I’m just going to tug at this loose thread
I had a weird dream a few days ago. It has started fading out already, but I was meaning to journal it and so I have a memory of a summary. I was boarding a plane to Alaska. The plane took off, then I started fidgeting and realised Alaska wasn’t where I was supposed to be going. Somehow I took off from the plane, and landed over Ireland with frost on my outstretched arms.
Part of the inspiration behind my dream is reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I don’t usually read crime fiction; but I had heard of that book when last year’s Hugos were coming up and found it at a library. It takes place in Alaska, in the Sitka enclave, with a diaspora of Jewish inhabitants who carved out land and built a port city next to an indian reserve. There has been a murder, and it turns out the junkie corpse was the Tzaddik-ha Dor, a potential messiah in the eyes of his community.
What makes this (kinda) science fiction, and deserving of a Hugo prize, is the textured and seamless world-building. Most of the locales don’t exist, history has taken a different turn (one major diverging event in WW2 is mentioned matter-of-factly a third of the way in), and is about to take another. It is the early 21st century, there is no promised land, technology evolved a bit slower, and the retrocession of Sitka to the USA is coming up.
I appreciated the way a few evocative details painted diverse characters and places. The mood is often bleak, though there are a few brighter people and less decrepit lands. The investigation starts off very slow, but it ramps up and the story it uncovers gets big by the end of the book. The story needs a lexicon, it has lots of Yiddish, some of it part of the world-building. This comes up gradually, just like the divergences, the investigation, and the rest of Sitka.
Some of the details that make this book worthwhile: the eruv that circles the ultra-orthodox community that makes an enclave within the enclave, and the mayven who operates it. An eruv is a strange Jewish concept that works around some of the restrictions on what is permitted during Shabbath. Using poles and bits of strings, one builds walls and doors that outline an extended “home”, which as a home gives you permission to lift things and do some forms of physical activity without running afoul of the prohibition against work. Not fictional; there is one around Jerusalem for example. The chess club, and its mutation when a local champion put Sitka on the map, and the hotel redecorated it. It was both a nice gesture and a change from a ballroom into something drab with alternating black and white tiles on the floor. An aged chess player’s “I liked it better before” suicide note made nice black humour. Some of the Yiddish policemen; the mixed indian/jewish outcast who makes his bear totem animal proud. There are a lot more that I wouldn’t do justice to. All in all, this was an enjoyable foray into some more mainstream literature, with some emphasis on style without being boring or nihilistic.
The other inspiration for this plane dream is that I was accompanying a good friend from the airport, on her trip back from Israel. I had the date off, and was running around late at night without much purpose. This has been rectified, and now she is back with great stories.
Being a white Christian, she is able to visit both Israel and Palestine. Israel citizens don’t really get to see the other side; visits have been prohibited a few years back on the grounds of being dangerous. I’d like to write more on this - later, as I’m getting sleepy.