Dig, Lazarus, Dig
Bosnian ex-pat Aleksander Hemon has found modern resonances in the century-old tale of the murder of Jewish immigrant Lazarus Avenbach by the then Chicago chief of police.
Anne Sexton, 18 Sep 2008
For a country built by immigrants, America has an almost pathological distrust of foreigners. It’s been true since 9/11, it was true during the ‘reds under the bed’ years of McCarthyism and it was true a hundred years ago when the minor historical footnote around which Aleksandar Hemon has constructed his third novel, The Lazarus Project, took place.
In 1908 Lazarus Avenbach, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, tried to deliver a letter to George Shippy, Chicago’s chief of police. Shippy, taking in Avenbach’s dark features, decided he looked like a murderous anarchist, panicked and shot him dead.
A hundred years later, Hemon retraced Lazarus’ journey to America with the photographer Velibor Bozovic, whose images are found throughout the book. In The Lazarus Project Hemon’s fictional alter ego Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer who, like Hemon, escaped Sarajevo in 1992 before the war, does the same with his photographer friend Rora. The result is a compelling novel of two interwoven narrative strands – a buddy story following Rora and Brik’s travels through the cockroach-and-hooker infested hotels of Eastern Europe, and a meditation on immigration, nationality and the concept of home.
On the surface Brik and Lazarus are very different men, from different backgrounds, countries and religions a hundred years apart, but the experience of immigration links them. Hemon draws parallels between the two by recurring names, people and places. “I wanted to show there is a continuity between the past and present,” he states.
Like the current bout of Islamophobia, at the beginning of the 20th century America was gripped by the fear of anarchists. After Avenbach’s death, Chicago’s newspapers styled the 19-year-old as a determined assassin, carried articles on how to spot the ‘anarchist type’, and suggested that a violent revolution was imminent.
Distrust of foreigners is endemic to various characters in the book. Brik’s Irish-American father-in-law regards him with suspicion; travelling through the Ukraine, Brik is wary of his fellow bus passengers. “I don’t think this is innate,” says Hemon, but as he notes, xenophobia is frequently used as a political tool.
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