Highlights from The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon Last read on February 27, 2022
Highlights from this book
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The Holy Land has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka. It is on the far side of the planet, a wretched place ruled by men united only in their resolve to keep out all but a worn fistful of small-change Jews. For half a century, Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to bone and gristle. Jerusalem is a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles.
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As Shpringer has inferred from the marks on Lasker's arm, the deceased's apparent tourniquet of choice was a leather strap, black, about half an inch wide. Halfway along the strap hangs a small leather box designed to hold a slip of paper on which a scribe, with ink and a feather, has written four passages from the Torah. Each morning the pious Jew twines one of these doodads along his left arm, ties another to his forehead, and prays for understanding of the kinds of God Who obliges somebody to do something like that every damn day of his life. But there is nothing inside the box on Emanuel Lasker's prayer strap. It's just the thing he chose to use to dilate the vein on his arm.
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" Your father played chess, " Hertz Shemets once said, " like a man with a toothache, a hemorrhoid, and gas. " He sighed, he moaned. He tugged in fits at the patchy remnant of his brown hair, or chased it with his fingers back and forth across his pate like a pastry chef scattering flour on a marble slab. The blunders of his opponents were each a separate cramp in the abdomen. His own moves, however daring, however startling and original and strong, struck him like successive pieces of terrible news, so that he covered his mouth and rolled his eyes at the sight of them.
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By now they were all staunch Alaskan Jews, which meant they were utopians, which means they saw imperfection everywhere they looked.
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She pitied Isidor Landsman deeply for the loss of his family, for the suffering he had endured in the camps. But she was one of those Polar Bear kids who handled their own feelings of guilt at having escaped the filth, the starvation, the diches and killing factories by offering survivors a constant stream of advice, information, and criticism disguised as morale boosting. As if the choking, low-hanging black pall of the Destruction could be lifted by one determined kibitzer.
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Landsman's father played chess. Every morning, in rain, snow, or fog, he walked two miles to the Hotel Einstein coffee shop, sat down at an aluminum-topped table in the back, facing the door, and took out a small set of maple and cherry chessmen that had been a present from his brother in law. Every night he sat at his bench in the back of hte little house on Adler Street where Landsman grew up, in Halibut point, looking over the eight or nine correspondence games he had going at any one time. He wrote notes for Chess Review. He revised a biography of Tartakower that he never quite finished or abandoned. He drew a pension from the German government. And, with hte help of his brother-in-law, he taught his son to hate the game he himself loved.
" You don't want to do that, " Landsman's father would plead after Landsman released, with bloodless fingers, his knight or pawn to meet the fate that always came as a surprise to Landsman, no matter how much he studied, practiced, or played the game of chess. " Take it from me. "
" I do. "
" You don't. "
But in the service of his own small misery, Landsman could be stubborn, too. Satisfied, burning with shame, he wouldw atch unfold the grim destiny that he had been unable to foresee. And Landsman's father would demolish him, flay him, vivisect him, gazing at his son all the while from behind the sagging porch of his face.
After some years of this sport, Landsman sat down at his mother's typewriter to write his father a letter in which he confessed his loathing for the game of chess, and begged his father not to force him to play anymore. Landsman carried this letter in his satchel for a week, enduring three more bloody defeats, and then mailed it from the Untershtat post office. Two days later, Isidor Landsman killed himself, in room 21 of the Hotel Einstein, by an overdose of Nembutal.
After that Landsman started to have some problems. He wet the bed, got fat, stopped talking. His mother put him in therapy with a remarkably gentle and ineffectual doctor named Melamed. It was not until twenty-three years after his father's death that Landsman rediscovered the fatal letter, in a box that also held a fair copy of the unfinished biography of Tartakower. It turned out that Landsman's father had never even opened the letter from his son, let alone read it. By the time the mailman delivered it, Landsman's father was already dead.
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Landsman is at the wheel of a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport, which he bought ten years ago in an access of nostalgic optimism and has driven until all its secret flaws seem indistinguishable from his own.
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She leaves the door open, and Landsman standing there on the thick coir mat that says GET LOST. Landsman touches two fingers to the mezuzah on his way in and then gives them a perfunctory kiss. That is what you do if you are a believer, like Berko, or a mocking asshole, like Landsman.
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Goldy is wearing his polar-bear jammies, the height of retrospective chic for an Alaskan Jewish kid. Polar bears, snowflakes, igloos, the northern imagery that was so ubiquitous when Landsman was a boy, it's all back in style again. Only this time it seems to be meant ironically. Snowflakes, yes, the Jews found them here, though, thanks to greenhouse gases, there are measurable fewer that in hte old days. But no polar bears. No igloos. No reindeer. Mostly just a lot of angry Indians, fog, and rain, and half a century of a sense of mistakenness so keen, worked so deep into the system of hte Jews, that it emerges everywhere, even on their children's pajamas.
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They shake hands again. This conversation is the equivalent of Landsman's kissing the mezuzah, the kind of thing that starts out as a joke and ends up as a strap to hang on to.
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There is not a beard to be found on the chins of any of the men of his maternal family, reaching back all the way, no doubt, to the time when Raven created everything (apart from the sun, which he stole). Berko Shemets is observant, but in his own way and for his own reasons. He is a minotaur, and the world of Jews is his labyrinth.
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" Mazel tov, Berko. " Landsman's congratulations are so ironic that they are heartfelt, and they are so heartfelt that they can only come off as insincere.
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Berko has been staring at the dog with increasing fixity. Abruptly, he gets up and goes over to the stage. He clomps up the three wooden steps and stands looking down at Hershel. Then he holds out his hand to be sniffed. The dog clambers back into a sitting position and reads with his nose the transcript of the back of Berko's hand, babies and waffles and the interior of a 1971 Super Sport. Berko crouches heavily beside the dog and unhooks the clasp of the leash from the collar. He takes hold of the dog's head in his massive hands and looks into the dog's eyes. " Enough already, " he says, " He isn't coming. "
The dog regards Berko as if sincerely interested in this bit of news. Then he lurches to his hind legs and hobbles over to the steps and tumbles carefully down them. Toenails clacking, he crosses the concrete floor to the table where Landsman sits and looks up as if for comfirmation.
"That's the straight emes, Hershel," Landsman tells the dog, " They used dental records."
The dog appears to consider this; then, much to Landsman's surprise, he walks over to the front door. Berko gives Landsman a look of reprimand: What did I tell you? He darts a glance towards the beaded curtain, then slides back the bolt, turns the key, and opens the door. The dog trots right out as if he has pressing business elsewhere.
Before they can stand up or try to settle things with Mrs. Kalushiner, there is a scratching at the front door and then a long, low moan. The sound is human and forlon, and it makes the hair on Landsman's nape stand erect. He goes to the front door and lets in the dog, who climbs back up onto the stage to the place where he has worn away the paint on the floorboards, and stis, ears raised to catch the sounds of a vanished horn, waiting patiently for the leash to be restored.
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" I resign, " says Velvel. He takes off his glasses, slips them into his pocket, and stands up. He forgot an appointment. He's late for work. His mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.
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The old man emits another horrible reptilian croak, one that nobody understands. He writes, then slides the notepad across to his great-nephew.
" Man makes plans, " the kid reads, " And God laughs. "
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Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss. That is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.
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They started out, back in the Ukraine, black hats like all the other black hats, scorning and keeping their distance from the trash and hoo-hah of the secular world, inside their imaginary ghetto wall of ritual and faith. Then the entire sect was burned in the fires of the Destruction, down to a hard, dense core of something blacker than any hat. What was left of the ninth Verbover rebbe emerged from those fires with eleven disciples and, among his family, only the sixth of his eight daughters. He rose into the air like a charred scrap of paper and blew to this narrow strip between the Baranof Mountains and the end of the wolrd. And here he found a way to remake the old-style black-hat detachment. He carried its logic to its logical end, the way evil geniuses do in cheap novels. He built a criminal empire that profited on the meaningless tohubohu beyond the theoretical walls, on beings so flawed, corrupted, and hopeless of redemption that only cosmic courtesy led the Verbovers even to consider them human at all.
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That's how it goes for Berko Shemets in the District of Sitka when he breaks out his hammer and goes Indian. Fifty years of movie scalpings and whistling arrows and burning Conestogas have their effect on people's minds. And hten sheer incongruity does the rest.
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The Verbovers, with their Talmudic grasp of systems have broked or rigged many mechanisms of control. But to have figured a way to gaff the entire INS like a Coke machine with a dollar on a string?
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Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that its a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker. It has something to do with pretending that telephone poles are doorposts, and that the wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv you've drawn -- in the case of Zimbalist and his crew, it's pretty much the whole District -- is your house. That ways you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place, and walk to shul with a couple of Alka-Seltzers in your pocket, and it isn't a sin. Given enough string and enough poles, and with a little creative use of existing walls, fences, cliffs, and rivers, you could tie a circle around pretty much any place and call it an eruv.
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Zimbalist takes the vodka without a word and knocks it down in one shot. "I taught that boy to play chess," he says. " When that man was a body, I mean. Before he grey up. I'm sorry, I'm not making sense." But then he doesn't say anything, he just sits there watching the papiros burn down. He peers out from his cavernous eyeholes at Berko, then steals a cardplayer peek at Landsman. He's recovering from the shock now. Trying to map the situation, the lines he cannot cross, the doorways that he mustn't step through on peril of his soul.
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Through his wires and strings, the boundary maven felt every whisper and rumor the way a spider hears in its feet the thrashing of a fly.
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The boundary maven's faith in faithlessness had been shaken by a simple quest -- How is she? -- by a dozen words of blessing, by a simple bishop move that seemed to imply a chess beyond the chess that Zimbalist knew. It was as repayment for the miracle that Zimbalist had arranged the secret match between Mendel and Melekh Gaystik, king of the Cafe Einstein and future champion of the world. Three games in the back room of a shop on Ringelblum Avenue, with the boy winning two out of three. When this act of subterfuge was uncovered -- and not the other; no one else ever learned of the affari -- the visits between Zimbalist and Mendel Shpilman were broken off. After that, he and Mendel never shared another hour at the board.
" That's what comes from giving out blessings, " says Zimbalist the boundary maven. " But it took Mendel Shpilman a long time to figure that out. "
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The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsmen feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaving is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, a charge on your battery. But in the three-second lull that follows Zimbalist's crying out the name ofthe rebbe's lost son, Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering amont them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it's just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hours. Or maybe it's the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night's sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.
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He knows what a hard thing it can be to have fathered a heroin addict. He has seen this kind of coldness before. But something rankles him about these Jews who tear their lapels and sit shiva for living children. It seems to Landsman to make a mockery of both the living and the dead.
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Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap.
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He sets down the paper, and Landsman has to wonder how he ever could have seen anything in the rebbe's eyes but ten thousand miles of frozen sea. Landsman is shocked, knocked overboard into that cold water. To keep himself afloat, he clings to the ballast of his cynicism.
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Landsman watches the progress of Elijah the Prophet through the snowstorm and plans his own death. This is a fourth strategy he has evolved to cheer himself when he's going down the drain. But of course he had to be careful not to overdo it.
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You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.
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A girl with a healthy appetite, that was his mother's first recorded statement on the subject of Bina Gelbfish twenty years ago. Like most of his mother's compliments, it was convertible to an insult when needed.
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Everybody loves it when the prodigal returns, except for the guy that's been sleeping in his pajamas.
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Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until, at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman. " It's all talking chickens to me now. "
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Once Bina Gelbfish believed in Meyer Landsman. Or she believed, from the moment she met him, that there was a sense in that meeting, that some detectable intention lay behind their marriage. They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself.
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" No, you don't tell her nothing. " Benito grins. " Now she your boss. "
" She was always my boss, " Landsman says. " Now it's just official. "
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Rivalries, grudges, sectarian disputes, mutual excommunications, they've been laid aside for a day so that everyone can mourn with due passion a Jew was was forgotten by them until last Friday night. Not even a Jew -- the shello of a Jew, thinned to transparency around the hard void of a twenty year junk habit. Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gather in the rain to lay it in the ground.
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" You can't get near her, And even if you can, you still can't." He was making a nice policeman-like distinction between the things that balls could accomplish and those that the breakers of balls would never permit.
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Over the last hour, the crowd has swollen, bunching up around the cemetary gates. Jiggling, shifting, prone to sudden mass lurches, animated by the Brownian motion of collective woe. They smell of lamentation, these Jews, long underwear, tobacco, smoke on wet overcoats, mud. They're praying like they're going to faint, fainting like it's a kind of observance. Weeping women cling to each other and break open their throats. They aren't mourning Mendel Shpilman, they can't be. It's something else they feel has gone out of the owrld, the shadow of a shadow, the hope of a hope. The half-island they have come to love as home is being taken from them. They are like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora. But that's too much to think about. So instead, they lament the loss of a lucky break they never got, a chance that was no chance at all, a king who was never going to come in the first place, even without a jacketed slug in the brainpan.
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Of course, the Shtrakenzer bride, though perfect, was not suitable; Mrs. Shpilman knew that. Long before the maid came to say that nobody could find Mendel, that he had disappeared sometime in the course of the night, Mrs. Shpilman had known that no degree of accomplishment, beauty, or fire in a girl would ever suit her son. But there was always a shortfall, wasn't there? Between the match that the Holy One, blessed be He, envisioned and the reality of the situation under the chuppah. Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth, husband and wife, Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall "The World". Only when Messiah came would the breach be closed, all separations, distinctions, and distances collapsed. Until then, thanks be unto His Name, sparks, bright sparks, might leap across the gap, as between electric poles. And we must be grateful for their momentary light.
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Mrs. Shpilman had taken steps to protect Mendel, setting hours and conditions. But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given.
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Mrs. Shpilman sat in the Louis XIV chair for a long time, hours, years. A coldness filled her, an icy disgust for creation, for God and His misbegotten works. At first theh orror she felt seemed to bear upon her son and the sin that he was refusing to surrender, but then it turned into a horror for herself. She considered the crimes and hurts that had been committed to her benefit, and all of that evil only a drop of water in a great black sea. An awful place, this sea, the gulf between the Intention and the Act that people call " the world. " Mendel's flight was not a refusal to surrender; it was a surrender. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor was tendering his resignation. He could not be what the world and its Jews, in the rain with their heartaches and their umbrellas, wanted him to be, what his mother and father wanted him to be. He could not even be what he wanted to be. She hoped -- sitting there, she prayed -- that one day, at least, he might find a way to be what he was.
As soon as the prayer flew upward from her heart, she missed her son. She longed for her son. She reproached herself bitterly for having sent Mendel away without first finding out where he was staying, where he would go, how she could see him or hear his voice from time to time. Then she opened the hands he had enfolded a last time in his, and found, curled in her right palm, a tiny length of string.
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" It's not much, " Landsman says, rain pattering the brim of his hat. " But it's home. "
" No, it isn't, " Batsheva Shpilman says. " But I'm sure it makes it easier for you to think so. "
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Landsman feels a numbness enter his limbs, a welcome numbness, a sense of doom that is indistinguishable from peacefulness, like the bite of a predator snake that prefers to swallow its victims alive and tranquil.
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" All right. " Doctor Rau turns his plump face to Landsman. The irises of his eyes are like cast iron. " Based on my examiation, I would guess that you are going through alcoholic withdrawal, Detective Landsman. "
" Doctor, " he says, " from one man with X-ray eyeballs to another, I respect your keenness, but tell me, please, if the country of India were being cancelled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world have just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don't you think you might take up drinking? "
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" In my experience, Detective Landsman, if I may, the people who worry about losing their edge, often they fail to see they already lost the blade a long time ago. "
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Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket.
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It was hatred at first sight, the kind of grand romantic hatred that in thirteen-year-old boys is indistinguishable from or the nearest they can get to love.
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Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It's only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounds to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls.
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Landsman runs through his mental docket of smuggler kings and gray-market moguls, gurus of minor cults. Men with influence, connections, unlimited funds. None of them could have pulled off something like this, not even Heskel Shpilman or Anatoly Moskowits the Wild Beast. No matter how powerful, every Jew in the District is tethered by the leash of 1948. His kingdom is bound in its nutshell. His sky is a painted dome, his horizon an electrified fence. He has the flight and knows the freedom only of a balloon on a string.
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Uncle Hertz puts his palms together and bows. Like a true hermit, he takes his duties as a host very seriously.
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The old man tells Landsman to go into the house, and Landsman obeys him, which leaves Hertz standing there face to face with his son. Landsman watches, an interested party like all Jewish men from the moment that Abraham got Isaac to lie down on that mountaintop and bare his pulsing rib cage to the sky.
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As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation.
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Landsman gives Berko a look that is meant to remind him not of his age and station in life but of the manifest uncoolness of bickering with one's relatives. It's an old and well-worn facial expression dating from the time of Berko's first strife-filled years with the Landsmans. It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.
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Uncle Hertz speaks then, or rather the wind emerges from his lungs through the gates of his teeth in a way that resembles human speech. He looks down at his lap and makes the sound again, and Landsman realizes that he's saying he's sorry. Speaking a language in which he has never been schooled.
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" Every damn day of my life, I get up in the morning and put this shit on and pretend to be somehting I'm not. Something I'll never be. For you . "
" I never asked you to observe the religion, " the old man says, not looking up. " I don't think I ever put any kind of " --
" It has nothing to do with religion , " Berko says, " It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers . "
It comes through the mother, of course, one's being or not being a Jew. But Berko knows that. He's known it since the day he moved to Sitka. He sees it everytime he looks into a mirror.
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" It's all nonsense, " the old man goes on, a little mumbly, half to himself. " A slave religion. Tying yourself up. Bondage gear! I've never worn that nonsense in my life. "
" No? " Berko says.
It catches Landsman off guard, how quick and how massive is the transfer of Berko Shemets from he doorway of the cabin to the dining table. Before Landsman can quite understand what is happening, Berko has jerked the ritual undergarment down over the old mans' head.
" You never wore one, eh? " Berko says. " You never fucking wore one! Try mine! Try mine, you prick! "
" Stop. " Landsman goes to the rescue of the man whose addiction to tactics of sacrifice led, maybe not predictable but directly, to the death of Laurie Jo Bear.
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Every Messiah fails , writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself.
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" A woman , " said the doctor, shifting his queenside rook, a move that gave him no advantage that Litvak could see. Dr. Roboy, in litvak's measured view, had a vice common to believers. He was all strategy and no tactics. He was prone to move for the sake of moving, too focused on the goal to bother with the intervening sequence. " Here. In this place. "
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Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnceted to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength. If Roboy could get Shpilman up and running again, then Shpilman could inspired and lead not merely a few hundred armed believers or thirty thousand black-hatted hustlers looking for new turf, but an entire lost and wandering nation.
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Litvak knocked the cigar from Shpilman's soft hand. The certianty he had felt down on the dock that Shpilman would serve their needs was turned abruptly on its head. A man like Shpilman, a talent like Shpilman's, could never serve anyone; it could only be served, above all by the one who wielded it. No wonder the poor bastard had been hiding from it for so long.
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" Fuck what is written, " Landsman says. " You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriachs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag.
He sits down. He lights another cigarette.
" Fuck you, " Landsman concludes. " And fuck Jesus too, he was a pussy. "
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Half-blind and cold in his bones, he trudges along Monastir Street to Berlevi Street, then over to Max Nordau Street, with a kink in his back and an ache in his head and a sharp throbbing pain in his dignity. The space recently occupied by his mind hisses like the fog in his ears, hums like a bank of fluorescent tubes. He feels that he suffers from tinnitus of the soul.
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At some point the humming that has plagued Landsman and his people since the dawn of time, which some in their foolishness have mistaken for the voice of God, gets trapped in the windows of room 505 like sunlight in the heart of an iceberg.
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The reason you never developed at chess, Meyerle, is because you don't hate to lose badly enough.
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For days Landsman has been thinking that he missed his chance with Mendel Shpilman, that in their exile at the Hotel Zamenhof, without even realizing, he blew his one shot at something like redemption. But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fat but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fratenity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.