The Almost Chosen Homeland

Originally posted at The Festering Swamp on June 20, 2007

Re-reading this book review, I noticed that in the final paragraph I had predicted that this novel would be an award-winner, and on April 26, 2008 my prediction came true. At their 2008 conference in Austin, Texas, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) gave Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union their 2007 Nebula Award for best novel. – Mike LaRoche

As an historian, I am often given to flights of imagination over what course history might have taken had certain significant events turned out differently. What if Burgoyne had led the British to victory at Saratoga? What if Lee had won at Gettysburg? What if Oswald's third shot had not struck President Kennedy in the head? The possibilities are endless, the answers infinite.

Some historians, professional and amateur, have gone so far as to put such thoughts on paper, producing such fascinating counter-factual academic-type histories as For Want of a Nail by Robert Sobel or the What If? series, edited by Robert Cowley. Others have taken the purely fictional non-academic route, spawning a vibrant sub-genre known as "alternate history." Among the best alternate history works are How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove and S.M. Stirling's Domination of the Draka trilogy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) has made his own contribution to the sub-genre with The Yiddish Policemen's Union – an engaging, sharply written novel of an Alaskan Jewish policeman named Meyer Landsman living in an early twenty-first century very different from our own. How different, you ask? In the alternate world of Chabon's novel, Israel does not exist – the Jewish republic having been crushed by invading Arab armies in 1948. Instead, Jewish refugees all over Europe end up migrating to a part of the Alaskan panhandle known as the Federal District of Sitka, a politically autonomous area reserved by the U.S. government for Jewish settlement.

The reserve is not a permanent one, though. The Sitka District's sixty-year lease is due to expire on January 1, 2008. Fearing the upcoming event – known as Reversion – at which time the Jewish settlers will become foreign nationals living on American land, Alaskan Jews begin emigrating by the tens of thousands. All except for a small group of Orthodox Jews, who Landsman has connected to a mysterious murder in a low-rent hotel. In trying to solve the murder, Landsman discovers that the reluctance of his orthodox brethren to leave Sitka may be connected to a larger conspiracy with geopolitical implications.

Alternate history novels typically have what is called a "point-of-divergence" – the point at which the historical timeline of the story separates from our own. At first glance, Chabon's point-of-divergence would appear to be Israel's defeat in 1948, but as the novel goes on some other interesting facts are dropped. For example, we learn that Nazi Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union was successful and that the final blow to Hitler's regime came in 1946 when an atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin. Thus, the true point-of-divergence is never made clear, adding to the novel's mysterious atmosphere. Just with the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, Chabon's world is radically different from our own; no U.S.S.R., no Cold War.

Chabon's concept of an Alaskan reserve for Jews is not far-fetched, for at one point just such an idea was considered by President Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. The only criticisms I have of Chabon's novel are his allusions to the influence of dominionism in American politics (a nonsensical left-wing fantasy) and his evident belief that a Jewish state in Palestine has no right to exist. He even throws in a gratuitous complement toward Islam, referring to it as an "old and venerable" faith (though an older and more tolerant faith like Christianity does not merit such a kind description).

Political disagreements aside, this is an excellent novel that is well worth your time to read. I believe Michael Chabon has written another award-winner; a novel that not only highlights a brief and rarely mentioned episode in American history, but one that draws attention to a small, but growing sub-genre of American literature.