Novelist's Ugly View Of Jews
MICHAEL Chabon's first full-length novel for adults in seven years, the delayed follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," is bound to set off a firestorm of controversy.
"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" depicts Jews as constantly in conflict with one another, and its villains are a ruthless, ultra- Orthodox sect that resembles the Lubavitchers, reports The Post's Kyle Smith.
Chabon, who is Jewish, depicts some of his Jewish characters as willing to do anything, including massacring other Jews, in the cause of Zionism.
Like Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," it takes place in an alternate reality. Chabon's tale is a comic noir detective story set in a contemporary America in which an atomic bomb was dropped on Germany in 1946 and Jews, who tried and failed in a bid to found modern Israel, were instead temporarily settled in the place where FDR once suggested they go - Alaska.
As the story begins, a section of Alaska that has been the Jewish homeland for the last 60 years is about to "revert" to being part of America, meaning the Jews who live there will again be stateless.
The Jews in the novel have an uneasy relationship with the Alaskan Indians - a parody of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The two groups have disputed borders and a simmering conflict, and there is a riot, blamed on the Indians, in which Jews turn out to have been massacred by other Jews.
The book's most sinister presence is a gangsterish extreme sect of Hasidim (who are derisively referred to throughout as "black hats") known as the "Verbovers" - a fictional group, but one that Chabon compares to such real sects as the Satmar, Bobov, Lubavitch and Ger.
The author describes the sect as a "criminal empire that profited on" secular Jews, whom the "Verbovers" consider "so flawed, corrupted and hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all."
Film rights were sold to producer Scott Rudin five years ago, long before the book was finished. But with Chabon's take on Jews as the central element in endless struggle, maybe Mel Gibson would like to direct.