Anchorage Daily News

Imagine, if you please, a city of 3.2 million people on the shores of Baranof Island around Sitka. The official language is Yiddish, the inhabitants are Jews, and their lights stretch across the in-filled sound from Mount Edgecumbe to some place called Shvartsn-Yam. They have been gathering in Southeast since World War II, when U.S. officials hatched a plan to transport refugees from Europe to the territory of Alaska.

Click to enlarge

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon's latest novel is set on Baranof Island. Chabon won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2001 with his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay."

Story tools

Comment on this story

E-mail a friend

Print

Digg this

Seed Newsvine

Send link via AIM

Font size : A | A | A

That is the imaginative leap made by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, whose new novel set in Alaska comes out next week.

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" takes as its starting point an actual scheme, developed by Franklin Roosevelt's interior secretary, Harold Ickes, to help Nazi Germany's Jews by prying open immigration quotas for the northern territory.

The real plan never made it through Congress, foundering on pre-war national politics, gross impracticalities, and what historians call "a broad streak" of anti-Semitism in territorial Alaska.

But Chabon, the best-selling author of four previous novels, invents an Alaska that might have been. The result is a funny, dark, faintly preposterous tale in which territorial congressional delegate Anthony Dimond was run over by a "drunken taxi-driving schlemiel," Zionists were routed from Jerusalem and the Tlingits became the new Palestinians.

Now, in the novel's present-day, it's all coming to an end. The "interim" territory is going to revert to Alaska's control, and detective Meyer Landsman has a dead junkie on his hands who just might be the Jewish Messiah.

The 43-year-old Chabon (SHAY-bon, rhymes with radon) is part of a playful new generation of novelists who have managed to combine critical acclaim and commercial success. He won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2001 with his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." (His other works include the novel "Wonder Boys," a comic book series, a young-readers baseball fantasy, and the screenplay for the movie "Spider-man 2").

The Berkeley, Calif., writer joins a small handful of literary novelists who have taken Alaska for a subject -- joining the likes of Norman Mailer, TC Boyle and Peter Handke.

"It was one of those little bits of Jewish trivia that you pick up and file away," Chabon said in an interview this week, recalling his first encounter with the Alaska resettlement plan.

The novel's embryo was in an essay Chabon wrote 10 years ago about Yiddish, the everyday old-country language of European Jewry. At that time, Chabon tried to imagine a place where Yiddish became the mainstream language, and the Alaska plan came to mind.

For a long time, the working title of his novel-to-be was "Hotzeplotz," a Yiddish word for the back-of-beyond.

Chabon made a research trip to the Southeast panhandle in late 2003, visiting Ketchikan, Juneau, Petersburg and Sitka (he was weathered out of Skagway). In the Juneau state library he read through the Slattery Report, the 1939 Interior study that pitched resettlement in booster tones as a way to develop the territory.

Sitka was one of several sites considered for refugee settlement in the Slattery Report. Chabon said he focused on Sitka because the harsher climate in other parts of Alaska would have intruded too much in his story. He also found the geography of Russian Alaska to be perfect for his story, he said, with place names that evoked the storied landscape of "Fiddler on the Roof" author Sholom Aleichim.

Visiting Sitka, feeling like the secret advance man for a planned invasion, he talked to no one about the plausibility of his scheme. He studied the light and topography and weather and ignored the human activity.

"It was weird, I was busy mentally erasing much of what I saw around me as I walked around Sitka. I tried to picture how it might be otherwise."

The resulting book is a noir police story set in streets too mean for any Alaska fishing town. The focus of the story -- the names, the slang, even the cadence of the sentences -- stays inside the fog-bound ghetto atmosphere of the Jewish city, with its old grievances and sectarian divisions, weary cynics and gangster rabbis, and a self-lacerating humor that suggests this whole Alaska adventure was somebody's mistaken detour.

"They keep on making new Jews," says one of the hard-boiled characters. "Nobody is making places to put them."

The mood is politically claustrophobic -- the Jews of Sitka are second-class residents, whose "Ickes passports" do not allow free travel in the United States. That was, in fact, the plan set forth in the real Slattery Report.

Alaska comes into play in inventive ways. Detective Landsman's partner, Berko Shemets, is a rarity, half-Jewish and half-Tlingit -- "Tartar eyes, dense black hair, broad face built for joy but trained in the craft of sorrow." Berko's mother was killed in the Synagogue Riots, which erupted after the fire-bombing of a prayer chapel built by an aggressive Jewish splinter sect on Indian land.

Landsman's sister, meanwhile, rejected the city ways to become a tough Alaska bush pilot. Landsman describes her kiddingly as a lesbian "in everything but sexual preference."

The two worlds find new ways of blending, as when Chabon refers to the salmon as "that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home."

Engaging as the murder mystery may be, Alaska readers will have a lively time considering secondary mysteries, such as: How, in the name of Frank Murkowski, did they develop enough industry to sustain a city of 3.2 million people in Southeast Alaska? And how do they keep from cutting down every last spruce tree and snagging every salmon? How does the wilderness splendor around them survive?

"I fully expected Alaskans to just be horrified by this," Chabon laughed, "that so many people would show up on their doorstep, regardless of who they are."

Reporter Tom Kizzia can be reached at tkizzia@adn.com.

Author will make Alaska appearances

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon (Harper Collins, $26.95)

Chabon's 15-city book tour includes visits to Anchorage (Title Wave Books) on May 29 and Juneau (Hearthside Books) on May 30.