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A Novel
by Michael ChabonIn 1938 a proposal was put to
Roosevelt that part of Alaska should be offered as a
safe haven to Jews fleeing the Nazis, but the
proposal was quashed (see sidebar). Chabon's
genre-melding alternate history-police procedural is
set in a present in which the Alaskan proposal was
resurrected in 1948 following the collapse of the
fledgling State of Israel. Sixty years later, the
Federal District of Sitka is a thriving community of
more than 2 million Jews living on the Alaskan
panhandle (map), but they're about to find
themselves homeless again, as the land was only
leased as a temporary safe haven, and when the lease
ends in two months the land will revert back to
Alaska.
Meyer Landsman is a weary, hard-drinking homicide
detective working for the Federal District of Sitka.
His marriage has collapsed, he's living in a seedy
hotel and, to add insult to injury, his former wife
is his new supervisor. When a drug-addict named
Lasker washes up dead in the hotel, Meyer sees an
opportunity to redeem himself, but he and his
half-Tlingit partner and childhood friend, Berko,
soon discover that there's more to the death than
first meets the eye. For starters, Lasker isn't Lasker,
he's Mendel Shpilman, a former child prodigy who
some thought was the Messiah, until he
disappeared two decades ago on his wedding day.
How did this genius son of a Rabbi with connections
to the criminal underworld end up a drug addict in a
cheap hotel, and why was he murdered? These are the
questions that Landsman is determined to answer, and
he has only two months in which to do so before
Sitka reverts to Alaskan authority and he loses his
job and home.
Just as Landsman starts to make progress, he is
warned off the case and, when he refuses to drop it,
stripped of his rank (requiring him to flash the
only other piece of ID he possesses, his membership
card for the Yiddish Policemen's Union). Like
many of the best fictional detectives before him, being outranked and ordered to
stand down just makes him more determined to solve
the crime - and so he does, but what he uncovers
encompass a much wider territory than the chilly
region of Sitka, requiring Meyer to weigh the fate
of nations against a promise made to a grieving
mother.
Chabon effortlessly leaps themes and genres in a
tightly written novel in which gangsters, extremists
and conspiracies jostle for space. The Yiddish
Policemen's Union can be read as a well written
noir-thriller, or as a powerful piece of political
writing with themes and world events mirroring those
of our own timeline, or both!
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2007, and has been updated for the May 2008 edition. Click here to go to this issue.
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