Sprechen Sie Daytshish?

When I took German in college, little did I know it would come in handy for reading a murder-mystery set in a fictional Jewish refugee colony in Alaska. That's right, it's book update time once again. I'm pretty far behind on posting about my reading progress, but I'll try to get it under control over the next few weeks.

#19: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
This is the first book I've read by Michael Chabon (I know, I'm apparently the only one who hasn't read The Amazing Adventure's of Kavelier And Clay). Coming off a Dashiell Hammett's complete novels this book was a little bit flat for me as a genre book. It came really close to working for me, but was a little bit short in a few areas. I really liked the Yiddish for the first third of the book, after that it started to seem a little gimmicky. I also really liked the plot for the first third and the last third of the book, the middle was slow and not helped by my sudden irritation with the unblent Yiddish. That being said, knowing German added another layer to the characterizations for me. Since a good bit of Yiddish is the phonetic spelling of the German word (how you can be more phonetic than German I don't know), or just the German word, I was amused to find that the main character's ex-wife has the last name Gelbfish, or yellow fish. My favorite Yiddish transformation is familiar to most bagel-eaters of the northeast: lox = lachs = salmon. You can translate from Yiddish to English as much as you want here.