BERKELEY, Calif. - A few years ago, Michael Chabon took two research trips to the island community of Sitka, Alaska. Like an anti-architect, a city planner in reverse, he erased nearly all of what he saw in order to conjure a city that has never existed anywhere, in any time, as the setting for "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," his first full-length novel for adults since his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" in 2000.

In a recent interview, Chabon (SHAY-bahn) said that as he walked, he felt like "an advance man for a planned invasion," mentally deleting the people and buildings of the sport fishing town of about 9,000.

"It was strange, because I needed to get a sense of the place," he said. "But on the other hand, the place I needed to get a sense of didn't exist."

His Sitka is a dense, teeming metropolis of 3.2 million, the vast majority of them Yiddish-speaking Jews who fled Europe during and after World War II. Its complex society is partly modeled on Israel and all of that nation's shades of religious and cultural identity: liberal secularists, orthodox "black hats," Communists, Zionists, bicultural Jews and everything in-between.

The resulting book has just arrived in stores. Like much of his work, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" mines Chabon's fondness for the pulpy, popular mass product of past eras. Where "Kavalier & Clay" was sourced in the postcard-bright world of comic books of the 1940s, "Policemen's Union" takes its direction from the same era's shadowy hard-boiled detective yarns and the intriguing alternate histories of its science fiction.

It's as if Arthur C. Clarke has met Raymond Chandler on their way to answering the question: "What if -- as was suggested in the 1940s -- the United States had set aside an area of Alaska for Jewish refugees of World War II?"

Underlying intent

Chabon's answer is the Federal District of Sitka, where the night sky "is an orange smear ... a compound of fog and the light of sodium-vapor streetlamps" that appears with "the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat." This unlikely and special place resembles a contemporary version of the Jewish cities of Europe's past more than any actual place in the United States. And it is scheduled to revert to Alaskan control after 60 years of independent rule.

In one respect, Sitka is merely the setting for a noir mystery about a man, detective Meyer Landsman, who discovers a body and, with his ex-wife and his cousin, works the investigation as if it is their last case -- because for all they know, it is.

But in another way, Sitka is a route for Chabon, a descendant of Jewish immigrants, to connect with his roots and pay homage to the language he can remember being spoken by the older generations in his family. Most hauntingly, it is a way to imagine a world in which the Holocaust was halted and "the millions of Jews who were never killed produced grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren."

Those last words are lifted from an essay that Chabon, now 43, wrote 10 years ago about a phrase book called "Say It in Yiddish." In it, Chabon first articulated the Alaska idea that would become the premise for "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." He also started a small but painful controversy, he said, because the essay exhibited a cheeky sense of humor that was touched by a sense of the absurd. In questioning the utility of the book, Chabon outraged people in the U.S. Yiddish community who felt he had disrespected the book's editors, Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich, longtime advocates of preserving the language.

"I didn't know any of that, and I seemed to be mocking them," Chabon said. "Part of my motivation for writing this novel was to ameliorate my own ignorance."

With "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," he said, "I sort of forced myself to repair that gap in my Jewish education, and to sort of reconnect -- albeit in this weird, imaginary way -- to this lost heritage of Yiddish that is my heritage and informs the way I think and speak and write."

That's not to say readers must speak Yiddish to understand the new book. There are some Yiddish phrases, but it's written in English -- or as the Sitka-ites would say, "American." The fictional conceit is that most of what's being spoken is done so in Yiddish.

All in the family

In a room of Chabon's house in Berkeley -- a picturesque brown-shingled Craftsman built in 1907 -- 1,000 copies of "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" are stacked, in boxes, waiting to be opened and signed. The plan is for a calligrapher to hand-number the copies as Chabon signs them. The special editions will be sold later on a national tour. "They have to be done by tomorrow," Chabon murmured, marveling at the work ahead.

Despite the looks of it, he said the publicity commitments for this book are not as heavy as for "Summerland," his 2002 novel for young readers and the first to be published post-Pulitzer.

That said, there are big expectations: The film rights were sold before "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" was even written. If the movie is made, it would be the third from a Chabon book, following "Wonder Boys," made in 2000, and "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," expected to be released this year and based on his uncommonly successful first novel. A film of "Kavalier & Clay," for which Chabon wrote the screenplay, has stalled out for now, he said.

More so than many novelists, Chabon stays busy, and not only with screenplays (he also contributed to "Spider-Man 2"). During a two-hour conversation, he was interrupted by a phone call from the New York Times to go over copy edits in "Gentlemen of the Road," a Sunday serial that will be published as a novel in October. And there was a fax from Details magazine, for which Chabon writes a column. Chabon's wife, novelist Ayelet Waldman, brought him the fax, which he signed practically without looking.

Along with his speaking engagements, Chabon said, those jobs, while enjoyable, help pay the bills. He and Waldman have four children, and they're paying for private schooling. Their kitchen, where Chabon was interviewed, is sunny and inviting and contemporary, not a fussy museum piece reflecting their historic home. Son Zeke sat with a laptop on a couch, dwarfed by the pile of boxes. Occasionally, Waldman popped in, taking phone calls and arranging for their daughter's bat mitzvah.

Variations on a theme

In the back yard is a small cottage where husband and wife do their work "back to back," as Chabon said. Waldman confessed to struggling a bit with her most recent book; she said it's bigger and more complicated than her previous series of mysteries and two literary novels. Waldman was born in Israel and raised in New Jersey. She met Chabon in New York City and they moved together to California about 10 years ago.

One can instantly see in her the quickness and certainty, the strength and independence that is so characteristic of Chabon's female characters, from Rosa Saks in "Kavalier & Clay," to Sara Gaskell in "Wonder Boys" and "Policemen's" Bina Gelbfish.

"Those are all, to one degree or other, versions of Ayelet," Chabon said. "Ayelet is never in doubt about what's right. ... She's a quick study and she grasps the full implications, both for good and ill, of almost every situation as it arises. ... Whereas I am very slow, deliberative. It takes me a long time to know what I even feel about something, let alone figure out what to do about it."

No surprise, then, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" starts out as a detective story and ends up as a humane, unsentimental love story, never glossing over the scars that develop between people over time.

"Ultimately, to me, the core or the heart of the book is the story of Bina and Meyer, so that is where we land, when we finally land," Chabon said. "In a way, we're left with nothing but them, and they are each left with nothing but the other, in the sense that that's all they can count on having. "

Eric Hanson • 612-673-7517 • ehanson@startribune.com