The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—“an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its…blockbuster superfame” (New York).
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 the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
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Community Reviews
The American Writer Michael Chabon published The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in 2007. The book is set in 2007. The novel is an alternative history novel. The novel is set in Alaska, around the city of Sitka in the Alexander Archipelago. In this alternative universe, in the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, organized to settle Jewish refugees fleeing the unrest caused by Nazi Germany in Alaska (Chabon 27). In 1948, the state of Israel lost the war with its neighbor (Chabon 29). To house the refugees from the failed state of Israel, “Congress granted the Sitka Settlement “interim status” as a federal district” (Chabon 29). In the 2004 election, an American President promised to return the Sitka Settlement to the state of Alaska, thereby forcing most of Sitka's Jewish population to find a new home by early January 2008 (Chabon 77). For a sizable portion of Sitka's Jewish population, the hope of a Jewish state based in Jerusalem, Israel, has never fully vanished (Chabon 148-150). The novel is a murder mystery. Homicide Detective Meyer Landsman is summoned to investigate the murder of a former Orthodox Jewish man who was a chess prodigy. The District Police Department is about to close as part of the transfer to the state of Alaska. Meyer Landsman, his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish police partner Berko Shemets, and his boss, Bina Gelbfish, enter a world of Orthodox Jewish gangsters, Tribal Police, Bush Pilot, and other memorable groups of people. Berko Shemets is Meyer Landsman's cousin. Bina Gelbfish is Meyer Landsman’s ex-wife. The meaning of much of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union stuck with me as ambiguous, which I enjoyed. I enjoyed The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
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