yiddish policemen
I just finished reading Michael Chabon’s exquisite The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a detective story set in the present day of a parallel universe where Franklin Roosevelt allowed the Jewish refugees of World War II to settle in Alaska. The Holocaust was therefore brought to a premature end, with two major consequences for this alternate history. First, speakers of Yiddish still vastly outnumber speakers of Hebrew. And second, without the Displaced Persons (that real-life remnant of Holocaust survivors and Soviet-trained guerillas who formed Israel’s patchwork revolutionary army), there is no Israel. Beyond the story itself, well-drawn and clever, I detected a wonderful hidden motive: to put together a world where Yiddish survived the 20th century as a living language, with its own words for cell phones and SUVs.
Having finished the book, no longer scared of running into spoilers (it is a murder mystery, after all), I promptly found this essay by Chabon, which neatly confirmed my theory. He came up with the idea for this book, it seems, discovering a Yiddish phrasebook for travellers–and realizing that such a thing no longer had a reason to exist.