The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

Michael Chabon's novel imagines a world in which a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was created in Sitka, Alaska, during the Second World War, and the young state of Israel did not survive its first war. Six decades later, the Yiddish-speaking District of Sitka is about to revert to American control, and its people face an uncertain future. Homicide detective Meyer Landsman, a weary man living in a run-down hotel, is drawn into a case when another resident is found murdered, and with his partner, Berko Shemets, he follows the trail toward the district's powerful Hasidic community. Written as an homage to the hard-boiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the book won the Hugo, Nebula and Sidewise awards.