The Association of Yiddish Police Officers
The Yiddish Policemen's Union (original title: The Yiddish Policemen's Union ) is an alternative-historical crime novel of American author Michael Chabon from the year 2007 .
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The novel is set in 2007 in a fictional Yiddish-speaking society in a fictional city Sitka on the site of the former Russian capital of the same name in Alaska .
The novel is based on the alternative historical assumption that the United States offered European Jews a home within what was then the federal territory of Alaska during World War II . This home is neither a sovereign nation-state (like real Israel ) nor an autonomous member state of the United States (like real Alaska) or a permanent federal district (like the real District of Columbia ), but merely a provisional entity with the Yiddish language below the name Federal District of Sitka . Although the novel is written in English, it contains numerous terms from Yiddish, as well as Yiddish-sounding word creations based in particular on standard German or Slavic words. According to the novel, the establishment of the district goes hand in hand with the fact that many European Jews escape the Holocaust and emigrate to Alaska. The novel suggests that for this reason on the one hand (a war-focused) Germany only loses the World War in 1946, the Soviet Union does not establish hegemony over Eastern Europe and a great power of Manchuria is establishing itself in East Asia . Furthermore, the State of Israel, founded in 1947, went under in the war of independence in 1948.
In the present, so the novel, an evangelical US president is undertaking the lifting of the provisional status so that the Jewish residents of Sitka have to leave the country. This is where the crime story begins. A junkie named after the chess player Emanuel Lasker is found murdered in a dump at Zamenhof in the Untershtot , where the alcoholic police detective Meyer Landsman also lives . The investigation has met resistance from the American federal authorities. Together with his cousin, who is the descendant of a Jewish father and a Tlingit mother, Ber Shemetz, who was murdered by Jews , and his superior and ex-wife Bina Gelbfish, Landsman sets out to find the murderer. The trail leads into the Hasidic milieu that dominates Sitka . At the same time, Jews from Sitka undertake a terrorist attack on the Dome of the Rock in order to enable the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem and thus the coming of the Messiah . The dead man turns out to be the outcast son of the chief rabbi, in whom his fellow men had placed their messianic hopes.
Awards
- 2007: Nebula Award
- 2007: Sidewise Award
- 2008: Locus Award for best science fiction novel
- 2008: Hugo Award for best novel
Web links
- The Messiah vom Zamenhof - review on www.zeit.de