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The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.) Paperback – Deckle Edge, April 29, 2008

4.1 out of 5 stars 2,616

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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 murder—right 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.


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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 murder--right 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.

From the Back Cover

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 murder—right 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 29, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0007149832
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007149834
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1.16 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 out of 5 stars 2,616

About the author

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Michael Chabon
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Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels – including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union – two collections of short stories, and one other work of non-fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
2,616 global ratings
A NOIR NOVEL NOT TO BE OVERLOOKED
5 Stars
A NOIR NOVEL NOT TO BE OVERLOOKED
This is a review of Michael Chabon’s novel, ‘The Yiddish Policemen's Union’. If you like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald or Isaac Bable and have not yet partaken of the word-crafting expertise of Michael Chabon, be prepared for a vibrant escapade into writing at its best. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 ‘Noir’ detective story set in an alternative history of post WW2 to present Sitka Alaska. The mystery opens with alcoholic Sitka police department homicide detective, Meyer Landsman, examining the murder of a man in the hotel where Landsman lives. The victim turns out to be the potential Moshiach, Mendel Shpilman. The plot swims in political corruption, treachery, weaving patterns of character into a reality that shock, intrigue, and unforgettably engross the reader in a page turning marathon. Is there a dark cloud over the novel? Unfortunately, there is, and the tragedy is that the book ends. Chabon breathes life into each character that is unsurpassed and when the last page was turned something grievous personally happened. With no more pages to turn, it was like experiencing a death in the family; like an addiction, you crave more. Unfortunately Chabon has moved on to other venues in his novels. Take heart, another writer R. Avraham Kosźmiński, it is rumored, is in the process of picking up the scepter with a sequel that moves Detective Meyer Landsman and his wife Bina up the coast to Valdez Alaska where the adventure steps forward into a 21 year future that brings closure ushering in the Moshiach. The merit of this novel is widely shared. ‘The Yiddish Policemen's Union’ debuted at #2 on the New York Times Best seller on May 20, 2007, remaining on the list for 6 weeks. It won a number of science fiction awards: the Nebula award for Best novel, the Locus Award for best SF Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for Best Novel. It was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. I went to Amazon now and found a brand new hardcover, unused, for only $1.59. A great deal.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2008
This is the third Chabon book that I have read (after  THE FINAL SOLUTION  and  THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH ) and it is unquestionably the best -- imaginative, audacious, thought-provoking, and humane. As I gather he did with  KAVALIER & CLAY , Chabon takes a genre of popular fiction, in this case the police story, and transforms it into a vehicle capable of carrying significant insights into the human condition, and particularly the complex crosscurrents of Jewish identity. For some reason this fascinates me, and I have read a good deal of post-Holocaust fiction, but I felt that I understood more about Jewish life in America, especially among the orthodox, from reading this book than from any other author since Chaim Potok (e.g.  THE CHOSEN  or  MY NAME IS ASHER LEV ).

Chabon creates an alternative historical reality on the basis of three plausible assumptions. The first is that, in the years before the War, America created a home for a limited number of Jewish refugees in Sitka, on the South-East coast of Alaska; (this plan was actually floated, but never brought to a vote). Second, that the new state of Israel was overrun by its enemies shortly after its founding, causing a massive exodus of people to be accommodated in this small area, giving rise to a large city built up over islands and a narrow strip of land. The third assumption is that these refugees were not accepted as American immigrants, but as temporary nationals of the new entity, leased for a period of sixty years. So while Jewish Sitka is a self-governing city-state, with Yiddish its official language, and with its own police force, this authority is precarious. For one thing, different sects have taken over different parts of the city, effectively maintaining their own law, even sometimes in opposition to the official law. For another, the sixty-year lease is about to expire, and the action of the book takes place in the last weeks before Reversion, when Jews who have not made other arrangements will be forced out again in yet another Exodus.

One such unprepared unfortunate is our protagonist, an alcoholic homicide detective named Meyer Landsman. One of the other residents in the fleabag hotel where he lives is found murdered, with a chess game set out on a board beside him. Even though his superiors tell him to drop the case, Landsman persists in his attempts to discover who the victim really was, and who killed him. This thread sews the plot together and leads to some surprising places. Ultimately, however, it is not the whodunnit element that is important; we discover the answer, but that is a minor detail in the almost apocalyptic drama of fear and destiny that is revealed in the shadow of the last days of the Jewish people in Sitka. But while specifically Jewish in context, I find the book also is full of insight into the fundamentalist mindset generally, and it is very much a reflection of forces in American politics of our own time.

Chabon is equally successful on the intimate level. We come to know a lot about Myer Landsman: the suicide of his chess grandmaster father, the death of his sister in a flying accident, and his separation from his wife Bina after the abortion of their unborn child. This last relationship is further complicated when Bina turns up as Meyer's new boss, but the unraveling of the case also has the effect of bringing the past and present together, in ways that are ultimately deeply satisfying, and give the book human warmth as a ballast to its flights of brilliance. If you come to the novel as a Gentile (and perhaps even as a Jew), you will be plunged into a world that seems hermetic, claustrophic, extremely strange. When you finish it, you will understand where the strangeness comes from. More, you will be left with a small group of human beings whom you have come to know as intimately as if they were your own family or neighbors.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2013
As a reading experience this is one of the best books I've read this year, and I am glad I invested my time in it. To summarize and not repeat what has been written in plenty of other reviews here: the prose is enchanting and the rich complexity of the characters and the world make for an all-enveloping vision as I read through the story.

However a few things threw me off about this book, namely, my own experiences with Yiddish. As a language and a culture that I have encountered through my family (predominantly secular) and through my associations with Hasidic Jews (obviously orthodox), Chabon's Yiddish seemed a bit off, and although it wasn't a deal-breaker for me, it took a little getting used to. This book's Yiddish just isn't exactly the Yiddish I know, however, I make no claims to speak the language or have lived a Yiddish life. I finally came around to accepting Chabon's setting in Sitka, Alaska as more of a, "If this were what we got instead of Israel," senerio, and since I've personally had a lot of exposure to Hebrew, Israel and modern Israeli culture, I felt Meyer and Berko fit in a little better as I found myself seeing them this way.

The plot also disappointed me on a certain level, as it starts off so seductively as we slip into a noir-of-sorts city that makes its way into a bigger world; I was fine with letting go slightly of that dark noir ambiance, but I was not pleased with how the book concludes; the wrap up betrays the theme of the book in some ways as it ends uneventfully (an explosion reported on the TV doesn't count for much with me), bad-guys sort of winning, nothing too learned to take away except that Meyer is getting old and contending with the idea that he needs to settle--his story to tell, at the end, was already told, better to have left it at that than to make it a tale he's now going to share with a journalist.

On a final positive note, the characters are robust and so very real, especially the Black Hats who are without exception brilliantly written.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Christian Wyss
5.0 out of 5 stars Those enthusiastic reviews are true.
Reviewed in Germany on February 2, 2024
The book has won prices over prices. It deserves them.
kat
5.0 out of 5 stars Good
Reviewed in Canada on January 2, 2019
The book is good, but it gets quite boring due to its length
Nitish
5.0 out of 5 stars A delightful, hidden treasure of a book
Reviewed in India on May 23, 2018
What prose, what imagination. Interesting story, compounded to a blissful journey with Chabon's unending leaps of fantastic metaphors and similes.
Kate
5.0 out of 5 stars Such originality!
Reviewed in Japan on May 20, 2017
This is the first Michael Chabon I've read and I felt at sea for the first five pages or so. After that I was hooked. I particularly love the originality of his descriptions. My book is full of short highlighted sections that are spot on but completely fresh.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars ideal para estudiantes de ingles avanzado
Reviewed in Spain on January 5, 2016
como regalo es perfecto para estudiantes de ingles avanzado, además de ser muy interesante el tema del libro. . .
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