A

& Entertainment

ON THE CO

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Louis Begley:

Matters of Honor

Andre Aciman:

(Knopf; $24.95)
Three roommates — an unpolished Jewish
Polish refugee transplanted to Brooklyn, an
affable Army brat and a New Englander who
narrates the story — navigate Harvard in the
1950s. Following their lives post-graduation,
what emerges is a portrait of friendship and
a meditation on loyalty and honor.

Sam Bourne:

Call Me by Your Name

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $23)
A summer romance shared by an adoles-
cent boy and a summer guest at his par-
ents' home on the Italian Riviera marks the
two for life. The significance of the relation-
ship becomes a revelation about passion.

(HarperCollins; $24.95)
A young reporter connects the deaths of
people around the world and tries to solve
a wider mystery. The meaning of ancient
texts and a prophecy enter into the thriller.

Aharon Applefeld:

Tatiana de Rosnay:

All Whom I Have Loved

Sarah's Key

(Schocken; $23)
The Ukrainian-born Israeli writer, author of
more than 20 works of fiction and nonfic-
tion, crafts another novel about a Jewish
family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s that
prefigures the fate of the Jews during World
War II. At its center is a 9-year-old boy, the
child of divorced parents, through whose
eyes the reader witnesses an increasingly
chaotic world.

By Michael Chabon

I

n the invented world of the
much-anticipated novel by the
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay, Yiddish is spoken in the Alaskan

panhandle.
Sitka today, in actual geographic
terms, is a town in Alaska with a
population of 9,000 people, about 35
of them Jews. Chabon's Sitka is an
invented place, "a crooked parenthesis
of rocky shoreline running along the
edges of Baranof and Chicagof Islands,"
that serves as a temporary homeland
for 3 million displaced European Jews,
established by the U.S. in the wake of
World War II and the collapse of the
State of Israel.
The Jews of Sitka are the Frozen
Chosen. Here, television shows are
dubbed into Yiddish, and the cops and
criminals are Jews.
"In some ways I'm trying to do this,
an act of imaginary salvation, to save
Yiddishkeit, to save the Jews of Europe,

38

June 28 @ 2007

Bad Blood

(Scribner; $26)
An assistant district attorney prosecutes a
high-profile homicide case during the time
an underground explosion affects the New
York City water-supply system. The thriller
gets more dramatic as the prosecutor finds
a link between the murder victim for whom
she is seeking justice and the killed tunnel
workers.

Eliot Fintushel:

The Righteous Men

(St. Martin's Press; $24.95)
A French girl locks her brother in a closet
on the day the police round up Jewish fami-
lies for the Nazis. Years later, an American
journalist investigates that day in history
and uncovers a connection between her
husband's family and the girl who tried to
protect her brother.

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION

(Harper Collins; 411 pp.; $26.95)

Linda Fairstein:

from the fate they met.
I'm imagining that they
were able to live and that
their language survived.
I'm acting as the escapist
in this novel," explains
Chabon.
The story is set in
the present, and Sitka
is reverting to Alaskan
control, after 60 years
of prosperous times for
the Jews.
In the first sentence
of the book, a man is
murdered. The unknown victim lives
in the same fleabag hotel as Meyer
Landsman, the most decorated Yiddish-
speaking cop in Sitka. Detective
Landsman discovers the corpse of
his neighbor, a former chess prodigy,
but his investigation is mysteriously
ordered closed.
This is a hard-boiled detective story
that's an homage to 1940s noir, a love
story, a meditation on identity and faith
and a celebration of language, spiced
with Chabon's distinctive humor. The

Breakfast With the
Ones You Love

(Bantam; $12)
A 16-year-old runaway and her boyfriend
want to call down a spaceship to take the
Chosen to the Promised Land. Their mission
entangles them with the Russian Mafia, a
telepathic cat and Satan.

Judy Goldstein and Sebastian Stuart:

24-Karat Kids

(St. Martin's Press; $22.95)
A new pediatrician with a humble back-
ground gets hired by a group of doctors
with a very lucrative practice. The effects
of being drawn into a culture replete with
money, style and romance become the cen-
ter of the plot.

author explains that
one of the ideas he
plays with in his work
is to find a Jewish
aspect of a genre, if
such a thing exists,
and emphasize it, as
he did with comics in

Kavalier and Clay.

"If it's a genre
that doesn't have a
particularly strong
Jewish component
or heritage, I make
one for it. There's
not a strong tradition
of Jewish writing in
hard-boiled detective fiction. I somehow
feel that in turning my attention to a
genre, part of what I have to do is make
it a little more heimish before I can feel
comfortable."
With high verbal dazzle, Chabon
seems to have a good time with names,
spellings, wordplay and language as the
mystery gets further tangled with his
made-up history and the game of chess
and then resolved. His characters are
speaking Yiddish for the most part as
the cadences and phrases in English

Joanna Goodman:

You Made Me Love You

(New American Library; $13.95)
Three sisters and their mother, apparently
on different life paths, seek distinct ver-
sions of love and happiness. As they turn to
each other, they also turn their lives around
in reaching for their personal dreams.

Batya Gur:

Murder in Jerusalem

(HarperCollins; $24.95)
In the last novel from the late Israeli author,
the body of a woman discovered in the
warehouses of Israel Television leads to an
investigation that questions the people who
run the broadcast center. Discoveries relat-
ed to the crime relate to evils that could be
more far-reaching.

Howard Jacobson:

Kalooki Nights: A Novel

(Simon & Schuster; $26)
In this darkly comic novel, Jewish cartoon-
ist Max Glickman caricatures and satirizes
the exiled Jewish people in his tome Five
Thousand Years of Bitterness — so he can
try to cope with his own life. Jacobson,
often referred to as "the English Philip
Roth," explores his American counterpart's
favorite themes: sex, death, Jewish parents
and their sons and Jewish identity.

suggest.
Chabon succeeds in creating a world
in full color; it's as though he has
painted a large mural, bursting with life,
covered with powerful images, fanciful
details and even some graffiti around
the edges. He is a writer who barely
leaves a paragraph without packing it
with a string of inventive metaphors.
Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of
Pittsburgh, was originally written for his
master's degree from the University of
California-Irvine and became a national
bestseller. His other novels include
Wonder Boys and Model World; his
adventure novel, Gentlemen of the Road,
just ran in serial form in the New York
Times Magazine and will be published in
book form in November.
Born in 1963, Chabon grew up in
Columbia, Md., a planned community
with utopian aspirations, and has lived
in California for the last 20 years. He
now lives in Berkeley with his wife,
novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their four
children. Chabon's 15-city author tour
for his novel included two unusual stops:
Anchorage and Juneau.

- Sandee Brawarsky

