Off in Sitka

Haven't submitted in a while because I've been reading fiction. I'm finding that I only have room in my day to day for either imputs or outputs - if I'm filling my head, there's no time for letting stuff out.

So I've been spending my time in Boerum Hill (Fortress of Solitude - Lethem) and Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Chabon). Very different worlds, both very entertaining.

Lethem loves Brooklyn and here he's written a remarkably evocative book of Brooklyn in the 70's and 80's. It's not a nice book - drugs and crime and graffiti and all sorts of nasty things happening - but he really knows how to paint a picture. It almost reminded me of the Corrections in that you feel like you know his main character by the end. This is a real person living in a real place and you're right there with him. So much so that the fantastical elements of the story don't even linger in the cumulative feel of the book when you're done. It's such a realistic portrait that the supernatural piece just sits within it without altering the overall feel. Kind of like a gritty magical realism.

Then you switch to Chabon and boom! No realism here. A yiddish speaking nation living in Alaska?! A down on his luck cop walking the mean streets of Verbover island with his sholem (idiomatically, "peacemaker") in his holster?! Craziness! But fun.

Chabon clearly loves genres and alternate histories of niche communities. Parts of this reminded me of Kavalier and Clay and how he tried to weave in realistic elements to that book (footnotes, references to New Yorker articles about his protagonists). Here, the whole world has changed: 2 million dead in the Holocaust, israel loses the battle for independence, the US bombs Berlin with the atomic bomb... And he does a good job putting all that in that background so that he can focus on this crazy little pocket of alaskan jews and what would have happened if the vibrant, contentious, yiddish-speaking, european world had not been extinguished through genocide and assimilation, but rather had been preserved like a frozen gefilte fish in this bubble of sitka. Yiddish cops and chasidic gangsters, dead heroin addicts, chess players and a potential messiah. Like I said, lots of fun. Makes me nostalgic for a yiddish that I never learned.