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Hoofdstuk 2. the Yiddish Policemen's Union

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Hoofdstuk 2. the Yiddish Policemen's Union 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 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. iii 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 v 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 vi 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 7 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
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