The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an alternate history novel written by Michael Chabon and published in 2007. The story explores a fictional modern day Jewish homeland located in Alaska instead of the middle east, with Yiddish as its official language instead of Modern Hebrew. The story is told in the manner of a pulp detective story with a Raymond Chandler-esque protagonist exploring an enigmatic murder case that turns out to be part of a sinister conspiracy.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!
Welcome to Sitka
In the mid 20th century there were several proposed locations for a Jewish homeland that were different from the modern day state of Israel. At least one of these, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia, still exists, although it is relatively small and obscure. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is based on a plan advanced in 1939 by then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes to create a Jewish Settlement in and around the real-life city of Sitka, Alaska.
The reason this world has come into being seems to have its origins in a somewhat different version of World War II. Although most of the details of this alternate past are not discussed in the book, it is clear that the Nazis in this world destroyed the Soviet Union and as a result the war went on until 1946, ending after the United States used Nuclear Weapons on Germany. The Holocaust was less severe than it was in our world, but the state of Israel failed soon after the land was turned over to the Jews by the British in 1948, possibly because many of the potential settlers had already began to settle in the Federal District of Sitka, where the novel takes place.
There are many striking differences between the book’s Sitka and our Israel. The most obvious is the location, on American territory, west of the Baranof mountains. This has superficial implications which include the naming of local haunts after cold-weather themes like penguins and eskimos. There are also deeper consequences to this arrangement. Unlike Israel, the Federal District of Sitka is not a sovereign state, but rather a semi-autonomous region that must ultimately answer to the United States Federal Government.
Sitka is on the eve of “reversion”, or re-integration with the state of Alaska. Most of the people who have settled there are going to be deported, beginning a new Jewish diaspora. This “reversion” is happening despite much lobbying on the part of its residents for permanent status as an autonomous territory. We learn though the course of the book that Sitka as a Jewish refuge is unpopular with most Americans, and is sometimes pejoratively referred to as “Jewlaska”.
Instead of living alongside Arab neighbors, the Sitka Jews interact with the indigenous native-american Tlingit, with which they have somewhat tense but ultimately peaceful relations. Some of the characters in the book are of Tlingit ancestry.
Yiddish
The spoken language of the Federal District of Sitka is Yiddish. This is another divergence from Israel, where Modern Hebrew is spoken. Although both of these languages are written with a similar script and share some vocabulary, they have completely different origins. Modern Hebrew has its origins in 19th century Jerusalem. It is a semitic language, which means its closest relatives are languages like Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic and the biblical or classical Hebrew that is spoken in a religious context.
Yiddish is a Germanic language that developed around the Ashkenazi(Literally “German”, but in practice referring to northern European Jewry) Jewish community in the middle ages. While the novel is mostly rendered in English, it does use some Yiddish vocabulary, some of which is put to novel fictional use. An example of this would be Shoyfer brand cellular phones, which are the number one product exported by the district. A Shoyfer is the Yiddish word for the ram’s horn used in religious ceremonies. Another example would be referring to beat cops as “latkes” because of their uniform hat’s resemblance to the ubiquitous potato pancakes. There is also an incredibly elaborate pun where a gun is called a “sholem”, which means “peace”, because it sounds like “piece” which is slang for a gun in English. Besides the obvious uses of Yiddish vocabulary, there are many examples in the book where text rendered in English follows patterns and phrasings inherited from Yiddish language.
Chabon’s use of Yiddish language instead of Hebrew is neither arbitrary nor superficial. In our world, Yiddish was a contender for the official language of the state of Israel. One of the reasons it didn’t win out had to do with the secular tone of the Zionist movement. In the 1940s, Yiddish was more widely spoken than Modern Hebrew, but it was also had religious overtones. More specifically, Yiddish has been and continues to be associated with the Hasidic community, and this is reflected in the world of the novel. The Federal District of Sitka is dominated by the Verbovers, who are a kind of Hasidic mafia. The plot of the book revolves around an investigation into the murder of an estranged Verbover scion named Menachem-Mendel Spilman.
Besides the religious/secular implications of the language, it appears that Chabon wanted to use Yiddish to depict a national character that is different from the Israeli “sabra” archetype. The people of Sitka come across as more smart-ass than hard-ass. They would be more at home in Woody Allen’s New York City than in the middle of an Entebbe commando raid. This concept was first proposed in a 1997 article for Harper’s called “Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts” -
I can imagine another Yisroel, the youngest nation on the North American continent, founded in the former Alaska Territory during World War II as a resettlement zone for the Jews of Europe. (For a brief while, I once read, Franklin Roosevelt was nearly sold on such a plan.) Perhaps after the war, in this Yisroel, the millions of immigrant Polish, Rumanian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Austrian, Czech and German Jews held a referendum, and chose independence over proferred statehood in the U.S. The resulting country is obviously a far different place than Israel. It is a cold, northern land of furs, paprika, samovars and one long, glorious day of summer. The portraits on those postage stamps we buy are of Walter Benjamin, Simon Dubnow, Janusz Korczak, and of a hundred Jews unknown to us, whose greatness was allowed to flower only here, in this world. It would be absurd to speak Hebrew, that tongue of spikenard and almonds, in such a place.
In addition to being a refuge for the Jewish diaspora, Sitka is home to a small population of immigrants from elsewhere in the world. This immigrant community was responsible for creating the flagship fictional food of the book, the “Filipino Style Chinese Donut”.
Echatology.
It is through the character of Spilman that the world of the Yiddish Policemen’s Union is revealed to have some supernatural elements. Spilman is believed to be the Tzaddik-ha Dor, a potential messiah, born once every generation. He has the ability to perform miracles, referred to as “blessings” in the book.
It is ultimately revealed that Spilman has died as a result of a scheme on the part of evangelical Christians in the American government to bring about the events of revelations. This brand of evangelical eschatology is based on a real-world movement sometimes referred to as Christian Zionism. Those who subscribe to this ideology believe that the Jews must be in possession of the holy land before the apocalypse can begin. By the end of the book, the Verbover syndicate has been co-opted into a US government backed invasion of Arab Palestine, kicked off by a bombing of the Dome of the Rock.