Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. - By Ruth Franklin - Slate Magazine:
With The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Chabon has finally made the only use of genre fiction that a talented writer should: Rather than forcing his own extraordinarily capacious imagination into its stuffy confines, he makes the genre—more precisely, genres—expand to take him in. This novel bursts with so many forms and styles, it's hard to know where to start: It's a noir thriller, a Jewish family saga, a counterhistorical fantasy that manages at once to be utopian and dystopian. Mostly, though, it is a "what if?" story for adults. What if the Jews had lost the Arab-Israeli war, and with it the state of Israel, in 1948, and instead had to settle on a (literally) Godforsaken collection of islands the U.S. government had set aside for them in the Alaskan Panhandle? What would that state look like, sound like, feel like? And what if, 60 years after its settlement, the Jews had to give it back?
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