ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- It was one of the greatest humanitarian acts in history.



Pondering an imaginary Yiddish-speaking place produced "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," says Michael Chabon.



At the beginning of World War II, as the Nazis tightened their grip on Europe, the U.S. government allowed millions of Jews to resettle from their homes in Poland and Russia to southeastern Alaska, along the panhandle.   Two million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazi scourge, but millions more were saved as the Federal District of Sitka, Alaska, became the new Jewish homeland -- all the more important when the fledgling State of Israel went down to defeat in 1948.



However, 60 years later, Sitka is about to be returned to local jurisdiction, and the island's Jews -- including a noted detective, Meyer Landsman -- are wondering where to go next. The Jewish people, forever rootless, will have to wander some more.



Landsman's got other problems, too. He's rootless himself, biding his time in a seedy hotel. There's the body that turned up in a nearby room, a onetime chess prodigy who appears to have major connections with some big shots -- machers, in the local Yiddish lingo. There's his ex-wife, now his boss -- at least until the department is disbanded -- and his partner, a half-Jewish, half-Tlingit named Berko who's far more responsible than Landsman.



And there are a host of old enemies with long memories, particularly when Landsman decides to root around the dead chess player's case.



Landsman's world is fiction, of course, a product of Michael Chabon's imagination. Chabon's new book, "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" (HarperCollins), combines Landsman's hard-boiled detective's terrain with the landscape of alternate history, one in which world events take a startling turn.



The story is rooted in fact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay") observes.



Chabon had written an article about the decline of Yiddish, and the reaction to the piece -- some of it very negative -- "got me thinking about ... a possible, but nonexistent, imaginary Yiddish-speaking place in the modern world," he says in an interview at CNN Center.



In the article, he noted an actual plan by Franklin Roosevelt's Interior secretary, Harold Ickes, to create a refuge for European Jews in Alaska, still 20 years from statehood. In reality, the plan was squelched thanks to the opposition of Alaska delegate Anthony Dimond, but in the "Yiddish Policemen's" world, Dimond is conveniently killed off and the plan goes forward.



Chabon's Federal District of Sitka is a land of tall apartment blocks and grimy streets, as if "Hong Kong had moved to the other side of the Pacific Ocean," he says.



The novel is peppered with clever conceits. The book's black hats, as in villains, are actual "black hats," a slang term for ultra-Orthodox Jews. The characters are fond of Filipino doughnuts, a twist on the Jewish taste for Chinese food. The place names of Russian Alaska are an apt companion to the Eastern European surnames of Chabon's Jews, and then there are throwaway bits -- such as in the Sitka of 2001, Orson Welles did release a version of "Heart of Darkness."



Doing a genre novel -- or several at once, as "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" is part detective story, part alt-history, part modern Jewish folktale -- isn't considered the natural turf for a so-called literary writer like Chabon, but the author -- who has been vocal in support of genre fiction -- makes no apologies for the work.



"I only ever try to write in genres that I love ... I love hard-boiled detective novels, I love fantasy, I love science fiction," he says. "It feels like a natural impulse to want to integrate that passion that I have as a reader into my writing. I didn't see
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