In 1908, a Jewish immigrant, Lazarus Averbuch, is shot to death by the Chicago chief of police. In the present day, Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian-born writer living in Chicago, secures a grant to travel to Eastern Europe to investigate Averbuch’s death. Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project follows the stories of these two men. Averbuch’s death sets off a citywide investigation into the anarchic activities of the Jewish community. Averbuch’s unfortunate sister, Olga, is left behind to be relentlessly hounded and abused by investigators and reporters, while she tries to secure a dignified burial for her brother’s body.
Meanwhile, Brik engages the services of a Bosnian photographer, Rora, and heads East to spend his grant money and, if not discover the truth about Averbuch, to hopefully learn about his own roots, his own feelings of rootlessness. Hemon’s novel is not the first to feature descendants of American immigrants delving into their ancestors’ shadowy histories in hopes of assuaging their own feelings of cultural displacement. It is also not the best. The flashback sections featuring Olga’s terrible story make for a good book, but the sections featuring Brik seem pointless and uncertain, although Rora is a hilarious character, and I always love to recognize Chicago locations in literature (there’s a scene set in the Kopi Cafe!). I’m not sure why the critical reception for this book was so overwhelmingly positive. I enjoyed reading it, but it left no impression on me.
