The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union was published in 2007 and is Michael Chabon's sixth novel. Chabon had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and this book followed it into a very different register: a hard-boiled detective story written in an invented English that mimics the cadence of Yiddish, set in a frozen city that does not exist. The premise reverses a real historical proposal, that Jewish refugees might be settled in Alaska, and follows it forward for sixty years.

The novel's detective is a competent, exhausted man with a failed marriage and a chess problem, and Chabon uses the conventions of the form deliberately: an anonymous death in a residential hotel, a conspiracy that reaches upward, a partner with family connections, and a community that would rather the case stayed closed. Around the plot he builds Sitka as a working city with its own newspapers, bureaucracy, religious factions and slang, which is the part of the book that took the longest to read and the hardest to shake off.

The book won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in 2008, which is unusual for a literary novelist and reflects how thoroughly it commits to its speculative premise. It was followed by a planned television adaptation that did not proceed. It is a standalone, and it sits with the detective novels that use an invented city to say something about a real one. The dialogue is written in a synthetic English that borrows Yiddish word order, which is the part of the book readers either fall for immediately or find hard going.