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The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 409
proposals, not once but twice, to tackle with the so-called “Jewish
problem,” but the solutions they propose are political ones, rather
than psychotheological ones. The first of these proposed solutions,
to save the European Jews from political persecution, was made by
Harold Ickes in 1938, offering Alaska as a “haven for Jewish
refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews
are subjected to oppressive restrictions.”
11
In reality, the US
Department of the Interior did draft a report, commonly called the
Slattery Report, but the main focus of this report was to solve the
“Alaskan” problem. As a solution to the backwardness of Alaska’s
economic development, Ickes proposed importing European Jews to
Alaska
—
not yet an American state at that time. The reasoning was
that Jews, given their educational and cultural capital, could help
boost Alaska’s social and economic development. In other words,
the plight faced by the European Jews only won Ickes’ attention
because the importation of Jewish refugees could have solved an
internal US problem. It was out of self-interest that Ickes found the
Jewish problem of interest to him. In actuality, Ickes’ proposal did
not even reach the floor of the Senate, and European Jews before
the Second World War were thus left to fend for their own lives, six
million of which were subsequently lost.
Chabon took up Ickes’ proposal and gave this historical event
a fatal twist by making Anthony Dimond, Alaska’s Delegate to the
House of Representatives, a victim of a car accident, and as a
consequence of his demise, the Alaskan Settlement Act was
introduced, passed, and put into practice in 1940 in Chabon’s
counterfactual novel. The first wave of immigrants from Eastern
Europe arrived, with great expectations, in 1940. Their hope was
met with a chilly reality, as life was hard and jobs nowhere to be
found. Eight years later, “In August the defense of Jerusalem
collapsed and the outnumbered Jews of the three-month-old
11
For an interesting account of Ickes’ “plan to save Europe’s Jews” from the points
of view of Jewish Americans, please see the opinion piece written by Raphael
Medoff (2007).