The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon
reviewed by Michael Pinker

Riverhead Books, 2008. 294 pp. Cloth: $24.95.

Vladimir Brik intends to write a novel about the senseless murder of Ukrainian Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch by Chicago’s chief of police in 1908, the event’s historical backdrop calling attention to a widespread xenophobia riveting the national consciousness, stirred by the news media to fever pitch. A Bosnian immigrant like his creator, married to an Irish-American surgeon, Brik feels guilty at his lack of publication and dependence on his wife. A chance encounter leads him to win a grant to support research on the unfortunate Lazarus, who survived a pogrom to seek the American dream, only to be gunned down in his new home shortly afterward. Hemon’s double narrative begins with Lazarus’s murder, then alternates between events surrounding its aftermath and the peregrinations of Brik and his slick sidekick, Rora Halilbašić, photographer and raconteur, whose winning savoir faire spices the pair’s efforts to comb Lazarus’s past in the old country. In the episodes in which Hemon imaginatively recreates the milieu of bygone Chicago, a supporting cast of Lazarus’s unwed sister Olga and friend Isador Maron; William Miller, a conniving Chicago Tribune reporter; and numerous unsympathetic, persecuting police officers supplies an often cruel, even more pathetic coda to Lazarus’s date with destiny. Prominent members of Chicago’s Jewish community become accomplices to further injustice as a result of the murder’s threatening to lead to an anarchist (read Jewish-inspired) uprising capable of destroying all they had built. Echoes of the biblical story of Lazarus periodically haunt the proceedings, lending an otherworldly intensity. Gradually, Brik’s latter-day journey also assumes a profound melancholy, the influence of his presumptive protagonist as well as the discoveries he shares with his traveling companion leaving him moved beyond his wildest imagining. Above all a tale about stories and storytelling, Hemon’s brilliant novel attests to the arresting power of his singular vision.