The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Here is an interesting fact that you should know before you start reading this book. The novel begins, the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America, with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Michael Chabon jumps right into the story and you quickly understand that Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews is about to revert back to American control, but FDR is never mentioned and I had no idea this could have really happened. Of course it didn't and that's the major flaw in this story. It all seems so far fetched that the story doesn't really work.

The brilliance of the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is that you felt the story was real. I remember having a couple of discussions with fans of the book who thought it was a biography.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is a bizarre mash-up of a Philip Roth novel, with a crime noir plot in a Twilight Zone other world setting. There are long stretches when you can't put the book down, but the problem is in holding the entire story together, it's almost as if there are too many balls in the air. Meyer Landsman is an alcoholic cop. His partner is half native, half Jew. His boss is his ex-wife. He is investigating a murder that his superiors have basically told him to forget as they are about to turn the entire jurisdiction back to the Americans in a month anyway. But of course this murder is bigger than just one man, it engulfs the unexplained disappearance of Lansdown's sister, the future of the Jews and ultimately the return of the Messiah.

Frankly it's an interesting crime story for the New Yorker fiction section that has been extended into a novel with a lot of character exploration that doesn't really go anywhere.