The Yiddish Policemen's Union

My 18 highlights

• “You,” she says, making a face like she just tasted earwax on her fingertip.

• The lady has been in and out of the hospital lately, dying in chapters, with a cliff-hanger at the end of every one.

• Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

• the disappointed gray of a November afternoon in southeastern Alaska. It’s not light oozing through so much as a residue of light, a day haunted by the memory of the sun.

• He feels that he suffers from tinnitus of the soul.

• As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation.

• Night is an orange smear over Sitka, a compound of fog and the light of sodium-vapor streetlamps. It has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat.

• “Beth Tikkun?” says the sergeant, as if it’s an American girl whose last name rhymes with “chicken”.

• Landsman’s mother was also a big one for the hurling of objects in anger, and the histrionic displays of Uncle Hertz, that cool customer, are rare but legendary.

• He tosses a smile in Landsman’s direction like a man dropping a quarter in a cripple’s cup,

• A scrotal pair of propane tanks huddles against the side of the building.

• Berko’s usual discreet skullcap has been laid aside in favor of an outsize embroidered number, cylindrical, a dwarf fez. Berko always lays on the Jew a little thick when he is obliged to travel to the Indianer-Lands.

• An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left parked with its engine running in the middle of his brain.

• singing Negro spirituals with Yiddish lyrics that paraphrased Lincoln and Marx.

• Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running.

• Potholes the size of bathtubs. Rain tossed in vandalistic handfuls at the windshield.

• The Indian noz has a head like a redwood burl and the worst haircut Landsman has ever seen, some kind of ungodly hybrid of a high-and-tight and a pompadour.

• “They’re yids. Yids with a scheme. I know that’s a tautology.”