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True to the formula of the hard-boiled detective novel, Landsman
enters the novel thoroughly burnt out: a 44-year-old workaholic and
alcoholic, depressed by his guilt-ridden memory of his father’s
suicide, his sister’s sudden and enigmatic death, his wife’s painful
abortion and a divorce. All of these experiences have made him a
cynic in a world of desperate believers: “To Landsman, heaven is
kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery”
(130). The novel is set a year before the sixty-year lease between
Jewish settlers in Alaska and the US government is to expire, with
Landsman finding himself unsure if he will be able to keep his job,
or, more correctly, if he will be able to stay in Alaska, as all Jewish
settlers either have to leave or stay as illegal immigrants. Worse still,
he finds himself already homeless years before Alaska reverts to the
American government when he and his wife, Bina, divorce after
losing their unborn baby. Since his divorce, Landsman has lived in a
worn-out hotel, dulling his pain with alcohol. It is not difficult for
the reader to see that Landsman has been reduced by forces beyond
his control, living now as a creature deprived and dispossessed. His
world, in other words, is a prison, in which he lives on, devoid of
any hope for redemption, awaiting the end. By taking up alcohol,
Landsman is simply hastening the arrival of his day of reckoning.
As Landsman’s personal life is collapsing and the collective fate
of Alaskan Jews hangs in the air, he becomes obsessed with a murder
that occurs in his hotel. In a sense, the murder saves him from his
own suffocating ennui. Landsman finds the murder victim, who calls
himself Emmanuel Lasker but is actually Mendle Shpilman, is the
son of the most influential Rabbi of an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect
called the Verbovers. Mendle was believed by many to be the
messiah, allegedly born to Jews in every generation, even though he
had run away from an arranged marriage and a plotted life and
become a drug addict. Why should a young man run away from his
influential family and a promising future? How could this dramatic
reversal of fate be explained? “What did he do?” and “Exactly why
was he dead to [his family] already?” (143). These questions rankle