The Yiddish Policmen's Union, by Michael Chabon

How about a little detective story in an alternative present?  I've never read Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon before, but I figured if he won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) maybe he's worth a read.  Speaking of awards, The Yiddish Policemen's Union won a Hugo award for best novel (Hugo awards are for science fiction and fantasy.  TYPU fits the sci-fi genre in the sense that it presents an alternative history.)

In the world of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the fate of the Jews took a different twist in the mid-20th century.  In the late 1930s, when the persecution of the Jews was becoming uncomfortably evident to those outside Germany, a number of proposals bounced around for relocating the Jews.  Two weeks after Kristallnacht, FDR's secretary of the interior proposed the use of Alaska as a "haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions."  In real life, this proposal didn't get far.  In Chabon's world, thousands of European Jews immigrated to Sitka Island, establishing a Yiddish-speaking stronghold of Jewish culture.

Against that backdrop, Chabon spins a noir detective story featuring a hard-boiled, independent-minded, rumpled detective of the sort we see in Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe private detective stories and others.  Chabon's detective, Landsman, is called in to investigate the murder of an apparent junkie in a sleazy hotel.  Turns out the victim is the son of  a prominent rabbi/organized crime figure, so Landsman gets drawn into that world.

Besides the strong detective story, Chabon explores the world of Orthodox Judaism in Alaska, the land of the "Frozen Chosen."  An entertaining subplot involves the keeper of the boundaries.  The eruv is the enclosed area out of which an Orthodox Jew may not travel on the Sabbath.  The boundary keeper has extensive maps of the eruvin, which are marked out with rope around the community.  For someone unfamiliar with this practice (me), this sounds like it must surely be made up, but it's really observed in many Orthodox Jewish communities.

A larger Jewish theme, and a theme more central to the story, is the Jewish hope for the coming of the messiah and the reestablishment of the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Sitka Jews had placed a lot of hope that one of their own would be the messiah, but then, well, he turned up murdered in a sleazy Sitka hotel.  His death doesn't deter them from continuing with their plans, and we learn that the Jews are in cahoots with right-wing elements of the U.S. government, who want to see the Jews returned to Israel in accordance with their evangelical beliefs.

With Landsman's quirky personality and personal problems, his uncanny ability to get into problematic situations while uncovering the truth behind his case, and the believable alternative Jewish world, Chabon manages to make the reader laugh out loud and believe that there really is this Jewish enclave in the north.  Driving the urgency of the story is the fact that the 60 year agreement is coming to an end; soon the Jews will be on their own again, seeking a homeland.  I, for one, am grateful that in our history they did find a homeland in the restoration of the state of Israel.  In the meantime, you'll get a kick of Chabon's picture of what might have been.