My first Michael Chabon book! I’ve only heard the best about this writer, and surely enough I picked up his least usual novel. Alternate history timeline where Israel collapses after WWII and many Jews take refuge in Sitka, Alaska and form a grim and other-wordly metropolis. This minor sci-fi element aside, this is majorly an homage to 1940s noir detective stories (the genre with the coolest, sleekest and most flawed characters), and Chabon fits that sensibility in, without any failure or hesitation, to the world of Yiddish myth, vernacular, conspiracy and scripture. I’ve read the Coen Brothers want to make a movie of it, and after seeing A Serious Man and The Man Who Wasn’t There, I have no doubt they can make a perfect adaptation of this yiddish detective story.
