Chabon has written a book called The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. (Yiddish, known also as Judeo-German, is the dialectic spoken by millions and millions of Jews in Europe before the War. It’s rough analog in Mediterranean Jewry is Ladino or Judeo-Spanish. There is also a Judeo-Arabic. Even last generation many Jewish immigrant familes spoke Yiddish first, and English second. The language now looks as if it might go extinct, although it is making a comeback in universities and so on. Yid, in Yiddish, means Jew, so while it’s incorrect to say a Yiddish-speaker is speaking Jewish, you’ll sometimes hear a Yid use Yiddish as an adjective meaning Jewish.) Chabon explained how the idea for the book started when he saw a book called a Say It in Yiddish by Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich. He wrote an article about it, which annoyed much of the Yiddishist community, including Ms. Weinreich, co-author with and widow of the now late Mr. Weinreich. She was not at all mollified by Chabon’s apology, which story sounds about right. Very Yiddish. Behind me (there were about five hundred people in the audience for a Monday night lecture) sat a large man, probably a professional, who laughed at his own jokes and bad Yiddish. I didn’t mind his talking for too long, though; he fell asleep five minutes into the talk.

The funniest line of the evening came when Chabon told the story of a friend’s mother who claimed she could get anywhere in the world speaking English and Yiddish. Someone would always speak her language, so she didn’t need travel guides. After she went to Switzerland, the friend asked her what language they spoke there. “Yiddish!” she answered, as if it were obvious (answers are always as if they were obvious in Yiddish).
“That’s not true,” relied her son. “I’m pretty sure they speak schweizerdeutsch.”

“I didn’t say it was good Yiddish!”

The idea of the book, briefly, is that after the War the United States government provided a semi-autonomous, Yiddish speaking district for the Jewish European refugees in southeastern Alaska, in which, sixty years later, there is a murder case just before the district’s sovereignty is to be returned to the state. Chabon talked about what it is like to come from a place that does not exist. His recent ancestors, like mine, were born and lived and some died in Jewish communities, whole towns, that are either totally unwelcoming to their progeny or actually entirely gone.

During questions and answers, someone pointed out that a bookseller, named Jen, had put a note out in the bookstore. “I am twenty pages from the end and I don’t get it at all. Please help?” Someone else asked him what it was like to finish his novel. “I’ve never actually put the star on the Christmas tree, but I imagine that’s what it’s like.” Everyone laughed. I wondered whether it was too easy, whether it was a problem to have allusions that some people, like Jen, completely missed. Here are all these Chicagoans, mostly Jews, talking about themselves. And books. Very Yiddish. It’s a beautiful program in a blooming city about a poetric, or at least mysterious, people. If you don’t get it, that’s ok. Neither do we. In short, it’s very Yiddish. I didn’t say it was good Yiddish!