Alternate History: The Case of Nava Semel’s IsraIsland and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

The article sketches the development of the genre of alternate history, also called allohistory and argues that allohistory may be treated as a philosophical genre that meditates on contingency and determinism. It examines two contemporary allohistorical novels, Israeli author Nava Semel’s IsraIsland (2005) and American writer Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), that comment on the role of Israel in the Jewish imagination. The thematic and formal elements of these texts reveal how a version of allohistory can also function as a kind of detective fiction that may influence the reception of historiographic narratives.