The Yiddish Policemen's Union

For a time before the outbreak of WWII, Franklin Roosevelt considered a proposal that would establish a temporary settlement for persecuted European Jews in the Alaskan panhandle. The plan fell through, but Michael Chabon uses the proposal as a “What If?” springboard, building the foundation for the architecture of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Sixty years have passed since the Sitka settlement, which saved millions of Jewish lives. (In Chabon’s version, two million Jews died in the Holocaust instead of six million.) Only now the Sitka district is about to revert to American rule, forcing its Jews to find yet another homeland. Just before the upheaval, Detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a chess prodigy/heroin addict who lives in the same rundown hotel as Landsman. With the Reversion imminent, Landsman is pressured to forget the case and move on (literally). To make matters worse, most of this pressure is coming from Landsman’s boss, who is also his ex-wife.

Imagine the style of any hard-boiled detective writer, preferably someone like Raymond Chandler, then toss in plenty of Jewish culture (including, of course, healthy doses of Yiddish) clashing with Native Americans, Americans, Filipinos and all sorts of bureaucracy . Add an outrageous sense of humor with sentences that are so well constructed it’s astounding. That’s a very small sampling of the delights to be found in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

(As an aside, I thought it interesting that Chabon abandoned the usual hard-boiled detective first-person narrative, choosing instead a third-person present voice.)

So does this Alternate History/Detective/Murder Mystery/Clash-of-Cultures novel actually work? Like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, it doesn’t really matter who the murderer is. (And yes, you do find out who did it.) It’s all about the journey, not the destination. Sure, there were moments that I thought the story was close to coming off the rails, but Chabon is such a gifted writer I didn’t care. And I wasn’t disappointed. Highly recommended.