Here is a nice, but way too short interview with Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), who talks about his new novel the The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Q: Your book is a mystery set in parallel universe, about a police detective trying to solve a murder in “Alyeska,” the territory that Alaska could have been had it become a homeland for Jews during the second World War. In an odd way, the story comments upon September 11. How did you come up with the idea?

A: It grew out of an essay that I wrote several years ago that was a response to this strange little book called Say It in Yiddish. There’s a series of Say It books: Say It in Swahili, Say It in Spanish, etcetera. All of the others in the series have countries or regions associated with them. So, I started wondering in this essay, what’s this book for? Where would you take it? In the course of speculating on that, I considered possible Yiddish-speaking countries that might have come into existence if things had happened differently. I had read about this proposal once that Jewish refugees be allowed to settle in Alaska during World War II. I made a passing reference to it in the essay, but the idea stuck.

What’s more is that there is also an excerpt of the new novel.