The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.
But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

(From Publisher).

Michael Chabon is the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

The extremely complex plot is handled masterfully by Chabon. The unusual concept of a Jewish homeland set up in Sitka, Alaska instead of Israel makes it one of the most original books of the year.

This entertaining tour-de force combines alternate history and noir murder mystery in a Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska. The imaginative and humorous descriptions make for an unforgettable reading experience.

Chabon pays homage to the 1940's noir style in an elaborate plot that imagines Alaska as the homeland for Jews after World War II.

Chabon brilliantly creates an alternative vision in which a remote outpost of Alaska, and not Israel, has become the homeland, albeit a temporary one, for Jews fleeing the Holocaust. The rare infusion of a Yiddish sensibility into this most unlikely of noir settings provides an elegiac sweetness (or, perhaps, bittersweet is the true flavour) to this improbable, yet completely convincing tale.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a stylistically brilliant mix of black comedy, gripping hard-boiled mystery, wildly inventive alternate history, moving love story, and profound and humane examination of exile and redemption.

A compelling, genre-blending story that explores an alternate history for the world's Jewish population after World War II.

A murder mystery set in the imaginary Jewish homeland that is Alaska. A page-turner with Yiddish wordplay that is effective as alternative history, mystery and romance.