The Lazarus Project
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Provocative, enlightening, serious but entertaining novel, that can be experienced in different layers of meaning.
It’s a masterful literary adventure that manages to be grand in scope and intimate in detail.
A brilliant study of displacement, this is the story of American based Bosnian writer Brik who retraces the steps of an Eastern European Jew in 20th Century Chicago.
The story of two parallel exiles: the exile of the narrator a Bosnian writer estranged from his American wife, the exile of the character he wants to write about, Lazarus Averbuch a Jew who leaves his country after a person only to find a senseless violent death in Chicago. “What is home?” This is the question.
Hemon proves to be a master storyteller on a grand scale chronicling the turn of the 20th century American immigrant experience and the recent upheavals in Eastern Europe.