Name: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
ISBN: 9780007373055

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a 2007 novel by American author Michael Chabon. The novel is a detective story set in an alternative history version of the present day, based on the premise that during World War II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941, and that the fledgling State of Israel was destroyed in 1948. The novel is set in Sitka, which it depicts as a large, Yiddish-speaking metropolis. The Yiddish Policemen's Union won a number of science fiction awards: the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best SF Novel, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for Best Novel. It was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel.

What Hacker News says

crux_May 2009

Random anecdote: I interned, back in the day, at a consulting firm working w/ their website; at the time -- and perhaps still? -- they worked in gender-segregated areas when on site.

More randomness for the hell of it: I read the Yiddish Policemen's Union the other week and cannot recommend it highly enough. (It's a noir detective alt-history set in a Jewish analogue of Hong Kong in Alaska, where the local organized crime are Hasidic, the slang name for them is "black hats.") (It also manages to be a page-turner without any of that guilty feeling of "I just read 300 pages without thinking a single original thought" that so many page-turners leave you with.)

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nlJul 2020

It's worth noting that all three of her Broken Earth trilogy won Hugo awards.

It's not uncommon for series to win like that (getting a Hugo award for the first book means people will start the series, and since the awards are popular voting having people read your book is half the struggle).

I think the first two books (The Fifth Season and the Stone Sky) were great, but I didn't love the final book. I think Ann Leckie's Provenance should have won that year - it's in the (Hugo award winning!) Ancillary Justice universe, and deals with lots of issues around AI that I think many at HN would enjoy.

And as for the dead comments complaining that her winning is some kind of conspiracy because it's not hard SF: Fantasy has long won Hugo awards.

Also: (a) go read it - it's got a system of magic that is as hard as any magical faster than light technology in a space opera, and (b) Gaiman won with American Gods and The Graveyard Book. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won in 2008. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won.

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lmmDec 2015

I've read a little of both.

Regardless of what we label it as, would you agree that some recent winners (specifically I'll say Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The City & the City, Ancillary Justice, and The Three-Body Problem) are in some sense alike, that they form a different cluster from the list of older winners in my previous comment? That these newer winners are more similar to e.g. older Booker Prize winners (so that we don't get caught up trying to objectively define literary) than the older Hugo winners were? That there are qualities that the older Hugo winners have that the newer ones lack?

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ghshephardApr 2011

This is great news - because, hopefully, it means that more publishers will realize that there is a lot of money to be made releasing their books in EBook format. I find it strange that so many of the books that I want to purchase haven't been released in Kindle format. Even books that are obvious candidates, such as "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." It's an award winning Novel (2007 Nebula, 2008 Hugo), Science Fiction, and has been out for more than four years. And yet, still not available in electronic format.

As more and more people pick up e-readers, I'm hoping that publishing electronically will cease to be an option.

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