歐美研究季刊第47卷第4期

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EURAMERICA Vol. 47, No. 4 ( December 2017) , 395-432
© Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
The Unlikely Blessings of Living on
Borrowed Time in a Leased Land
—Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union
Shuli Chang
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
No. 1, University Rd., Tainan 70101, Taiwan
E-mail:
Abstract
The culture of violence committed in the name of faith,
a malady which plagues our world today, is the subject matter
of Michael Chabon’s 2007 speculative fiction, The Yiddish
Policemen’s Union, which is based on the historical premise
that Israel, in losing the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, was
destroyed, and millions of Jewish refugees given temporary
shelter in Alaska, on a 60-year lease with the United States of
America. The novel opens in 2007, when the Reversion is to
take effect, and Diasporic Jews once again face homelessness.
Against this counterfactual background of collective anxiety,
Chabon has his detective-protagonist follow a murder case
only to unravel a conspiracy to “basically force [the] Messiah
Received May 25, 2017; accepted September 27, 2017; last revised October 13,
2017
Proofreaders: Alex C. Chang, Yan-jun Guo, Tsai-Ying Lu