymond Chandler characters carried monikers such as Mendel or Yossele). He is instantly detestable and lovable but prone to making really bad decisions that somehow work out in his favor. Berko, his Tlingit-turned-Jew partner, is a metaphor for the topsy-turvy politics of this barren northern settlement and Bina, Landsman's ex-wife and current boss is a careerist cop who plays by the book. A nice little Harry Potter-esque triad of good guys to fight against Slytherin Hou... I mean the Verbover Jews.

Anyway, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a good book but left me needing more in terms of geo-politics. I suspect that says a lot more about me than it does about this book. So read it yourself and get back to me about what you thought because I'm still day dreaming about Shiite/Sunni conflicts in Arab controlled Palestine and their global implications.

Yes. I'm a nerd.