June 3, 2008
Aleksandar Hemon and the murder of a Jewish immigrant
The acclaimed Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon is not Jewish but something about the little-known story of Lazarus Averbuch — a Jew who was murdered by Chicago's chief of police in 1908 — grabbed his attention and became the focus of his latest novel, titled “The Lazarus Project.”
Hemon told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he first learned about the Averbuch story some years ago when a friend gave him a copy of “An Accidental Anarchist,” by Walter Roth and Joe Kraus. That book was a nonfiction account of the murder. For some unknown reason, Averbuch, a 19-year-old Jewish immigrant from Russia, went to the home of Chicago police chief George Shippy on March 2, 1908. A scuffle ensued and Averbuch was shot by the chief. He died en route to the hospital.
Shippy claimed Averbuch had been an anarchist sent to kill him in retaliation for the city's banning of a speech by Emma Goldman. The Chicago police and the Cook County coroner called the killing justified after a brief investigation. Many in the Jewish community and the anarchist community were unconvinced of the chief's explanation. They believed Shippy overreacted when he saw the young man and shot him without provocation. The anti-immigrant, anti-radical sentiment caused by the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing may have led the chief to believe that that young immigrant at his door was a threat, they argued. According to Averbuch's sister, Lazarus Averbuch never had an anarchist leanings or contacts.
After reading “An Accidental Anarchist,” Hemon began researching more about the case and eventually took a trip to Eastern Europe to retrace Averbuch's steps.
Hemon, who received a Guggenheim grant in 2003 and a 'genius grant' from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004, talked to the Journal Sentinel about why he was attracted to the Averbuch story:
“What attracted me was many things,” Hemon recalled recently. “That he (the so-called anarchist) was young, a survivor, only seven months in Chicago. That the assassin was not held responsible. His sister's grief. And the fact that it was not really clear why he (Lazarus) went to Police Chief Shippy's house. And then the photos – they were haunting and troubling. And I wanted to write about Lazarus but also wanted to include the photos.”
Indeed, those photos seem to play a major part in Hemon's re-creating of the story. You can find many of them on the Lazarus Project Web site.
According to what I've read, Hemon interspersed the story of the murder with a fictional account of his own trip to Eastern Europe to document Averbuch's life. The resulting book draws several parallels between America in the aftermath of the Haymarket bombing and the aftermath of September 11, 2001. As you may presume, the critics have lavished praise on “The Lazarus Project,” just as they did with Hemon's two previous books, “Nowhere Man,” and “The Question of Bruno: Stories.”
Here's more from the review of the book in the May 25, 2008 edition of The New York Times:
Some writers turn despair into humor as a way of making the world bearable, of discovering some glimmer of beauty or pleasure or, most important, humanity. In contrast, the gifted Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon has taken the formal structure of humor, the grammar of comedy, the rhythms and beats of a joke, and used them to reveal despair. His new novel, “The Lazarus Project,” is a remarkable, and remarkably entertaining, chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty propelled by an eloquent, irritable existential unease. It is, against all odds, full of humor and full of jokes. It is, at the same time, inexpressibly sad.
Over at the Washington Post, author David Leavitt reviewed the book and called Hemon a 'writer of the senses':
Whether describing turn-of-the-century Chicago, with its mean tenements and decrepit outhouses, or the “onionesque armpits” of a Moldovan pimp or an “unreal McDonald's” in Moldova, “shiny and sovereign and structurally optimistic,” Hemon is as much a writer of the senses as of the intellect. He can be very funny: The novel is full of jokes and linguistic riffs that justify comparisons to Nabokov. And though the prose occasionally lapses into turgidity (“Olga's stomach is churning and she would vomit if there were anything in it to disgorge”), these overwrought moments are more than made up for by the many gorgeous ones. (In the aftermath of the pogrom: “The down from torn pillows floating, like souls, through the fog of what had just happened.”) For beauty and violence, in Hemon's universe, are far from mutually exclusive. Indeed, he seems determined not to let his readers (particularly his American readers) escape the experience of war as a personal affront and a personal transformation.
“The Lazarus Project” is published by Riverhead Hardcover (304 pages).
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