Book #177 of 2017:

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

In the late 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt rejected a government proposal to establish a settlement for Jewish refugees within America’s Alaskan Territory. The U.S. instead largely blocked Jewish immigration, and ultimately over six million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Author Michael Chabon takes these historical facts and asks us to consider what would have happened if the Slattery Report proposal had been instituted after all, and if four million Jews had been able to escape the Holocaust and create a new home for themselves and their descendents in Alaska. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful idea, even with Chabon’s best efforts to show how this new Jewish homeland would still be no paradise more than half a century into its existence. Our entry into this world is a jaded homicide detective, trying to solve one last murder case before America officially revokes the status of the Alaskan settlement and makes its inhabitants refugees once more, but it’s still dazzling to see so many Jewish characters who could never have been born in reality, as well as the uniquely Jewish character that this society has developed.

On some level all of this is a fictionalized dramatization of our own world’s struggles with notions of Israel, Judaism, and colonial statehood, wrapped up in a pretty good detective story to give the novel some characters and plot along with its worldbuilding. But it’s that world that really tugs at the reader, allowing us to dream of what could have been, if only America had lived up to its ideals as a land of immigrants instead of largely abandoning Jewish refugees to their fates.

★★★★☆

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