I’ve been reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and loving it. So you can see how the guy writes, here’s the backstory of some of the characters, WWII refugees resettled in the imaginary Jewish homeland in Alaska:
On the heels of Jews from Germany and Austria, the Shemets family was dumped with their fellow Galitzers at Camp Slattery, in a muskeg swamp ten miles from the hard-bitten, half-decrepit town of Sitka… In drafty, tin-roofed huts and barracks, they underwent six months of intensive acclimatization by a crack team of fifteen billion mosquitoes working under contract with the U.S. Interior Department.