NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {E} ven considering the extraordinary vicissitudes of Jewish history, the founding of Israel as a modern state stands out as highly improbable. Describing the unlikely contingencies that enabled its creation (with both U.S. and Soviet support, defeating a legion of Arab would-be conquerors), historian Paul Johnson in his magisterial work Modern Times writes that “Israel slipped into existence through a crack in the time continuum.”

So what if Israel hadn’t slipped through that crack? That is the intriguing premise of Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Chabon, seizing on an abandoned World War II resettlement proposal of the U.S. government, imagines not Israel but a portion of Alaska as the main home of the world’s Jews. Taking the form of a potboiler murder mystery, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is richly imagined. But it also displays an impishness, even a callousness, about the counterfactual scenario it imagines that helps lay bare certain prejudices against Jews and against Israel that have sadly resurged in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack.

The world Chabon imagines differs from ours in ways small and large. A first lady Marilyn Monroe is mentioned, as is a long Cuban war and a nuclear strike on Berlin in 1946. We learn that Jews are in Alaska because the resettlement proposal that in real life was scuttled by Anthony Dimond, Alaska’s nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, went through because of Dimond’s death in a car accident. The formation of the District of Sitka was the Jews’ good fortune. There were also misfortunes. Israel is founded, in 1948, as in our reality. But it doesn’t go well. That August, instead of fending off their Arab invaders, “the defense of Jerusalem collapsed and the outnumbered Jews of the three-month-old republic of Israel were routed, massacred, and driven into the sea.” The Jerusalem of the novel’s present is “a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles,” for which some of Sitka’s Jews still long but without much realistic hope. But they’ll need somewhere to go soon, as the District is to be returned to the U.S. government imminently.

In classic detective-story fashion, the novel gives us the dead body and its investigator on its first page. The former is not what it at first seems. But the latter is: Meyer Landsman, a divorced, hard-drinking detective in the Sitka police department. He has “the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker.” Landsman is our guide through the Sitka that Chabon has imagined. Or perhaps reimagined: Sitka is, in fact, a real place in Alaska. In our reality, it’s the nation’s largest city by area yet is home to only about eight and a half thousand (and few Jews). But Chabon’s capable imagination fills it up with millions of people, most of them Jewish. It is a chilly, sprawling metropolis, where Russian gangsters and Orthodox and secular Jews (such as Landsman) patronize chess clubs and kosher cafeterias.

An essential part of Sitka culture is Yiddish, the vernacular that sprinkles the pages of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. (A clever touch makes “sholem,” meaning “peace,” the Sitka Yiddish word for “gun.”) Yiddish inspired the novel. In a 1997 Harper’s essay, Chabon describes a book, Say It in Yiddish, as “probably the saddest” he owned, given the declining use of the language. It caused him to think of some alternative histories: one in which Yiddish came to dominate the newfound State of Israel; one in which there is no Israel but also no Holocaust; and one in which Jews settled Alaska, a place where he thought it impossible for Hebrew, a tongue of “spikenard and almonds,” to take root.

There was an unexpectedly fierce reaction to Chabon’s essay, from those who thought he had prematurely announced the end of Yiddish. But — and here is where some of the impishness begins — he derived inspiration from the backlash. As he told a New York Times interviewer in 2007, “Oh yeah? That offended you? Well, I’m going to write a goddamn novel, and you think that was offensive? Just wait.” Also a motivator was simple interest in the counterfactual. “How mad it seems that this tiny little scrap of land” should be so fiercely contested. Though interested in the scenario, he claimed to have “ambivalence” about the existence of the State of Israel but “didn’t come in with a point to prove or an agenda.”

That supposed lack of agenda becomes a bit harder to credit as we explore Sitka, where the Jews are described as having a fraught relationship with the native Tlingit people. (Nudge nudge.) And it becomes even less creditable as we unravel the novel’s central mystery. The murder Landsman investigates turns out to be tied up in a scheme involving a sect of fundamentalist Jews and the U.S. government to reclaim Israel for the Jews. The effort starts with a terror attack on Jerusalem — specifically, the Dome of the Rock, which sits atop the Temple Mount, a sacred site in Islam and Judaism entirely controlled by Muslims in Chabon’s alternative reality. The U.S. government, headed by an Evangelical Christian president, participates to help fulfill end-times prophecy, a commonly cited through rarely evidenced rationale for Christian support of Israel. This can’t be accomplished without “some bloodshed,” as one government agent tells Landsman, though he wants to keep it to an “absolute minimum.” And when the terror attack is successfully completed, those who helped scheme it, as well as other Jews in Sitka, celebrate — a sinister echo of how some Muslims in other nations reacted to 9/11. Put them in dire straits, Chabon seems to be saying, and Jews will descend to the level of their enemies — and the U.S. government will happily back them.

In this light, one feature of his fictional Sitka is particularly galling. Those planning the terror attack convene in an establishment “at the corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn.” Those names hardly belong to nobodies, as Ruth Wisse pointed out in a review for Commentary. Emanuel Ringelblum “between 1939 and 1943 performed prodigies of meticulous documentation in Jewish Warsaw under the Nazi boot,” and Jacob Glatshteyn was an American Yiddish poet whose work, among other things, celebrated the founding of Israel as a “miracle.” To Wisse, the “conscripting” of these “Jewish cultural heroes” amounts to “a purely personal crack, and an exceptionally annihilating one.”

But Chabon’s literary gifts, in at least one sense, inadvertently transcend his callous attitude. We learn that a feature of Sitka’s architecture is that many of its buildings are connected by a vast network of secret tunnels, the product of a paranoid generation that moved to the district after the fall of Jerusalem and became convinced that one day its enemies would threaten it even there. In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, not just the Middle East but also Europe and the U.S. have seen resurgences of Jew-hatred that make it hard to disentangle anti-Zionism from antisemitism (antisemites sure aren’t trying).

The land Chabon in 1997 called “a hard bit of grit in the socket that hinges Africa to Asia” once again is receiving attention and condemnation out of proportion with its existence and its actions. So are the people who call it home. The assurance in 1983 by the usually perspicacious Paul Johnson that “the creation of Israel finally ended European anti-Semitism, except behind the Iron Curtain” has, sadly, not endured. Those who call for Israel’s elimination envision a similar fate for the Jews inside of it, and for Jews everywhere. Chabon may not have intended to affirm the value of Israel by imagining a world without it. But by doing so, he has highlighted the value of this “miracle” — for the Jews, and for those who wish them well.