Now here’s a list

I waited a long time to get to this book. Gosh it’s good.

At the bottom of the steps, he passes through the lost-articles room, lined with pegboard, furnished with shelves and cubbyholes that hold the thousand objects abandoned or forgotten in the hotel. Unmated shoes, fur hats, a trumpet, a windup zeppelin. A collection of wax gramophone cylinders featuring the entire recorded output of the Orchestra Orfeon of Istanbul. A logger’s ax, two bicycles, a partial bridge in a hotel glass. Wigs, canes, a glass eye, display hands left behind by a mannequin salesman. Prayer books, prayer shawls in their velvet zipper pouches, an outlandish doll with the body of a fat baby and the head of an elephant. There is a wooden soft-drink crate filled with keys, another with the entire range and breadth of hairstyling tools, from irons to eyelash crimpers. Framed photographs of families in better days. A cryptic twist of rubber that might be a sex toy, or a contraceptive device, or the patented secret of a foundation garment. Some yid even left behind a taxidermy marten, sleek and leering, its glass eye a hard bead of ink.

Other than the sheer beauty of the words (zeppelin, marten), there is an awful lot of goodness in this list. it says so much about the people that have passed through the hotel: a logger did, a salesman. The people came and left the relics of their falling-apart bodies — canes, a glass eye — as well as all those hairbrushes, tools to improve the appearance. There are tools for the spirit, too, the prayer items, most obviously Jewish, one Hindu. There are odds and ends, things that should have been missed (odd shoes), things that seem antique — cylinders for a gramophone, a toy zeppelin instead of an airplane or rocket.

And all these things evoke not just the lost and left behind items of the people in this hotel in this fictional Jewish settlement in Alaska, but the items so systematically taken from Jews by the Nazis, those storehouses of personal items (like those now in the museum at Auschwitz). Although it’s a different world, a world where perhaps some of those people might not have been victims of Nazi atrocities, the ghost of our world is there, echoing in the vintage-ness of the items, in the unusual quantities, in the way they’ve been saved and stored. The list ends with an offbeat taxidermied critter, cute yet also undeniably dead.

And that’s only pages 10-11. I can’t wait to get to the rest of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

About the author

I like sitting in Jack Webb's booth.