"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" | Something's not kosher in Jewish state of Sitka

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union"

by Michael Chabon

HarperCollins, 414 pp., $26.95

Welcome to the Federal District of Sitka. Population: 3.2 million. Language: Yiddish, lightly spiced with Esperanto and "American." Winter climate: cold, rainy, dim.

The District's political prospects, toward the end of 2007, are looking dim too, thanks to the upcoming "Reversion" under which the Jewish city-state on the western side of Baranof Island will revert to Alaska after 60 years of semi-autonomy. Will Sitka go the way of the Jewish homeland in Palestine, which collapsed "with savage finality" in 1948?

Hard to say. But as more than one "Sitkanik" remarks, "These are strange times to be a Jew."

The world of Michael Chabon's new novel, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," lives and breathes so palpably on the page that readers may wonder why mapmakers haven't caught up with it yet. And it does have a tenuous basis in fact. In the early 1940s, the Roosevelt administration briefly weighed offering Alaskan territory as a refuge for persecuted Jews. In "Policemen's Union" the plan comes to imperfect fruition.

Chabon's guide through this what-if metropolis is police detective Meyer Landsman, and he's in terrible shape: drinking too much, smoking too much, hardly eating a thing. Following the death of his sister Naomi (who flew her plane into a mountain) and his breakup with his wife, Bina (a tough-gal police officer), Meyer has wound up at the Hotel Zamenhof, a flophouse full of winos and junkies. There, he seems ready to spiral down some black hole of the psyche himself — until duty calls.

One of the Zamenhof's residents, a gifted chess-player/smack-addict named Frank, has been found shot, execution-style, in the back of the head. Meyer takes on the case — and complications immediately ensue.

For one thing, "Frank" is just one of several names the murder victim went by. For another, everyone who hears about his killing is surprisingly woebegone. Frank may have been a junkie, but he had a luminous charm about him.

Meyer's investigations soon lead him into the heart of Hasidic Sitka, where he picks up on strange rumors about the dead man and his long-estranged rabbi father. Even stranger are the hints Meyer gets about the geopolitical implications of Frank's murder.

The more he finds out, the more certain Sitkaniks try to shut him down. His half-Tlingit patrol partner and boyhood friend Berko Shemets does his best to back his efforts. So does his ex-wife, Bina, now Meyer's boss and under orders to close the case. But she's fond of her ex and wants to get at the facts too — especially when it appears that her sister-in-law's plane-crash death may be connected to the murder.

Still, things don't go smoothly for Meyer. After losing his badge and gun, he finds himself left only with his union card to brandish, and a series of clues that don't add up.

Chabon's wiseguy-noir alternahistory is a marvelous creation. Its characters are full of gothic or sardonic vigor, and its island landscape is lovingly rendered. Its Yiddish-flecked prose has an Annie Proulx-like density of regional vocabulary (except in this case the region doesn't exactly exist). The plotting is tight and the book is shapelier than Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winner, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay."

For all its wild inventions, the novel holds up an eerie, distorting mirror to our own unsettled world. With his allusions to Sitkanik-Tlingit tensions, international skirmishing for access to oil, and the miring of the U.S. in a Cuban war "notorious for its futility, brutality, and waste," Chabon seems to suggest that no matter what path we took, we would still have arrived at this moment in the early 21st century where malaise and distrust lurk at the heart of public life. And not just for Jews.

"Everybody has a funny feeling these days," Meyer says early on in the novel.

In Chabon's hands, that "funny feeling" translates into a tour-de-force of fiction.

He has been the Seattle Times book critic since1998 and has published four novels.