Picks, pans, and peculiarities

Culture | Reviews: A fanciful portrait of Alaska and two fanciful attacks on Christianity

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

Michael Chabon's latest literary effort is as difficult to classify as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his Pulitzer Prize--winner about comic books and the Holocaust. It is a quirky combination of noir thriller, religious-cultural reflection, and alternative history.

The setting is a fanciful modern-day Alaska, populated with displaced European Jews after the United States took FDR's suggestion to establish a refuge there for Holocaust escapees. We also learn, in brief asides, that an atomic bomb destroyed Berlin and the Zionists were routed in Palestine. Rather than squabbling with Arabs, the Jews now dispute borders with Tlingit Indians. All of this can be disorienting at first, since Chabon doesn't show his cards. Characters simply appear on the tundra and start kvetching.

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August 25, 2007, Vol. 22, No. 31

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