BookOpinion

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon’s sixth novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, has been holding strong among the top of the bestsellers lists. He recently sat down with the Borders Book Club to discuss the novel.

Chabon tackles an alternate-history story based on the premise of a Jewish homeland established in Alaska as a safe zone for European Jews fleeing Hitler. The “what if” scenario is based up the King-Havenner bill or Alaska Development Plan that was proposed prior to the U.S. involvement in World War II. What if the bill was passed? Chabon uses this as the setting for a present-time murder mystery. Detective Meyer Landsman works the case of an execution-style killing, while trying to redeem himself, personally, as well as to his ex-wife. 

“To me it’s a love story essentially,” Chabon says in the book club video. “For me it is a story of these two people and their having to make a new place for themselves and their relationship in this rapidly changing world.”

For Chabon, creating this entire new world wasn’t a stretch.

“Writing all started for me with making up imaginery kingdoms. Filling notebooks with maps, chronologies of invented histories,” he says. “I loved fantasies when I was a kid. I loved Tolkien and I loved all the aparatus that came around the Lord of the Rings of the charts and the maps and the chronologies, all that stuff. And very early on I would start making my own. Writing this novel in many ways is a return to that.”

He wrote a 600-page draft of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in first person, past tense. He scrapped it and reworked it in in third person, present tense. He said maintaining a sense of immersion in the work is crucial.

“To write a novel at your very best you have to really just be always with your head in the book, even when you are not writing,” Chabon says. “So that as you’re going through your day when you are encountering people, overhearing people’s conversations, reading something in the newspaper or just taking a walk and thinking, you’re always writing. It’s always feeding and you are thinking, ‘Oh, I could use that’ or ‘That’s just what I need.’ That’s a magical state to be in.”

Watch the full Borders Book Club discussion with Chabon, here.

Listen to an audio excerpt of the book, here.

Chabon also did a reading at a Barnes and Noble in San Jose, Calif. In these two videos, he talks about the book, about his influences and how he goes about writing a novel.

Watch Part 2 of the video here.

The audio version of this book is also available for instant download at these sites: