I will start by saying that this is the first book I’ve read by Michael Chabon and I bought it mostly because of its cover (absolutely loved it). I have his novel “Wonder Boys” on my list since like forever, but for some reason I never got the change to buy a copy. I begun reading “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” in a holiday but never got to finish it then, so when I got back home, from the lack of time, it took me another two weeks to continue it, which is very very unusual for me.
Enter the Alaskan Yiddish world
The author imagined how Alaska would have looked now if the Slattery Report would have passed and all the region would have been populated with Jew refugees from Europe in the World Word II.
The main character is Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic homicide detective with the Sitka police department who finds himself trying to solve the murder of a mystery man in the hotel where Landsman lives. From this moment on, Michael Chabon introduces his readers to a world where Jews, Russians, Natives and American secret services want a part of the iced land.
I am not very religious, and I know next to nothing about the Jewish faith, so this is why I found this book very educative. Also, I loved the way it is composed. It gave me a feeling of dark and cold and not only because of the place where the action is happening but because of the gloomy and pessimistic way it is written.
My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.
The Reading Badger’s final thoughts
I must say that because of the way I read it, it took me 14 chapters to really get into this novel, but it is a really interesting and original book, so I think that every person looking for a book involving a murder should read it, because this specific one it is more than this. As I mentioned earlier, it is edifying. However, there are some small, small parts that were not for my taste (like the forever problem between Russians and Americans), but this is just an opinion and you should just find out for yourselves how you feel about it.
