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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.
Harper Collins
May 2007
On Sale: May 1, 2007
432 pages ISBN: 0007149824 EAN: 9780007149827 Hardcover $26.95
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.
