The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Tapa blanda

The fanciful Sitka of The Yiddish Policemen s Union plays the delicate, infinitely complex game of fiction fairly: this place is so vividly imagined you practically need a parka and a prayer shawl to get from one page to the next, but it s also blatantly impossible, and that s its saving grace. It s a welcoming homeland for imaginary people which is all fiction is, anyway. But this novel slowly, movingly allows at least a couple of its imaginary denizens, Landsman and his tough ex-wife... to become real to themselves, to find a story they can live in without feeling imprisoned or cosmically cheated...Nice novel. (New York Times Book Review)

Is it possible to combine Raymond Chandler and Isaac Bashevis Singer? In an alternate-universe version of Alaska, yet? It seems you can, if you re as talented a fantazyor as Chabon. While respecting the conventions of the detective story, he spins an immensely satisfying yarn that combines chess, murder, and politics. (Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly)

Chabon s prose is so awesome . . . there s not much that Chabon . . . can t do with words. (Time Magazine)

Michael Chabon rocked readers across the world with the imaginative acrobatics of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY. Now, four years later, he follows up that triumph with an even more audacious invention -- a psychological thriller that is also a monumental novel of love and faith , boasting the same compassion, wit, and warmth that have garnered him such passionate fans.

It is the year 2000, but the world is not as we now know it. Israel does not exist, and Alaska is not -- quite -- Alaska; a ravelled strip of it serves instead of the former Palestine as the comically unlikely new homeland for Jews following the ravages of WWII. Orthodox sects clad in breeches, stockings, and furred hats battle it out on the snowbound streets of frontier towns for control of a brisk black market trade in drugs and guns. Amidst the madness, the perennially world-weary and cynical Meyer -- once an upstanding member of the Yiddish Policeman s Union, now more the slouching, shambling, half-drunk variety -- attempts to puzzle his way through a murky mystery set off by the discovery of a skull that purports to be Native American. In fact, it appears to be Tlingit, the very tribe pitted against the Jews in an eternal struggle for territorial rights. His ridiculous plight is made worse by the fact that his ex-wife, the flame-haired and fiery-tempered Bina (with whom he is, of course, still in love), has been rotated from her uttermost northerly posting to resume her job as Chief Medical Examiner. She whisks the skull from his hands quicker than he can say divorce decree. Shemets, his half-Tlingit/half-Jewish partner, a walrus-like figure clad in impeccable Italian suiting, is the only presence who can maintain a semblance of calm as Meyer and the skeptical Bina find an eerie threat circling ever closer to what he calls home.

In THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN S UNION, Michael Chabon offers a loving tribute to the hard-boiled world of Hollywood noir -- from THE BIG SLEEP to CHINATOWN -- even as he engages with vital questions of identity, faith, and the simple but profound subject of love. It is a masterful work that will continue to broaden his enormous readership.