The Yiddish Policemen's Union; A Novel

New York, NY: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2007. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 411 pages. Signed on the half-title page by the author (Michael Chabon). This signed edition of The Yiddish Policemen's Union has been specially bound by the publisher. Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American author and "one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, " according to The Virginia Quarterly Review. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a critically acclaimed novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called Chabon's magnum opus; it received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history novel, received enthusiastic reviews and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is set in an alternative history version of the present day. The premise is that, contrary to real history, the United States voted to implement the 1940 Slattery Report, that recommended the provision of land in Alaska for the temporary refugee settlement of European Jews who were being persecuted by the Nazis during World War II. The novel's divergence point from real history is revealed in the first dozen chapters to be the death of Anthony Dimond, Alaska Territory delegate to the U.S. Congress, in a car accident; Dimond was one of the congressmen responsible for preventing a vote on the report. It imagines a temporary independent Jewish settlement being created on the Alaskan coast. As a result, two million Jews are killed in the Holocaust, instead of the six million in reality. The setting is Sitka, Alaska, which has become a sprawling metropolis at the center of the Jewish settlement in Alaska. One of the city's landmarks is the 'Safety Pin', a tall building erected for the 1977 World Fair held in Sitka and a source of pride for its inhabitants.