The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon

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Essay by Gerald Sorin

In an opening passage that rings with the tone of epic poetry, the Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon writes, “The time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain.” And indeed, at the heart of The Lazarus Project is a true, but not entirely clear, story. In 1908, on that fateful March day in Chicago, Police Chief George Shippy reported that a young man was admitted to Shippy’s home by the family maid. Still haunted by memories of the city’s Haymarket bombing which killed seven policemen in 1886, and worried now about anarchist Emma Goldman’s impending visit to Chicago, Shippy perceives a threat in his caller’s eyes. He grabs Lazarus Averbuch, a recent immigrant from Kishinev, and a violent encounter ensues, ending with “gun smoke slowly moving across the room, like a school of fish,” three people wounded, and the nineteen-year-old Lazarus, unarmed and apparently innocent of any nefarious intent, dead, struck by seven bullets.

One hundred years later, a non-Jewish Bosnian immigrant, Vladimir Brik, who works in Chicago – on and off – as a teacher and journalist, finagles a grant to do research in Ukraine for a book on Lazarus. Brik asks himself how he could “write a book about Jews when I wasn’t one?” Neither, he admits, is he Muslim, Serb, or Croat. “I am complicated,” he tells us. Brik knows he has to follow Lazarus all the way back to the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, where, we later learn that the entire Averbuch family suffered attack and extraordinary physical and mental trauma. “I needed to see,” Brik explains, “what I could not imagine.”

To help him “see,” he enlists a photographer, Rora, his former Sarajevo high school classmate, also now in Chicago. Unlike Brik, Rora was in Sarajevo during the long siege of the city in the 1990s Bosnian war. He is brilliantly drawn by Hemon. Resigned, more than cynical, Rora has seen it all and understands better than Brik the absurdity of the search for ultimate answers about death, the silence of God, the nature of evil, transient identity, or the vagaries of love. Brik thinks Rora, who he envies and at times wants to be, has finished the work of becoming himself. He is in for more than one surprise as the young men pursue a surreal journey to and through Eastern Europe, a landscape of shifting borders, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, exploitation, petty thievery, and Mafioso-style criminality where everything is for sale. Here Rora and Brik, too, are sometimes complicit in the illicit and immoral. But finally, in a brutal yet beautifully written episode involving the rescue of a woman being forced into prostitution, they do the right thing, even as the lethal combination of wrath and righteousness allows them to take pleasure in the violence they’ve perpetrated.

Brik’s relationship with Rora, indeed Rora himself, nearly takes over Hemon’s story. But there are other stories, just as rich, embedded and interwoven in this distressing, humorous, and ultimately redemptive novel. At the heart of one of them, of course, is Lazarus Averbuch. After the pogrom in 1903, Lazarus goes from Kishinev to a “refugee camp” in Czernowitz, where he learns again that “humanity is wicked and endless,” and then to the United States, where he immediately encounters the promise and threat of America:

Lazarus stepped off the New York train into the crowd, enveloped in a cloud of steam; he pushed his way through it; they pulled and pushed him and thrust him aside. This was America; this passion of the mob; this struggle to protect your soul from the voracious mass. Someone tried to rip his suitcase out of his hand and he swung it forward, slammed himself in the knee as it swung back…. [Olga] stood under a large moonlike clock, pale and small, his big sister.He picked up his pace, scurrying forward, but tripped and nearly fell flat on his nose. Olga was scanning the crowd for him when she saw him coming – tall, scrawny, hair unruly – but did not fully recognize him until he stumbled. The fear that he might get hurt gave him the shape of her little brother, love fluttering up her bosom. Lazarus, she called him, Lazarus, I am over here, Lazarus.

Olga, a victim of the darkest side of the immigrant experience, is yet another protagonist who comes close to dominating The Lazarus Project. She is a proud and rightfully angry woman who, after having been victimized in the Old Country, comes to suffer extraordinary grief and humiliation in the New World at the hands of amoral journalists and the Chicago authorities. In the wake of her brother’s death, Olga is pressed by the police to admit her brother’s guilt and to name other “anarchists,” and she also is harried by Apocalyptics and revolutionaries who want to use Lazarus as a “sign” or a martyr. But like Sophocles’ Antigone and like Mary, the sister of the biblical Lazarus, Olga will go to any length to do right by her brother.

Olga can take little comfort from the Jewish community in Chicago or from its leadership, most of whom try to dissociate themselves from the “anarchism” and “revolutionary violence” of which Lazarus Averbuch has been wrongfully accused. Hemon gives us Hermann Taube, a German-Jewish lawyer, who seems at times genuinely concerned about Olga, but is one of the negidim (the rich men, the court Jews). There is also Rabbi Klopstock, less of a caricature than Philip Roth’s Rabbi Bengelsdorf in The Plot Against America, and therefore more troubling, who declares, “We Jews as citizens of this free country must join our Christian brethren in their opposition to the spread of revolutionary teachings on the soil of America.” Worse, of course, is the Catholic priest who asks his parishioners to “pray for the soul of Lazarus Averbuch and hope that he may rise in Christ like his beloved namesake.” No cleric of whatever faith stands by Lazarus.

One of the few bright spots in the Averbuch case (none of them mentioned by Hemon) were the efforts (ultimately futile) of Chicago Hull House founder Jane Addams and attorney Harold Ickes (later Secretary of the Interior under FDR), funded by Julius Rosenwald, the head of Sears, Roebuck, to investigate the contradictions and absurdities in Police Chief Shippy’s account.

Brik is naturally interested in all aspects of the case, and Hemon has him discovering the “fact” that Lazarus’s body, as in the Gospel According to John, has disappeared from its pauper’s grave, only to turn up three days later, however, not resurrected, not only dead, but partially vivisected. Brik, often knowingly, seeks his own resurrection. After all, throughout the trip from Ukraine into Moldova and then Romania, sometimes “riding in an old Volga, reeking of diesel and the U.S.S.R.,” Brik is partly dead, neither knowing who he is or where he belongs. There is in him, as in so many immigrants, a deep yearning for belonging. By the time he gets “home” to Bosnia, he knows he will not return to America or to his brain-surgeon wife Mary, to whom he has come to feel no more than indifferently attached.

After getting lost temporarily in a Jewish cemetery in Chisinau (formerly Kishinev), Brik thinks, “Everything I had been was now far away, I reached elsewhere. I could not remember how long ago I had left Chicago and Mary…. Some part of my life ended there, among those empty graves; it was then that I started mourning.” Did the biblical Lazarus dream, locked in his cave?, Brik wonders. “Did he remember his life in death…. And once he was resurrected did he remember being dead, or did he just enter another dream of another life… Did he have to disremember his previous life and start from scratch, like an immigrant?”

Brik had come to understand “a simple fact; if you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world – indeed, nowhere is the world.” Bosnia, despite or perhaps because of what Brik hears from Rora about the war, might become home, the place “where somebody notices your absence.”

In Rora’s recollections of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, Brik hears echoes of what he’s learning about the East European pogroms of the early twentieth century. He also makes connections between the anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish pronouncements in the America of that era with the demonization of Muslims in the United States post 9/11. These densely layered, weighty, yet often funny, interconnected themes, and stories within stories, in addition to Hemon’s engaging style and finely wrought phrasing, make this novel a rich literary experience.

Excerpts

She walks home through the rigid 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 he 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 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? (Page 60)

They are coming this way, Papa said. They shall come, no doubt. And as if on cue, a brick crashed through the garden window. Then another one from the street. It landed on Roza’s plate, smashing it. She yelped but did not move. The rest of us were on the floor already, shrieking. That sound, shrieking. You wanted to talk, you wanted others to talk, but all that came out of your mouth was shrieking. We shrieked. The pogromchiks pounded at the door, screaming our names, blood thirst in their hoarse voices. How did they know our names? I thought this is our home. They cannot come in. This is not their home. They are outside. Chaia was blubbering. Mother sat down on the floor with her back to the stove. I was afraid that her dress would catch fire. Papa was stretching on the floor to reach his yarmulke, as though something depended on it. I held Lazarus tightly, his face in my bosom. I could not feel his breathing. Oh, don’t go, I thought. Please don’t go. But then he sniffled again. Such a boy he was. Roza was still sitting at the table, now holding her fork and knife, looking furious. She must be hungry. She was at that age. Always hungry. The pogromchiks burst in, abruptly filling up the room. They set out to break everything: the lamps, the vases, the vitrine with the china. They swept the books off the shelf. Our life was blowing up, the shrapnel flying around the room. (Pages 242-243)

Questions for Discussion

1. Brik asks, “How could I write about Jews when I wasn’t one?” What does he think he needs to know and experience in order to imagine the lives of others? What are the implications of his question for fiction writing? Does one, for example, have to be a woman to write about women, or to be gay to write about gays?

2. In one incident the San Francisco police, in a hurry to enforce the law, choke to death a Bosnian refugee who had been a prisoner in a Serbian camp, and who “snapped” after the war. This takes place “in front of a disinterested choir of healthy grand latté guzzlers.” What is Hemon suggesting? Does he use an ingenious mix of opulence and violence here and, elsewhere in the novel, a mix of beauty and brutality, as a way of forcing us to confront our own responsibilities and potential complicities?

3. At the Jewish center in Chernivtsi, Brik talks with keeper Chaim Gruzenberg. “All of you foreigners come looking for your ancestors and roots,” Chaim says. “You are only interested in the dead. God will take care of the dead. We need to take care of the living.” What is Brik’s response, and what do you think it means for his project and for his own personal quest?

4. Midway through his journey with Rora, Brik thinks that the photographer’s Canon camera, which he never stops using, is the very center of his soul. What is Brik’s “center” at this point? Does he have one? Is there any significance here to Brik’s allusion to the “wad of cash” he always carries with him?

5. Hermann Taube, the German-Jewish lawyer advising Olga, says to her pleadingly, “Think of life, I beg you. Let’s live. We have to live.” This pronouncement is powerful and cries out for attention. How do you interpret it? What are Taube’s motives and what does his plea signify?

6. Rora, who has lived with some excitement and danger, dies violently, but in what can only be called banal circumstances. Besides irony, why has Aleksandar Hemon chosen to have Rora killed this way?

7. As Brik observes of the Moldovan woman who has been able to tell him so much about Jewish history, “She would one day die, and so would Rora, and so would I. They were me. We lived the same life: we would vanish into the same death. We were like everybody else, because there was nobody like us.” What are some of the implications of this observation, especially as they relate to questions about identity and to the argument about “universalism versus particularism” – an argument that often arises in contemporary Jewish conversation?

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.
Editor: Nancy Sherman
www.jewishreader.org