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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 407
Jews in Alaska had, by 2007, already lived on borrowed time and
leased land for over fifty-nine years. Disappointment has become the
keynote of their lives as they suffered one setback after another;
Landsman is no exception. He is a Jew about to be expelled from
his homeland to seek his luck on foreign soil. His cynicism and
pessimism bear only superficial resemblances to Hammett and
Chandler’s tough-guy detectives, for, unlike them, his losses are
more substantial and cannot be willed away. He knows, as
everybody else in the novel knows, that he needs to take action to
find himself a “place” to live. With time running out, only a few
options are still available. He needs to assimilate or emigrate, both
of which involve meeting various conditions, or he could join the
struggle to found a Zionist state in Israel.
Landsman is too busy abandoning himself to alcohol to
consider any of these options. While he drinks to numb himself,
others come to their own solutions. A careful scrutiny of the three
options outlined above suggest that the Jews seem to believe that the
Jewish problem can only be resolved by either founding a new state
or assimilating into an existing one, perhaps the US. That is to say,
the Jewish problem has become a political problem, in its narrowest
sense. It is this reduction of the problematic of “Jewishness” to an
identitarian issue with a nationalist and redemptive strain that
Chabon is calling into question. Without denying the importance of
the nation-state, Chabon draws the reader’s attention to the high
price individual Jews may have to pay if they choose to give their
own life narrative a historical causality and a singular teleology,
oriented towards the nation-building project, so that they disavow
the possibility of thinking outside of the framework of the “political,”
especially the framework of the statist form of identification.
Chabon goes further than simply calling into question the Zionists’
embrace of nationalism; he has Landsman eventually recognize
other options for the future of his people, options that seem
resonant with the theological strains within the Jewish tradition.
However, Landsman only learns to take a different perspective in