One my favorite books is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a wonderful Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon (you can read my review here). This week, Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, was published, and Leah and I bought a copy last night. So, yes, my book tower has grown (the horror, the horror) and shall soon topple upon my head.Since I'm in the middle of reading two other books - The Audacity of Hope and The Fortress of Solitude - Leah is reading Chabon's new novel first, and she'll post a review when she's finished (which, knowing her, may be this afternoon).
Until then, here are two articles from The New York Times about Michael Chabon and The Yiddish Policemen's Union:
Looking for a Home in the Limbo of Alaska by Michiko Kakutani
Mr. Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” builds upon the achievement of “Kavalier & Clay,” creating a completely fictional world that is as persuasively detailed as his re-creation of 1940s New York in that earlier book, even as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.The Frosen Chosen by Patricia Cohen
In this fourth novel, which comes out Tuesday, Mr. Chabon takes a historical footnote, a pie-in-the-sky proposal to open up the Alaska Territory in 1940 to European Jews marked for extermination, and asks: What if? What if this proposal, which in real life was supported by the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, but killed in Congress, had actually passed? What if Jews had poured into a frigid island instead of the Middle Eastern desert, and the state of Israel had never been created? What if the small settlement of Sitka had grown into a teeming Jewish homeland, a land not of milk and honey but of salmon and lumber?
