The Yiddish Policemen's Union

By Michael Chabon

Finished reading on April 23, 2018

This is a tremendously fascinating book, the marriage of noir detective fiction and a historical what-if.¹ The book takes awhile to get going, but eventually takes off and introduces a slew of fascinating characters and plot hooks.

To me the most interesting character plays a minor role in the opening third of the book: Zimbalist or the “boundary maven.” He is responsible for running out the string that maintains the eruv, which holds together the border of a home, allowing residents of an orthodox-Jewish island to consider the entire island a single residence and go about their business without breaking the Sabbath. Chabon likens this to running a scam against God. More ironic is that Zimbalist himself is not considered to be that holy a man, but he has tremendous power over the crime lords that run large parts of Sitka.

Chabon also has some interesting commentary on the American government, which is purposefully propping up a organized crime syndicate in order to bring in the Messianic era. The US government is aiming to bring in the end times and helping to cover up a number of crimes in order to do it. The alliance between evangelical Christians and the far-right Orthodox Jews both in the US and abroad is an important part of contemporary US politics and there is interesting commentary on it here.

^{1. Turns out that the Alaskan resettlement plan was entirely real!}