Summary
Michael Chabon: Union of Yiddish Policemen
What would have happened if, on the eve of World War II, the proposal to create a temporary refuge for the Jewish people on the west coast of Alaska had been accepted? Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Marvelous Adventures of Kavalier &, Clay and the Gentleman and the Adventurers, took this historical possibility and created an alternate world in which the Federal District of Sitka, a temporary homeland for displaced Jews from the war, really exists. In this imagined parallel history, the state of Israel failed to maintain itself in the Middle East, and the Jews created their own little isolated universe at the edge of the world, a colorful settlement where the coldness of the landscape mixes with Yiddish and Native American traditions.
Only the temporary refuge on Sitka is to be returned to the administration of Alaska after sixty years, and the dreams of the Jewish people are at an end. But that is not the main problem of local policeman Meyer Landsman. His marriage is falling apart, his career is failing - and the story begins when he wakes up one morning in a cheap hotel and discovers that someone has killed his neighbor, a former chess master. But when his bosses order him to immediately stop the murder investigation, Landsman will find himself in a vortex of powerful forces of faith, devotion, evil and redemption - forces that shape his legacy.
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