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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 423
vocation
—
beyond any law
” (Bielik-Robson, 2010: 106)?
Even though Chabon is not a theorist, in writing
The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union
, he posits and attempts to answer these
Agambanian questions by giving us the inquisitive Landsman, who
in piecing together the story of a drug addict who is also a Messiah,
achieves his own small-scale redemption by letting go of his
attachment to the contrapuntal discourses of both American
exceptionalism and Jewish exceptionalism. Instead of seeking
assimilation into the US, thus ascribing to the supremacy rhetoric of
American exceptionalism or indulging in the redemptive narrative
concocted by Zionist nationalists, Landsman distances himself from
both grand ideologies and treats them as errors and mistakes. To
Landsman, the enigma of life cannot be translated into the language
of nationalism, nor can it be equated with the idiom of either
possessive or alienating individualism. It is not assimilation, nor the
founding of a Zionist state, that will procure for him the happiness
that he had in his own marriage and witnessed in the marriage of his
partner and half-cousin, Berko Shemets, who, as a mixed-blood Jew,
is, rather paradoxically, more Jewish than the “pure-blooded”
Landsman. Berko is seen by both Jews and Tlingit Indians with
suspicion, as “a Minotaur,” with “the world of Jews [being] his
labyrinth” (41). Precisely because he has to work hard to disentangle
and comprehend the Other’s claim on him, Berko makes conscious
efforts in living as a Jew who is nevertheless observant of Judaism
“in his own way for his own reasons” (41). By so doing, Berko
proves himself more a Jew than his father, given that he actualizes
the Jewish legacy by engaging in everyday life and valorizing the
“slow pacings of daily tasks” (75), to borrow a phrase from
Jacqueline Rose. This legacy to obey the divine commandments by
investing everyday life with divine significance is what the Zionists
have forgotten in their haste to embrace and militarize Zionism, and
it is this legacy to which Chabon is trying to give voice.
For Landsman, it takes the investigation of the death of a
Messiah to realize finally that the blessings of life do not reside in