Michael Chabon and the Names of Yiddish Sitka

When my book group picked The Yiddish Police Union by Michael Chabon, I was excited. I loved his Pulitzer Prize winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Then I heard that Title Wave was having him up for a talk and book signing. So we got the book and free tickets for the talk (unlike the Sedaris talk.) I won't go into the book much - there's been plenty of press on it: in the New York Times   (I guess it's a lot easier for New Yorker Michiko Kakutani to imagine that "Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka" than it is for this Alaskan living in the state's largest city of 260,000 people, nearly half the state's population, to imagine an urban center of over 2 million people in Sitka);  in The Jerusalem Post (no, Mr. Freeman, Sitka is not in the tundra), or on Terry Gross' Fresh Air.  I'll just focus on a part that intrigued me that I haven't seen covered elsewhere - the names of people, places, and things in this fictional Sitka. So you need to know that the book's basic premise is that Sitka, Alaska was designated as a temporary homeland for post-Holocaust Jews.

Last night was Chabon's talk - at Loussac Library's Marston Theater because Title Wave wasn't big enough for all the people who wanted to attend. I got to ask Chabon how he came up with all the various names of streets, buildings, places, and characters. A few I could already figure out. Bina Gelbfish (Goldfish), for example, always wore a bright orange parka outside. Others I could work out through google. Max Nordau (the book opens in the Zamenhof Hotel on Max Nordau Street) was an early Zionist who argued for a homeland for the Jews. On page 3, we read,

Landsman puts his hand on Tenenboym's shoulder, and they go down to take stock of the deceased, squeezing into the Zamenhof's lone elevator, or ELEVATORO, as a small brass plate over the door would have it. When the hotel was built fifty years ago, all of its directional signs, labels, notices, and warnings were printed on brass plates in Esperanto. Most of them are long gone, victims of neglect, vandalism, or the fire code.

And the fact that Yiddish became the language of Chabon's Sitka. Google quickly tells us that Zamenhof was the originator of Esperanto, the language that was supposed to become an easy to learn universal language. The Dnyeper Building overlooks the Schvartsn Yam, just like the actual Dnieper River flows into the Black Sea. And when you read the book, the last name of Shemets (shame, scornful whispering, according to the Yiddish dictionary online) makes sense for both Hertz Shemets and his son Berko.

Chabon's answer to my question about how he came up with the various names offered some extra insights one can't track down on Google. He'd read to us in his talk about a 1997 article he wrote on finding a Yiddish traveler's phrase book and imagining where it might be used. He was alerted to the Yiddish Online Discussion Group Mendele that was discussing his article. While the first post referred to the article as

a delightfully humorous essay regarding Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's little paperback phrase book "Say It in Yiddish"

other discussants were not as amused. (If you go to the link, search for Weinreich to find the various parts of the thread, which starts at June 24, 1997.) He also got an indignant letter from Beatrice Weinreich, by then the widow of Uriel. He wrote back an apology, but, as he told us, she didn't accept his apology.



So when he started to talk about how he named the characters in the book, he began by saying, Bina (Gelbfish, the ex-wife of the main character) was the nickname of Beatrice Weinreich. Many are names of important Jews as I mentioned earlier with some relationship to this fictional Jewish homeland. And some of the less savory characters in the book are named after people in the Mendele forum who were especially vocal in their displeasure with the original article on the phrasebook. I've now read through a number of the entries in the debate on Chabon's book on Mendele. I trust that Chabon, given his manner at the talk, was giving a friendly nod of recognition to his critics at Mendele. Certainly, contributors like Robboy ('the gaunt giant, Roboy') were thoughtful and respectful in their criticism . And I hope that they appreciate being immortalized in this book by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Update: I've added three other views of Tuesday night in a later post.