The New York Times bestseller, now available in
paperback--"an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective
novel that deserves every inch of its...blockbuster superfame" (New
York).
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.
