The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union grounds its alternate history in real historical proposals for Jewish resettlement, imagining how different historical circumstances might have reshaped the social conditions of its characters. Chabon’s inspiration for the novel came from a Yiddish phrasebook, which led him to imagine a country in which the citizens spoke Yiddish. He also drew inspiration from the historical proposal to create a Jewish refugee settlement in Alaska during World War II. Known as the Slattery Report, it was formally titled The Problem of Alaskan Development.

Produced between 1939 and 1940, the Slattery Report was devised in response to escalating violence conducted by Nazi Germany against European Jews, most notably the Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass pogrom of 1938. United States Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes proposed opening four designated zones in Alaska that corresponded to Sitka to Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany. Since Alaska was not yet a state at the time, Ickes argued that he could modify immigration quotas to allow refugee passage into the territory. Beyond the plan’s humanitarian aims, it was also seen as an opportunity to bolster the fledgling economy of Alaska, as well as strengthen its defense against Imperial Japan.

The Slattery Report was introduced in Congress as a bill but faced strong opposition from lawmakers and lobbyists alike. One of the bill’s major opponents was Alaska Territory Delegate Anthony Dimond, who convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to oppose the plan. Consequently, Roosevelt ordered Ickes to maintain a strict quota on Jewish refugee immigration. In Chabon’s novel, Dimond’s early death is one of the central divergence points in the alternate history of Sitka. In the world of the novel, the Alaskan Settlement Act clears its initial committee hearings without Dimond’s opposition and is subsequently voted into law. Sitka then becomes the site of a Jewish refugee district.

However, the Slattery Report is not the only historical instance of a proposed Jewish state. Prior to the expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine and the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, statesmen have proposed plans to create a Jewish homeland at various time in history: In the 1820s, Jewish civic leader Mordecai Manuel Noah attempted to establish a Jewish colony called Ararat in upstate New York; in 1903, the British Empire also presented the Uganda Scheme, a proposal to create a Jewish homeland in British East Africa; finally, there was also the 1940 Madagascar Plan, a proposal by Nazi Germany in cooperation with France and Poland to relocate Europe’s Jewish population to newly established settlements in Madagascar. All of these plans failed for various reasons, including opposition from the World Zionist Organization and other Jewish sociocultural organizations.

In Chabon’s novel, the Sitka settlement is on the verge of “Reversion,” or the expiration of its lease to the United States. It focuses on a second-generation immigrant whose parents arrived in Alaska as refugees. Since he has spent his entire life in Sitka, Detective Meyer Landsman knows no other homeland, but Sitka will no longer exist once Reversion takes effect. This looming deadline heightens the irony at the heart of the Slattery Report: A plan once justified as a boon to the United States’s economy and security now leaves its Jewish inhabitants without a homeland.