In the genre known as Alternate History, critical points in history are modified to suit a speculative story line generated by the author’s imagination. For example, If the South Had Won the Civil War is a 1961 alternate history by MacKinlay Kantor in which General Ulysses S. Grant is killed when thrown from his horse at the start of the Battle of Vicksburg, resulting in a Union defeat. The Confederacy goes on to win the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War.
In The Plot against America by Phillip Roth (2004), Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh, a dark horse Republican candidate, is a famous aviator, a supporter of the anti-war anti-Roosevelt America First Committee as well as a Nazi sympathizer and antisemite and his election has dire consequences for America’s Jews.
While the stories in Alternate History are conjectural, they may have some basis in fact and this is the case in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a 2007 novel by Michael Chabon. This book is essentially a crime thriller that takes place in Sitka, Alaska, a large Yiddish–speaking urban center of over three million. Sitka is a US Federal Territory set up by an Act of Congress in 1941 as an autonomous, but temporary refuge for European Jews, saving many from the Holocaust. Additional Jewish refugees end up in Alaska when Israel loses the 1948 War. The principle protagonists are two Yiddish-speaking homicide detectives, Meyer Landsman and Berko Shemets (who is both Jewish and Tlingit, the neighboring indigenous nation) who are trying to solve two murders; the murder of the prodigal son of a prominent Hassidic Rebbe, and that of Landsman’s sister. The backdrop to the novel is that Sitka’s status as a temporary refuge for sixty years is about to expire and no one knows what will happen next to its Jewish inhabitants.
The scenario just described is not a completely fanciful product of Chabon’s imagination. It is based on a document called the Slattery Report (official title: The Problem of Alaskan Development) produced in 1940 as an initiative of Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, and named after undersecretary, Harry Slattery. The report noted that Alaska was underdeveloped and underpopulated. In 1940 the population of Alaska was only 70,000, this in a territory more than twice the size of Texas. Ickes was concerned that Alaska’s sparse population would make it a tempting target for attack by a foreign power.
Originally, the report recommended a change in US immigration restrictions to make it possible to admit a limited number of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to Alaska. Later, in keeping with the Roosevelt administration’s sensitivity to widespread American nativist and isolationist sentiments and widespread antisemitism, the Report did not refer to Jewish refugees. Roosevelt was concerned that America’s looming participation in the Second World War not be seen as involvement in a ‘Jewish’ war.
A Bill to Provide for the Settlement and Development of Alaska, also known as the King-Havenner Bill, after the Senator and Representative who introduced it to Congress, was subject to hearings before the Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs on May 13, 15 and 18, 1940. There were 27 presentations made, the first by Secretary Ickes, who emphasized that the admission of a limited number of refugees from Europe would benefit the economic development of Alaska. After five years, those admitted could apply for reclassification as regular (quota) immigrants. Those who violated the terms of their admittance, such as by attempting to enter the territory of the continental United States, faced prosecution and deportation.
The hearing presentations dealt largely with such economic concerns as the potential of the fisheries or mining sectors, or with comparisons between Alaska and the population and state of development of the Nordic countries. Two individuals, E I Kaufmann of Washington DC and J O Hefter of New York City, spoke in favor of immigration, the latter pointing to the example of 20,000 refugees from Central Europe (‘Jews’) who found refuge in Shanghai. There were no addresses from representatives of Jewish organizations.
The oral and written presentations by Anthony Joseph Dimond, the Alaskan Territorial Delegate to the House of Representatives, were especially harmful to the proposal. Dimond began by noting that the Bill’s title, A Bill to Provide for the Settlement and Development of Alaska, was deceptive. It should be called ”a bill for the assistance and relief of the savagely persecuted people of some of the European totalitarian states.”
While he empathized with the humanitarian reasons for the bill, he objected to the idea that Alaska would become the home of non-quota immigrants, setting Alaska apart from the rest of the US, and, he noted, the deportation penalty for those violating the terms of their immigration status was unenforceable. To which country could they be deported?
In contrast to Dimond’s actual participation in the Senate hearings, in Chabon’s novel, Dimond dies in a car accident before he can testify, clearing the way for Congress to adopt the bill. In fact, the bill died before going for a vote.
While Ickes claimed that the proposal had strong support from Alaskans (he reported getting 4,000 overwhelmingly supportive letters), an article by Gerald Berman (Jewish Social Studies, 1982) notes that the opposite was the case. Alaskans were not shy to voice their opposition, citing such factors as the high level of unemployment in the Territory and, above all, that Jews would not be able to cope with the rigors of life in Alaska. Sample newspaper comments included “Alaska wants no misfits,” and “Alaska is no place for Jews, they would live off the fat of the land and they wouldn’t work.” Roosevelt insisted on a limit of 10,000 refugees per year over five years, only ten percent of whom could be Jewish. Without his support, the bill died.
Sadly, the result of this episode is consistent with the result of the Wagners-Rogers Bill of 1939, which proposed to Congress that 20,000 “German (‘Jewish’) refugee children” (10,000 in each of 1939 and 1940) be admitted to the US. The proposal was similar to the kindertransports that brought 10,000 Jewish children to the UK just before the outbreak of World War II. As with the Alaska proposal, the Bill stipulated that when the children reached the age of maturity they would be counted against that year’s immigration quota, or they would return to Europe. Despite lobbying by Quaker relief organizations and support from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the Bill was defeated. One of the president’s cousins, the wife of the US Commissioner of Immigration, commented that 10,000 charming children grow up to be 10,000 ugly adults.
According to Medoff, (The Jewish Standard, 2007), American Jewish leaders, hesitated to support the Slattery Proposal. Rabbi Stephen Wise, Head of the American Jewish Congress warned that the Alaska proposal creates the impression that Jews are taking over a part of the country and the settlement of a small number of Jews in Alaska was not sufficient reason for supporting it. The Labor Zionists of America were the only Jewish group to openly endorse the King-Havenner Bill.
The idea of a Jewish refuge somewhere other than the Holy Land is hardly new and in fact predates the modern Zionist movement. None of the various proposals, such as the British offer of a refuge in Uganda in the early twentieth century, could compete with the historic and religious attachments Jews have for the Land of Israel. Zionist organizations during the first quarter of the twentieth century were bitterly divided between those insisting on a return to Zion and those, such as the Jewish Territorial Organization founded by Israel Zangwill, that were willing to accept Jewish settlement in other territories.
Hava Eshkoli-Wagman, an Israeli historian, evaluated whether Zionist ideology played a role in the failure of the adoption of the Alaska proposal (Modern Judaism, 2015). From the reaction of the Jewish-American press (in Yiddish and English) to the Slattery Report, she concluded that the overriding concern for Jewish groups was the fear of appearing to be unpatriotic Americans, rather than concerns related to Zionist ideology. The Jewish response was essentially ambivalent and uncoordinated. This made it easier for the Roosevelt administration to avoid providing active assistance while at the same time appearing to show concern for the victims of the Nazis.
The Evian Conference (The meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for Political Refugees) convened in France in July 1938 is an example of Roosevelt’s approach. Convened in response to an initiative by the President, representatives of 32 nations participated in the search for a solution to the European Jewish refugee crisis, with shameful results; only the Dominican Republic indicated a willingness to take some refugees.
After the conference, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann said, “The world seemed to be divided into two parts – those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”
I have heard it said that every Jew today, whether observant or secular, or living in the Diaspora or Israel, has at some point considered the possible occurrence of another Holocaust. Assuming that is the case, have they wondered whether the world’s response would be different?
The writer is distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo