Not all of my reads come about through book stores, some come from street curbs halfway around the world. My friend Daniel, who is a lot like me in that he is incapable of walking by a stack of books without perusing through them, was walking around in Jerusalem, when he came across a pile of books that someone had obviously thrown out. Retrieved from the collection was The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, a Chicagoan. He read the book and sent it on to me.
The book is a fictionalization of the true story of Lazarus Averbach, a young man who thought he’d left the pogroms of eastern Europe behind him when he, like millions of others, immigrated to the United States in the decades before World War I. Lazarus and his sister Olga settled in the Jewish ghetto of Maxwell Street in Chicago. The Project is the story of how it came about that Lazarus was murdered by Chicago’s Chief of Police in 1908, as told by the author through the character of Brik, a present-day Bosnian immigrant to Chicago.
While the story plays out on several levels, the ever apparent theme is the similarities between America’s fear of foreigners, deemed “the anarchist threat” in the early 1900s, with the country’s fear of foreigners, deemed “the terrorist threat” exactly one hundred years later.
And a note for the weary, while there is more than enough sadness in this book, Hemon includes a character named Rora, a Bosnian Muslim Chicago immigrant, who provides relief with well-timed and often hilarious stories and jokes.
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