On 2 March 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the home of the city's Chief of Police, George Shippy. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him. Lazarus Averbuch, Shippy claimed, was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city - and country - seething with political and ethnic tensions. In the twenty-first ...
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On 2 March 1908, nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, a Russian Jewish immigrant to Chicago, tried to deliver a letter to the home of the city's Chief of Police, George Shippy. Instead of taking the letter, Shippy shot Averbuch twice, killing him. Lazarus Averbuch, Shippy claimed, was an anarchist assassin and an agent of foreign operatives who wanted to bring the United States to its knees. His sister, Olga, was left alone and bereft in a city - and country - seething with political and ethnic tensions. In the twenty-first century, Brik, a young Bosnian writer in Chicago, becomes obsessed with finding out the truth of what happened to Lazarus. And so Brik and his friend Rora, a charming and unreliable photographer, set off on a journey back to Lazarus Averbuch's birthplace, through a history of pogroms and poverty and a present of gangsters and prostitutes.'Masterful ...troubling, funny and redemptive ...ingenious ...Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: the novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov' - "Washington Post". 'The fearless and spirited expression of a turbulent literary talent ...For all Hemon's nods to other writers - one catches glimpses not only of Nabokov and Sebald but of Bulgakov, Pamuk, Amis, Poe - he is entirely his own man, an original who owes no debts to anyone' - Patrick McGrath, "Book Forum". 'Profoundly moving ...A literary page-turner that combines narrative momentum with meditations on identity and mortality' - Kirkus.
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The acclaimed young American immigrant writer Aleksandar Hemon tells two interrelated stories of immigrant life in the United States. The first story is set in Chicago of 1908 and is based upon a historical event. A young Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, Lazarus Averbuch, is killed wantonly by the Chicago Chief of Police. The police department attempts to cover-up the circumstances of the murder by claiming Averbuch was an anarchist.
The story explores the murder and its aftermath, centering on Averbuch's burial. The novel further describes how Averbuch was a victim of an infamous 1903 Pogrom and came to the United States where has dreams of freedom and a new life were dashed. Averbuch's murder occurs at the outset of the novel. Thus the focus of the story is on his older sister Olga who is inconsolable upon her brother's death. As her story develops, it bears resemblances to Sophocles' play Antigone. Olga grieves because her brother has not been buried with the rites and rituals of Jewish law. As in Sopocles' play, Olga faces tension between the requirements of a religious burial and what she comes to realize she must do in order to live and find a modicum of peace. She is pitted against not only the City of Chicago but also by the more established and settled elements of the Chicago Jewish community. The characters of Olga and Lazarus are poignantly developed. In addition, the story shows a great deal of Lazarus' and Olga's friend Isadore and of Olga's efforts to protect him from the Chicago police.
The portrayal in the book is of a Chicago which is rough and tumble and corrupt. Growing and welcoming of immigrants, the city also fears them. In particular, the city and many people fear the anarchist movement led by Emma Goldman. The story develops against the background of this paranoia. The immigrant experience does not end well here for Lazarus and his sister.
The second story involves a contemporary Bosnian immigrant, Vladimir Brik. He came to Chicago just prior to the Bosnian war. He lives a rather footlose life, selling stories and articles to newspapers and teaching English as a second language. He is married to an American neurosurgeon, Mary, and feels guilty that he depends on Mary for financial support. The book makes a great deal of the tension in this marriage between a marginally employed immigrant and a highly educated, successful American. Brik becomes interested in the story of Lazarus Averbuch and wants to write a novel about him. He learns all he can find about the incident and then secures a grant to travel to his former home, Bosnia, and to Lazarus' home to see what he can learn about Lazarus' early life. He travels with an old friend from Bosnia. a photographer named Rora, who immigrated to the United States after Lazarus did and who had substantial involvement in the events of the war.
The reader learns to story of Lazarus through the eyes and research of Brik. The book also shows a great deal of Brik's own story, including his feelings of loneliness, the difficulties of his life in the United States, and the problems in his relationship with his wife. The book explores Bosnia in the aftermath of the war, and makes a great deal of Brik's reflections upon and changing attitudes towards the land of his birth.
In the portions of this book that deal with Lazarus Averbuch and his sister, Hemon has captured a great deal of the rawness of early Chicago and of the eastern Europe ghetto from which Averbuch fled. The narrator's story generally is well told but less convincing. Much of the book explores the different attitudes towards life between Brik and Rora. The photographer tends to be taciturn and matter of fact. Yet he is full of stories and snappy one-lines. The narrator is a more complex, reflective, moody individual. The stories of Rora's activities during the Bosnian War are muddled, probably deliberately so.
As the stories develop, a great deal of parallelism develops between Brik and Lazarus in terms of their reasons for leaving the land of their birth and their reactions to the United States. Possibly the parallels are too neatly done. I came to understand and sympathize with Lazarus far more than with Brik. The parallelism and interrelationship of the two stories sometimes is distracting. And the story is weakened in many places by the vacuous "metaphysical" reflections of the narrator, on large questions of life, death, and the nature of human happiness. For the most part novels succeed on these themes when they illustrate them in the characters and activities of their protagonists. At its best, Hemon's book does this. On occasion, the philosophizing was empty and forced.
On the whole, this is a good novel which captures life in a large, ungovernable early 20th Century American city. It shows the perils of immigrant life and the tragedies that befell some people who came to our shores in search of freedom. Readers interested in the vast literature by American immigrants may enjoy the recent anthology,"Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing" edited by Ilan Slavans in the Library of America.
