The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

I seem to have stumbled into a string of novels rooted in real-life historical episodes. Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter (reviewed here) centered on the life of the violent abolitionist, John Brown. Then there was Julian Barnes' Arthur & George (reviewed here), which explored the events that led Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to publicly advocate for the exoneration of wrongfully-convicted solicitor George Edalji. There is something particularly satisfying about these types of books. Whether because they satisfy both my love of history and my love of literature, or because they present a particular type of imaginative blurring of the line between truth and fiction, I have greatly enjoyed these works.

Most recently I finished a work by Bosnian-American author (and MacArthur "Genius") Aleksandar Hemon, titled The Lazarus Project, which takes its name from the 1908 death of a young Eastern European Jewish immigrant at the hands of Chicago's Chief of Police. Lazarus Averbach was just 19 years old, a survivor of the Kishinev pogrom, and he came all the way to America only to be shot dead in the foyer of Chief George Shippy's home. The truth about Averbach's purpose for going to the officer's home is still disputed, but Hemon's opening chapter offers a portrait of Averbach as a dispossessed, wayward soul:

The young man descends the stairs, open the gate (which also creaks ominously). He puts his hands in his pockets, but then pulls his pants up--they are still too big for him; he looks to the right, looks to the left, as though making a decision. Lincoln Place is a different world; these houses are like castles, the windows tall and wide; there are no peddlers on the streets; indeed, there is nobody on the street. The ice-sheathed trees twinkle in the morning drabness; a branch broken under the weight of ice touches the pavement, rattling its frozen tips. Someone peeks from behind a curtain of the house across the street, the face ashen against the dark space behind. It is a young woman: he smiles at her and she quickly draws the curtain. All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.

More than eight decades later, Lazarus Averbach's mysterious death continues to fascinate Vladimir Brik, a young man who immigrated to Chicago from Bosnia in 1992, just before the disintegration of Yugoslavia turned most violent (like Hemon himself):

I am a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries. In America--that somber land--I waste my vote, pay taxes grudgingly, share my life with a native wife, and try hard not to wish painful death to the idiot president. But I also have a Bosnian passport I seldom use; I go to Bosnia for heartbreaking vacations and funerals, and on or around March 1, with other Chicago Bosnians, I proudly and dutifully celebrate our Independence Day with an appropriately ceremonious dinner.

Brik's quest to understand Averbach's journey, and to eventually trace it back to Eastern Europe, makes up half of The Lazarus Project's dual narrative. The other half is occupied by the aftermath of Averbach's death, and particularly its effect on his sister, Olga. The villainization of Averbach by the police and the press (personified in the character of Mr. Miller), including the publication of grotesque photos of Lazarus' body propped up on a chair, duly reproduced in the novel, inspires a wave of anti-anarchist rhetoric and violence. Olga herself becomes the subject of police harassment and interrogation; her neighbors are beaten, and she is constantly followed and observed. All the while, this grieving women is trying to make sense of her brother's sudden disappearance from this life, as she tries to piece together whether he really did have some hidden anarchist life, or was merely a lost man in the wrong place at the wrong time:

She walks home through the frigid drizzle, her bones light with hunger and the sense that everything is turned inside out; her legs hurt. Why was Lazarus at Shippy's house? Isador took him to those anarchist meetings, but she thought it was all just angry talk--young men like angry talk. He could not have become part of some crazy conspiracy. He was always prone to fantasies, always with one foot in some other world, but he would never do anything about it; he was a dreamer. She did not listen to him when the told her about his ideas, thoughts, fears, stories he was planning to write; she was always too tired. He had no anger, no violence in him. He he would never hurt anybody. She used to go look for him in the evenings. She would shout his name, until he hollered back from the woods or the back alley, wherever he was waiting for her to come and get him--he did not see well at dusk. He was a child when she left him behind, he wasted his boyhood in a refugee camp in Czernowitz, he landed in Chicago as a young man. How did she miss it all? When was it that she'd lost him? How did he become who he was? Who was he?

The similarities between Brik and Averbach are obvious. Both fled from violent areas of Eastern Europe, both found themselves unable to happily blend into the supposed melting pot of America, ignored or misunderstood by the women they lived with, and both ultimately found themselves unable to conform to the expectations of the American experience. Yet beyond these facile parallels, it's not clear what Hemon is trying to say. That the immigrant experience of the early 20th-century was not that different from that of the late 20th-century? Surely true, but I'm hesitant to credit Hemon with originality on that point. That assimilation is difficult, or at least undesirable? Perhaps more interesting is Hemon's implied commentary on the role of the press in shaping (and inventing) the narrative of tragedy; surely it is no mere coincidence that the vile "journalist" who pesters Olga Averbuch shares a name with the gloryhound whom Rora escorts around Sarajevo.

Nevertheless, Brik is sufficiently narcissistic (he goes all the way to Eastern Europe on a grant to study Averbach and spends most of the time studying himself) and self-loathing, particularly in his cold attitude toward his more successful wife, that the chapters devoted to Olga Averbuch are easily the better half of the book. They plumb the depths of anti-Semitism in early 20th-century America, as well as the irrational frenzies of the anarchist scare that would sadly be just one example in a pattern that would recur when Communists, Japanese-Americans, and Muslims became the enemy du jour. Any novel that can find a way to work Emma Goldman into the plot can't be all bad.