The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Name: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
ISBN: 9780007149834

A Novel

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 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.

“A beautiful marriage of high and low: a novel with a literary mind and a populist heart.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Ambitiously imaginative . . . incandescent, distilling sad Jewish mysticism into pulpy prose . . . Equal parts Chaim Potok, Dashiell Hammett and Woody Allen.” —Newsweek

“[P]ersuasively detailed . . . a gripping murder mystery and one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe . . . authoritatively and minutely imagined . . . ” —New York Times

“Few writers can match the wit of Chabon’s joyously colorful metaphors. And the fruits of his wild imagination (and buoyant sense of humor) come through on nearly every page.” —Washington Post

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union is many things at once: a work of alternate history, a medium-boiled detective story, an exploration of the conundrum of Jewish identity, a meditation on the Zionist experiment, the apotheosis thus far of one writer's influential sensibility.” —Benjamin Anastas, Book Forum

About the Author

Michael Chabon (born 1963, Washington, D.C.) is one of the most celebrated American novelists of his generation, and Jewish history, identity, and imagination run through much of his best-known work. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) follows two Jewish cousins, one a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, who create comic-book heroes in 1940s New York; it joins the immigrant experience, the Holocaust’s shadow, and the Golem legend with the birth of American popular culture. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate-history Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, imagines a Yiddish-speaking homeland that never lasted, and it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sidewise Awards. Other works return to Jewish themes, among them the essay collection Maps and Legends, the novella The Final Solution, the novel Telegraph Avenue, which explores Black-Jewish relations and shared cultural ground in Oakland, and the family memoir Moonglow. Throughout, Chabon writes about exile, inheritance, memory, and the question of what it means to belong.

Chabon has also been an active public voice on Jewish literary culture, and he has argued for a renewed, playful engagement with Yiddish language and tradition and for the creative possibilities of Jewish storytelling. His other honors include the Michael L. Printz Award for Young Adult Literature (for Summerland’s companion recognition in the field, as well as a National Jewish Book Award), and he is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman.