The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

“Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.”

The opening lines of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.

Nine months: the gestation period of homo sapiens. Signaling, perhaps, a novel of rebirth?

Certainly the protagonist, this Man of the Land, has fallen far, as the word “flopping” suggests. He’s not homeless or unemployed but he’s crawled deep inside a bottle, alcohol being his preferred course of self-medication as he tries to avoid thinking about the string of tragedies that has upended his life. Can he pull himself out?

The question of Landsman’s land will also prove to be vexed—not just for him, but for all the Jews residing in the Federal District of Sitka which, in this novel’s world, was created as a haven for the refugees of Eastern European Jewry as they fled the conditions that produced World War II. In the novel’s timeframe, they’ve now lived in Sitka for sixty years and made a thriving city of it, but they are about to be dispossessed as the United States comes in and reclaims this Alaskan territory in a process dubbed Reversion.

But for the moment, Detective Landsman (and really, what other job could he have in a book that begins like this? he’s gotta be either a cop or a PI) has a more immediate problem in the homicide victim that’s been found by the night manager of his hotel. (The victim’s alias is a clue to another of the novel’s preoccupations: Emanuel Lasker was a famous chess champion of the turn of the twentieth century.) Perhaps the path of investigation will also prove to be that of redemption—if he can overcome bureaucratic obstacles and his own demons along the way.

The familiarity of the form is animated by the exuberance of the writing and the astounding depth of the imaginative conception of this alternate Alaska.

Zamenhof, by the way, was the man who invented Esperanto, a “constructed language” made from repurposed bits of other languages, which is a nice metaphor for this novel whose constructed history is made up of re-imagined bits of real history.