John and Rosianna discuss The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon. This episode was originally released to subscribers in July 2019.
How does Michael Chabon use alternate history to explore the relationship between resettled people and people who have lived in communities like Sitka, Alaska? Does one need chess experience to understand the great metaphorical resonance of the game in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union? How does the book fit into the noir genre? Join a chess expert* (Rosianna Halse Rojas) and a chess novice (John Green) as they mull over Chabon’s 2007 novel.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in July 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
*ran her street’s chess club when she was five
Rosianna Halse Rojas: Hello, everyone. Rosianna here, just jumping in with a big spoiler warning, as we do discuss major plot points from The Yiddish Policemen's Union in this episode. So if you haven't finished reading the book, then we'd advise you to wait to listen to this episode of the podcast until you have finished reading. All right, that's it. On with the show.
John Green: Hello and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. We're going to be discussing The Yiddish Policemen's Union today. Hi, Rosianna.
Rosianna: Hi, we're recording this in person, for a change.
John: We are in the same place at the same time. We are here in California for VidCon, and so we thought that we would record IRL.
Rosianna: Without lag.
John: Without—no lag.
Rosianna: Sweet joy.
John: Yes, this is really, really fun for us. So I chose this book. I hadn't read it since it came out and I really enjoyed rereading it. But when I was choosing it, I learned that the average Goodreads rating of this book is 3.8, which is too low, in my opinion. I have a strong, strong opinion that the average Goodreads rating of this book is too low.
Rosianna: Isn't every Goodreads rating 3.8?
John: For a long time, for like the first 300,000 ratings, The Fault in Our Stars was over 4.5.
Rosianna: Oh, nice.
John: But the interesting thing about The Fault in Our Stars is that it has gotten much worse as a book, according to Goodreads, since it became very popular.
Rosianna: Crazy that that happens.
John: So I want to ask you, Rosianna, because you have not read as many down-on-their-luck alcoholic detective novels, as I have, I suspect—
Rosianna: I have not.
John: I wanted to begin by just asking you what you thought of the book.
Rosianna: I found the first hundred pages really hard, I have to say. Like it took me a while to get into it. And I think part of it was I kept stopping and starting. And I don't think it's a book, at least for me, that you can stop and start. And then I raced through the next 300 after that, and completely felt myself in the world and really invested in all the characters and really enjoying the back and forth and the play and kind of the dark joy of it. But yeah, the first hundred pages I found really tricky for some reason.
John: Yeah, it is a little bit of a hard book to get into. I mean, partly because Landsman is, from the beginning, not particularly likable.
Rosianna: Yeah, I don't mind about that, though. But I can understand that being tricky for people.
John: Yeah, but I really like—so I love this voice, right? Like this is a well-established genre that has become so well-established that in some ways, it can feel same-y same-y—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —at times, for me. One of the hallmarks of this genre is that it romanticizes drug use and alcohol abuse—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —which I did not find in this book, at least for me. Like I did not feel like it was romanticizing it. In fact, it's only when Landsman sobers up that he becomes a good detective.
Rosianna: Right.
John: But the genre goes back to writers like Dashiell Hammett with The Thin Man, Raymond Chandler, with his famous soaking wet detective novels. And I really liked the way that Chabon, Chabon—he said once that it rhymes with radon, which I didn't find that helpful.
Rosianna: That can go into two directions.
John: Yeah. Chabon said—I liked the way that he used that character, but in a way that for me felt very fresh. So I think the reason I loved it from page one was that I felt like I was in one of the wondrously noir worlds—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —and I was just happy to be there—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —in a way that felt new.
Rosianna: I think part of the challenge for me is when it's kind of an alternate history novel—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —I so much want to find out what happened and why we're here and all the facts of it—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —and work them out. And it's back to our theme from previous podcasts and previous discussions of having to surrender yourself to the novel and let it tell the story. And let it take you where it takes you because you find out so many wonderful rich things throughout the course of the text.
John: Right.
Rosianna: It's not exposition at the beginning.
John: Yeah. I mean, that's my favorite way of doing it.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I can never do it that way when I'm writing. Like the few times I've tried to write alternate history or fantasy or sci-fi, I'm always like, here are the rules, here's the situation. Here's where we find ourselves and here is why it happened.
Rosianna: And this is a hammer.
John: Right, yeah. Whereas there really is like a slow drip of—and at times you only get glimpses, like the nuclear bomb dropped on Berlin is a dependent clause in the novel.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of like skirted over it for a second.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I went back and I was like, wait.
John: Yeah. And I think it was in 1946, not 1945, so we are to imagine that the war went on for another year.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I just—I found all of that stuff really, really interesting and it definitely held me. I mean, what I love, there's a lot I love about Michael Chabon's writing. I'm going to say it differently every time. But when I was in high school, I read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and I just—I loved that book so much. Like, it was my Catcher in the Rye. Like it was the book that made me feel less alone and made me feel like books were alive and yeah, it's just a very special book to me. And then of course, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and millions and millions of people read it.
Rosianna: That's the only other one of his that I've read.
John: Yeah, so I love The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I highly recommend it. I also love—he wrote a swashbuckling adventure novel set in like, 10th century Silk Road—
Rosianna: Oh, brilliant.
John: —called Gentlemen of the Road that's also really, really good.
Rosianna: Oh, that sounds great.
John: Really good. One of the things I love about his writing is his ridiculously good similes.
Like, the quality—and that's also a hallmark of noir detective fiction, you know, is really good similes. And in this book, there were so many where I would get my breath taken away. And there's two kinds, I guess, like for me, there's two kinds of good writing. The kind of good writing that I get lost in and the kind of good writing that calls attention to itself. And I prefer writing that I can get lost in that doesn't call as much attention to itself. Like David Foster Wallace called the stuff that calls attention to itself, "Look, Mom, no hands."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And there are definitely a few similes in this book that are so good that they're "Look, Mom, no hands," but who cares? They're great, oh.
Rosianna: I always like to imagine that the moment the writer's kind of just grinning at themselves.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Just being like, oh, man.
John: Yeah, just like—those are the little moments where you think like, maybe I am a genius.
Rosianna: Yeah. Or your point about noir—I read this piece from forward.com—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —by Mark Oppenheimer about the book. And he asked the question, "What is noir but the world-weary perspective, the diction of the man who’s been around the block too many times and doesn’t expect to see anything new?" I love that.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And it also really cooled back to House of the Spirits for me, and that idea of the ones who always win will win again.
John: Right. Right. And yet—I think that's what I love about noir is that it takes as a given that the world is unjust and yet we fight on. We battle on. Like, there's this great series called The Last, I think it's called The Last Policeman by a guy named Ben Winters and it imagines the life of a homicide detective in the eighteen months where humanity knows that a comet is coming that will destroy all of humanity—
Rosianna: Oh, great.
John: —and there's nothing that can be done about it.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And like, talk about world-weary, you know? Like, there is no reason to solve crimes anymore—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —because the human experiment has eighteen months left. And yet here this guy still is pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, asking people—and the police procedural part of mystery novels I also really love. Like that's obviously something that connects deeply with people since 85% of television shows are police procedurals now. But yeah, I love, love, love mystery novels and I thought that this had most of what I love in mystery novels. I mean, there is a sense in which the resolution isn't as much a resolution as in, you know, like, a Patricia Cornwell mystery or—
Rosianna: Agatha Christie.
John: —Agatha Christie.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so it doesn't have that element of it, but I think it has a lot of elements of it, and I don't know. I really liked that and I really loved the alternate history stuff—
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: —and I thought it was an interesting way to explore the relationship between —I think by using the alternate history, he was able to explore the relationship between a resettled people and the people who have lived in those communities in a really deep and complicated and non-judgy way.
Rosianna: Yeah. Because it kind of always had to be in Sitka.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Like in the sense of, you could not tell this story and have it set in Israel, for example, because it wouldn't—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —have—I feel like all of us bring our own things, well, I don't know, our own biases to that in a certain way.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And you wouldn't be able to have the story there because that experience carries its own weight with it.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And by taking this other place to, you know, have that be that space.
John: Yeah, and having it set in Sitka also, I think, regardless of where you sit on—you know, in that particular political conversation—it challenges everyone.
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: I think it challenges people. I felt like it challenged me and challenged my own personal feelings on what the resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict needs to be. But I think it challenges everyone because it empathizes with everyone. That said like, you know, centering the experience so much inside the Jewish community definitely means that we only get little, little glimpses—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —of the—I think it's Tlingit position and experience. And there were times when I wanted more of that.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it was interesting to have this, like, little moments of crossover—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —but you don't really hear from them. And in a way, I feel like again, to tell that story, it's so steeped in—everyone's Jewish, regardless of observance and that had its value too. But then I find that.
John: Yeah, but I think it's okay to center a story in Jewish experience.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like I don't think that that's a weakness of the novel, necessarily.
Rosianna: No.
John: It's a choice. And you've got to make a lot of choices when you're writing a novel. Like, there's a lot of stories you're not going to tell—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —because you're just telling one story.
Rosianna: Yeah. And to your point about the—was it Ben Winters?
John: Yeah, I think so.
Rosianna: I feel like there's such a sense of impending apocalypse—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —of any size in these kinds of novels.
John: Yes, yeah.
Rosianna: And for them, you know, you've got the Reversion. And this limit to this place that by design has been created for—with limits, but then also there's, yeah, this broader sense of apocalyptic, you know—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —everything's changing
John: Everything's falling apart.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Our—what has become our homeland will be taken away from us.
Rosianna: And I'm so drawn to those stories over—across genres of—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —apocalypse, crisis, and—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —how we deal with that.
John: Yeah. How we deal with it and how we don't.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like how, I think, you know, we take for granted—those of us who live in stable communities take for granted that this is the natural way of things.
Rosianna: Right.
John: And so I think it's worth paying attention to stories about how things fall apart, because it reminds us that this isn't the natural way of things. And also I hope that it helps us to empathize with people who are living in communities where things are falling apart.
Rosianna: Right.
John: And by the way, I don't think—like, even if you don't live amid great political upheaval, there are times in your life where everything is falling apart.
Rosianna: Right.
John: I found it helpful in the few times that I've had to live with that, to be able to look to stories of how people march on. And I think that's part of what I love about House of the Spirits, it's part of what I love about this book, is that it's a story of people keeping going—
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: —you know? Like, Landsman, for all of his abundant weaknesses, keeps going. And, you know, Berko keeps going. And, you know, this whole community of people are about to be scattered to the wind, you know. Some to Jerusalem, some to Australia.
Rosianna: Madagascar.
John: Madagascar. Yeah, I love that in the novel, everyone's going to a different place.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, nobody's going to the same place.
Rosianna: I love that idea of like—you give your, like—"What's your address?" "Well, this is my new address."
John: Right, yeah. But they keep going. And I think that's reflective of the story of the Jewish diaspora, but I also think it's reflective of many other communities.
Rosianna: Yeah, yeah. And other—and that, kind of—your future being, or feeling in some way, like it's being taken out of your hand and your physical location.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Very much being part of that.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah. I did find I wanted a cast of characters and I kind of kept my own as I was going. I was getting people confused.
John: Oh, you wanted like a list of—
Rosianna: I was a little, yeah—
John: —like, in the front?
Rosianna: Just a little list.
John: I think House of the Spirits had a list in the front.
Rosianna: I don't know if it did, but if it did, that would have been great for this.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah. I just got them so—when it was like one name being referred to rather than their full name—
John: Right.
Rosianna: I couldn't—I was like, who is that?
John: Well, especially because the murder victim changes names many times.
Rosianna: Right. Right, yeah, I found it hard sometimes to keep everyone in place. And then when we saw—when we meet, like Cashdollar?
John: Yes.
Rosianna: I was like, have we met him before?
John: Right.
Rosianna: And that kind of thing threw me a bit. But again, that's part of just letting the story take you where it takes you.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And also testament to the richness of the number of characters and how populated Sitka feels. It feels so populated.
John: Right, and it has that wonderful sense of at the same time being a small town and a big city, because there's a moment where Landsman sits down at a cafeteria and he sees two guys and he recognizes both of them—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know? And he's got this regular appointment at the donut shop and—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —you know, so there's all these characters who he interacts with, but at the same time, you feel like the city is very full. And then when he goes to the Verbover Island or whatever, you get the sense that there are lots and lots of people who Landsman has no idea who they are. And that's part of what's menacing about that moment is that in the previous settings, he's always like been able to recognize this person or that person and then suddenly it's just like black hats.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Which is a very essentializing term, because he isn't able to individualize any of these people.
Rosianna: Yeah, he sees them as this collective, in that sense.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I love strings in the book.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I love the person who's doing the string-making.
Rosianna: I think he was probably one of my favorite characters.
John: Yeah. Yeah. I like that he came back at the end and I loved that idea. I loved that idea of working around the limits of one's religious beliefs. But also I loved the idea that if you draw enough string, then all of outside becomes inside and all land becomes yours and how you can, in your mind, become the owner of land or feeling a legal—like this is legally my land because I made these strings.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It all came back to me to the question of how does land belong to a community and how does land come to belong to a community? Which of course is a very important question to the Jewish community in the 19th and 20th centuries and still today. How does your tie to the land become real? And does it delegitimize other people's ties to the land?And I thought the strings and the pulling of the strings was a beautiful metaphor for that.
Rosianna: And it operates on those different levels of the exiled community finding its way to have ownership over the land. But then it also, for me, created such a visual of all the big power players, all the Allied divorces and stuff in the early 1900s, deciding that the land, too.
John: Right.
Rosianna: So it has that beautiful double—completely different in many ways—resonance.
John: Right.
Rosianna: —at once and who has the power and who's deciding what's, yeah—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —what's important.
John: Right. And the idea that this person, even though he's not a member of the community, and in fact, is pretty openly disdainful of that.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: He still has tremendous power in the community because he is the drawer of the lines.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And that's true in colonialism. It's true—it's true all over the place. Like, we just got a survey done of our house and the person who did that survey had tremendous power to decide what land we own and what land we don't own.
Rosianna: He could just change everything.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: So he'll be like, "No, not this bit anymore."
John: Right, yeah, she could have been like, I'm sorry, you don't own that anymore.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah.
John: Yeah, you don't have legitimate title to that land. The idea of ownership of land is of course, really, really complicated. The more—it's one of those things, like, the more you look at it, the crazier it gets. And I thought that, you know, this book did that beautifully. I also—I love Berko.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, I just—I loved his character. I loved the kind of person he was. I love how his way of being a police officer was in such stark contrast to Landsman's way. I love that.
Rosianna: Yeah, I loved that—Bina? Was her name Bina?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah, I think she was great, too.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: She was really funny, but then also you could tell how frustrating and painful it must be—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —and how she has a different approach to it from Landsman and Berko, as well. But then it's still allowed to be this figure coming in to save the day in many cases—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —and showing her care for him with that.
John: Yeah. Right. I think that the love between them was very sad and very real.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know, and their shared grief and the grief that can kind of destroy you and can destroy a relationship. It's hard to—yeah, it's really, really hard to make it through that, the kind of stuff that they had to go through. And I think especially when, you know, you've got other problems and it's clear to me that Landsman is an alcoholic.
Rosianna: Yeah. Should we talk about chess?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Big character in the book.
John: Big character in the book. I don't know anything about chess.
Rosianna: No?
John: I mean, I know how the pieces move.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But it's a little bit like the mahjong in Crazy Rich Asians.
Rosianna: Oh, yeah. And then you read the BuzzFeed article, you're like, "It's so clever!"
John: Right, right, right. Like, "That's brilliant!"
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But until you read the Buzzfeed article explaining the chess in Yiddish Policemen's Union, it's a bit lost on me. But I will say, I thought he did a good job of making the chess-ignorant people not feel excluded.
Rosianna: You felt included in the narrative?
John: Totally. That's a really hard thing to do. Like Sarah and I have a phrase for this. We refer to the phenomenon as hypothermia is when your body gets really cold. Because one time we were watching a Lifetime movie together on the Lifetime Movie Network. And one of the characters said, "I'm worried that he's going to get hypothermia" and then turned to her friend and said, "Hypothermia is a disease where your body gets very cold due to long-term exposure to cold weather."
And there's a—in one of the James Bond movies, he plays no-limit hold 'em. And there's, of course, a woman off to the side who has to explain what's going on. So she'll say to another woman, like, "If you have five cards and they all have the same suit, that's better than a straight, which is when you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6."
Rosianna: Oh, god.
John: And they keep having to do this because there's a huge percentage of people who don't know the rules.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And presumably—
Rosianna: They need to understand the stakes—
John: Yeah, exactly.
Rosianna: —of this very cinematic scene.
John: Exactly. And if you don't understand the stakes, you won't be like, "Oh!" And I thought, I thought the movie Crazy Rich Asians dealt with that really, really well where the mahjong was enjoyable and didn't explain itself really.
Rosianna: Yeah. And it's kind of an added joy to people who knew it.
John: Exactly.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I felt the same way. Like I hope—I don't know chess people enjoyed the chess stuff more than I did, because I didn't get it, but I liked that the culminating fact of the mystery was a chess move. But enough groundwork had been laid that I understood—
Rosianna: Right.
John: —why that was the culminating fact and what the chess move was.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah. Well, I ran my street's chess club—
John: Oh, did you?
Rosianna: —when I was five.
John: Oh.
Rosianna: Very bossy.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: To every one chess. But I haven't played it probably since I was seven.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But I know, you know, I know all the pieces go. I like it, but I mostly like it as a metaphor.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: That's my favorite thing about chess.
John: Yeah. It's a great metaphor, right?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, I mean, it's armies.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It's literally black and white.
Rosianna: It's pawns and players, like, you know, in a story about people who don't feel they have any control. Like what's a greater metaphor than chess?
John: Right, right. Where you have very limited set of moves.
Rosianna: Yeah, and you were being used as pieces in this war. I don't know.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And yeah, the position is the zugzwang? Zugzwang?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I'm not going to pronounce that right. But the idea of being forced to move, even though knowing you're going to be checkmated in wherever you go. I found that such a potent metaphor for the diaspora, exile theme. Yeah, going through.
John: Mhm. Yeah, for sure. For sure, I thought that was really beautifully done.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Another thing I really liked was Meyer Landsman's name. Like a man of the land, but also the land's man.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I mean, obviously, there's a lot in the book about how we negotiate our relationship with land. But part of what's so sad to me about the apocalyptic elements of it is that he has clearly become—and most people in that community have clearly become Alaskan.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: They have become Sitkan. They now see themselves as people of Sitka.
Rosianna: Right
John: And it's almost like they've just begun to see themselves as people of Sitka when it's pulled out from under them. And they're told that they're no longer going to be people of Sitka. And I think that's quite common and it's really hard, even with small moves, you know.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Even when you—just when you get comfortable living in Chicago, you move to New York. But I think it's much more dramatic in the lives of refugees and people who don't have a settled place.
Rosianna: Yeah. I'm thinking about it in the context of the USA. I mean, part of the USA and not, and having acts committed in the name of, you know, a bigger country and not, and having—I think someone on the Discord wrote down. Oh yeah, Youval from the Discord wrote that one of the really challenging aspects of the end of this book was the role of Christians within the government who grease the wheels for the Verbover's plans. It felt a little too real to have that involvement.
John: Well, that is really real—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —because that's happening now.
Rosianna: Which I had no idea about. And then I went down this rabbit hole—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —of a lot of groups of people who were really motivated by the end times idea.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And—
John: No, there's still a lot of people who believe that that Jerusalem has to be a Jewish city in order for the Christian Messiah to come back.
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: And that the point of humans is to try to make a world where Jesus will return.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Now, from my perspective, making a world where God can return to is about making a world where there is less suffering and injustice. Not about trying to literally recreate first century—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —life.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, I don't think that's the way. I might be wrong.
Rosianna: I like medicine.
John: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Among other things. But there are a lot of people who believe that, and it does shape U.S. policy in the Middle East. And it is a really powerful lobbying force in those conversations. And, yeah, and I thought that he wove that in really well—
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: —in this book.
Rosianna: Yeah. And that, I don't know, for me, it was just really interesting that idea of those moments where you think you have agency and you think you have power, but actually you're part of this bigger system and which—to an extent you're being taken—advantage of being is being taken—you're being taken advantage of. Wow. Jet lag is really coming in. In order to achieve someone else's goal. And we see that when Cashdollar comes in as this very anonymous, generic figure.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Yeah. Representing mad conspiracy in many ways.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah, I don't know. I just thought it was interesting on that kind of theme of grand scale of other people pulling the strings and laying them down.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah. I mean, I kept thinking in my head about that great line in Ulysses where Bloom is in a bar and somebody asks him—Bloom's Jewish, but also Irish. And somebody asks him, well, what is a nation?
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: And Bloom says, "A nation is the same people living in the same place." And then he pauses and says, "Or different places." Then, you know, I thought of like—in terms of thinking about how we make nations, how we make peoples, how we make the idea of a people? You know, I think this book has a lot to teach us. A lot to tell us about how we imagine our ourselves into being and we imagine our communities into being. And that also means that if we change the way that we imagine our communities, if we change the way that we imagine our nations to be more inclusive, it can actually change the world.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like the way we imagine the world has such a big impact on the world that exists.
Rosianna: I always remember how transformative I found reading that classic university text, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson, I think?
John: Yeah. Heavily quoted in my paper on nation-making in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Rosianna: Oh, really? Well, no, I just think about that book all the time—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —because it was so, I mean, it was definitely one of those like first year of university moments where I was like, what! This is new information.
John: Yeah, well—
Rosianna: But it was so—it was so helpful.
John: Yeah, because we take the idea of established nations and communities as a given.
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: And part of the reason that we're able to take it as a given—
Rosianna: Mhm.
John: —is part—let me rephrase that. Part of the reason I'm able to take it as a given is because I am allowed the privilege of nobody questioning whether I have a place in the United States.
Rosianna: Right.
John: Whether this is my community.
Rosianna: Right.
John: It's assumed when you look at me, but also when I was growing up, looking out at the world, I was able to assume that I was American.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I was able to understand myself as American, without any complexity. And it's only when you listen to people—other people—that you understand that in fact, that identity has a lot of complexity. And so I think about that a lot.
Rosianna: Yeah, everything is a lot more fragile than it immediately might appear.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Well, I think that's about all the time we've got today.
John: Yeah. But thank y'all for reading Yiddish Policemen's Union with us. We're looking forward to discussing the book with you in a Q&A.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's been great to read all your—read your comments on it. Especially because I was saving them all up for when I finished the book. And then Monday night of this week—when I finished the book on my ten-hour flight—I then poured over them. So yeah, thank you to everyone who's taking part in the discussions. Next month we are reading Stories of Your Life and Others. Really excited to talk about that.
John: So good!
Rosianna: So excited to talk about that one.
John: Your minds are going to be blown.
Rosianna: It's going to be really fun discussion and also short stories, a different format that we haven't done yet.
John: We haven't done short stories and we haven't done crazy, mind-blowing sci-fi.
Rosianna: Just, like, two at once!
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: But is it, feed two birds with one scone?
John: I think that is the PETA-approved.
Rosianna: Anyway, thank you, everyone, for listening.
John: Thanks for listening and we'll see you in the Discord. Bye.
Rosianna: Bye.