427 / 142
The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 427
and remains. It is this “something more” that allows him to free
himself from the narrative of Jewish exceptionalism and opens him
up to different narrative possibilities
—
difficult and impossible
—
that exceed any claim of communitarian politics and transcend any
identity politics that is driven by the acting out of trauma. Rather,
in
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
, Chabon forces the reader to ask
the difficult and impossible question about how to live with the
trauma of the present
—
a present marked by diaspora, dispossession,
and statelessness
—
and reflect on what psycho-ethical conditions
would be necessary to work through a traumatic past so as to open
up the “more” of the present.
V. Conclusion
But there is no doubt that what broke
the marriage was Landsman’s lack of
faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina
and her character, but in the
fundamental precept that everything
befalling them from the moment they
met, good and bad, was meant to be.
The foolish coyote faith that could
keep you flying as long as you kept
kidding yourself that you could fly.
—
Chabon,
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(2007: 393)
Roth’s
The Plot Against America
opens with a thought-
provoking counterfactual scenario
—
fascism can take roots in
America
—
but by framing it as a
bildungsroman
novel and by
returning, by the end of the novel, the counterfactual time line of a
“what could have happened” to the factual time line of “what
actually happened,” it concludes with an easy Hollywood ending to
disavow an aggressive interrogation of and confrontation with the
specter of racism out of whose exclusion the myth of American