The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Setting

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is set in an alternative history version of the present day. The premise is that, contrary to real history, the United States voted to implement the 1940 Slattery Report, which recommended the provision of land in Alaska for the temporary refugee settlement of European Jews who were being persecuted by the Nazis during World War II. The novel's divergence point from real history is revealed in the first dozen chapters to be the death of Anthony Dimond, Alaska Territory delegate to the U.S. Congress, in a car accident; Dimond was one of the congressmen responsible for preventing a vote on the report. It imagines a temporary independent Jewish settlement being created on the Alaskan coast. As a result, two million Jews are murdered in the Holocaust instead of six (as in the real world).

The setting is Sitka, Alaska, which has become a sprawling metropolis at the center of the Jewish settlement in Alaska. One of the city's landmarks is the 'Safety Pin', a tall building erected for the 1977 World Fair held in Sitka and a source of pride for its inhabitants. The lands across the border are populated primarily by Tlingit Alaska Natives, and there has been a history of friction between the Jews and the Tlingit, but also of intermarriage and cross-cultural contact; one of the novel's characters, Berko Shemets, is half Jewish, half Tlingit. Sitka's status as a Federal District has been granted for only sixty years, and the novel is set at the end of this period, as an evangelical Christian United States President is promising to go through with the 'Reversion' of Sitka to the State of Alaska.

In the novel, the State of Israel is founded in 1948, but is destroyed after only three months in an alternative version of the Arab-Israeli War. Without Israel, Palestine is described as a mosaic of contending religious and secular nationalist groups locked in internecine conflict; Jerusalem is described as "a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles". The United States president believes in "divine sanction" for neo-Zionism, a movement seeking for Jews to reclaim Israel once again.

Chabon describes the rest of world history only elliptically, but hints at enormous changes. Germany crushes the Soviet Union in 1942 and World War II continues until 1946, when Berlin is destroyed with nuclear weapons. Chabon refers to a 'Polish Free State' existing in 1950, and describes some characters as veterans of a lengthy 'Cuban War' in the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy was not assassinated and married Marilyn Monroe; Orson Welles succeeded in making his film of Heart of Darkness. And when describing the modern world, Chabon refers to a 'Third Russian Republic' and an independent Manchuria that has its own space program.

Plot summary

The book opens with Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic homicide detective with the Sitka police department, examining the murder of a man in the hotel where Landsman lives. Beside the corpse lies an open cardboard chess board with an unfinished game set up on it. Landsman calls his partner, half-Tlingit, half-Jewish Berko Shemets, to help him investigate further. Upon filing a report on the murder at police headquarters, Landsman and Berko discover that Landsman's ex-wife Bina has been promoted to commanding officer of their unit.

Landsman and Berko discover that the victim was Mendel Shpilman, the son of the Verbover rebbe, Sitka’s most powerful organized crime boss. Many Jews believed Mendel to be the Tzadik ha-Dor, the potential messiah, born once in every generation.

As Meyer continues to investigate Mendel's murder, he discovers that the supposed "chosen one" had taken a flight with Naomi, Landsman's deceased sister. He follows Naomi's trail to a mysterious set of buildings with an unknown purpose, set up in Tlingit territory by Jews. Landsman flies there to investigate; he is knocked out and thrown in a cell, whose walls have graffiti in Naomi's handwriting.

The naked and injured Landsman is soon rescued by a local Tlingit police chief, Willie Dick, who reunites him with Berko. They learn that the mysterious complex is operated by a paramilitary group who wants to build a new Temple in Jerusalem after destroying the Dome of the Rock, hoping to speed the birth of the Messiah. An evangelical Christian Zionist American government supports the group.

As Landsman and Berko investigate, the News reports the Dome being bombed. American agents apprehend the detectives and offer them permission to stay in Sitka, if they agree to keep quiet about the plot they have uncovered. Landsman says that he will and is released. Landsman reunites with Bina, frustrated by his failure with the Shpilman case. Remembering the chess board, he suddenly realizes that it's not an unfinished game: he had seen the same position from the perspective of the other player in Berko's father, Hertz Shemetz's house. Landsman and Bina track down Hertz, and he confesses to killing Mendel at Mendel's own request hoping to ruin the government's plans to bring upon the Messiah. Landsman contacts American journalist Brennan stating that he "has a story for him". It is left ambiguous to the reader if Landsmen is planning to expose Hertz's involvement in Shpilman's murder or the complex messianic conspiracy.

Origins and writing

Chabon began working on the novel in February 2002, inspired by an essay he had published in Harper's in October 1997. Entitled "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts", the essay discussed a travel book Chabon had found, Say It in Yiddish, and the dearth of Yiddish-speaking countries in which the book would be useful. While researching hypothetical Yiddish-speaking countries, Chabon learned of "this proposal once that Jewish refugees be allowed to settle in Alaska during World War II... I made a passing reference to it in the essay, but the idea stuck." Vitriolic public response to the essay, which was seen as controversial for "prematurely announcing [Yiddish's] demise," also spurred Chabon to develop the idea.

In late 2003, Chabon mentioned the novel on his web site, saying that it was titled Hotzeplotz in a reference to the "Yiddish expression 'from here to Hotzeplotz,' meaning more or less the back of nowhere, Podunk, Iowa, the ends of the earth." In 2004, Chabon said the (retitled) book would be published in fall 2005, but then the writer decided to trash his most recent draft and start over. His publisher HarperCollins pushed the publication date back to April 11, 2006. Chabon's rejected 600-page draft featured the same characters as the novel he eventually published but "a completely different story," and was also written in the first person.

In December 2005, Chabon announced a second delay to the novel's release, claiming that the manuscript was complete but that he felt that HarperCollins was rushing the novel into publication. An excerpt from the book appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the novel itself was released on May 1, 2007. Chabon has said that the novel was difficult to write, calling it "an exercise in restraint all around... The sentences are much shorter than my typical sentences; my paragraphs are shorter than my typical paragraphs." He also described the novel as an homage to the writing of mystery writers Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald, along with Russian writer Isaac Babel.

Reception

In the weeks leading up to its publication, the novel received considerable attention from the press. The front page of The New York Times' Arts & Leisure section featured a "big, splashy" profile of Chabon in which he flew to Sitka and discussed the book while walking around the city. The novel also received preemptive criticism, with The New York Post publishing an article headlined "Novelist's Ugly View of Jews." The Post alleged that Chabon's depiction of "Jews as constantly in conflict with one another [is] bound to set off a firestorm of controversy."

Reviews were generally positive. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 75 out of 100, based on 17 reviews. Library Journal called it "bloody brilliant" and Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the novel "builds upon the achievement of Kavalier & Clay... a gripping murder mystery [with] one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe." The novel debuted at #2 on the New York Times Best Seller list on May 20, 2007, remaining on the list for 6 weeks.

Film adaptation

Producer Scott Rudin purchased the film rights to The Yiddish Policemen's Union in 2002, based on a one-and-a-half page proposal. In February 2008, Rudin told The Guardian that a film adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen's Union was in pre-production, to be written and directed by the Coen brothers. The Coen Brothers were to begin working on the adaptation for Columbia Pictures after they completed filming of A Serious Man. Chabon stated that the Coens are "among [his] favorite living moviemakers[...] What's more, I think they are perfectly suited to this material in every way, from its genre(s) to its tone to its content."

In the fall of 2012, however, Chabon told Mother Jones that "the Coen brothers wrote a draft of a script and then they seemed to move on," and that the film rights had "lapsed back to me."

Cover

The book's original cover art by Will Staehle features an amalgam of styles (like the novel itself), drawing on classic pulp detective novel, Jewish imagery, and art from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, especially that of the Tlingit and Haida peoples.