Yiddish Policemen's Union

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This is Michael Chabon at his best. The story takes place in a Sitka, Alaska which has been a self-governing district, populated by European Jewish refugees, for sixty years. However, that will soon change when power reverts back to the Alaskan state. In the flurry of activity accompanying this shift, no one cares when a transient is murdered in a famously fleabag motel. No one save fellow tenant, and soon-to-be unemployed, detective Meyer Landsman. He for some reason cannot just let this one go.

Michael Chabon supposes that after World War II the Jewish Homeland was established in Alaska, rather than Israel, in his wildly imaginative The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Part serious political commentary, part hilarious noir crime novel, it follows Sitka homicide detective Meyer Landsman's investigation into the murder of Mendel Shpilman, a heroin-addicted chess prodigy, son of an extremist rabbi. Chabon masterfully combines ancient Jewish concepts of identity, faith and personal integrity with a modern world of greed, the desire for power, and international conspiracies.

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 murderGÇöright 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.

MICHAEL CHABON is the bestselling and Pulitzer PrizeGÇôwinning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Summerland (a novel for children), The Final Solution, The Yiddish PolicemenGÇÖs Union, Maps and Legends and Gentlemen of the Road. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children. Visit him online at www.michaelchabon.com.464 pages