You'll find Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, on many recommended reading lists. It is certainly one of the best books that I've read in the past decade. Kavalier and Clay has compelling, page-turning ingredients--engaging characters (two boys who make good on their dream to become comic book authors); a common but winning theme (justice for the weak); dashes of fantasy (the Golem of Prague); and enough melancholy to imbed Chabon's tale in your head and heart long after you finish reading it.
Chabon may have one-upped his own masterpiece with his newest book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. In this new novel, Chabon makes a foray into history--alternative history, to be precise. As the L.A. Times describes the premise for the book,
What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once suggested, a safe zone had been established in Alaska under the protection of the United States for European Jews escaping Hitler? What if this "Federal District of Sitka" had grown and developed until its population was in the millions, a country within a country, as it were? What if Israel had collapsed in 1948, mere months after independence, leaving many Jews with nowhere else to turn?
And what if, 60 years later, Sitka was about to face a process called "reversion," in which its territories would be returned and its Jews cast back into the Diaspora, a Diaspora in which the desirability of their presence was not entirely assured?
If this isn't enough to pique your interest, consider that the primary storyline is a noirish detective tale in which a Sitka police detective, under the supervision of his ex-wife (his superior officer), investigates the murder of the junkie son of a prominent rabbi.
I can't wait to get my hands on this book.
More on the book from the New York Times Book Review.
Read the rest of the L.A. Times review.
UPDATE: Michael Chabon discusses the book with Jewish culture website Nextbook [mp3 file].
