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 revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of
the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be
American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little
world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex
frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they
have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of
history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their
dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to
sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.
But 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. He and his
half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their
outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his
life--and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has
washed up, someone has just committed a murder--right under Landsman's
nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow
offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate
the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes
down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman
soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith,
obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage--and
with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one
person who understands his darkest fears.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and
an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish
Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
