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July/August 2008—Book Reviews
He Who Does Not Rise Again
Barbara Probst Solomon
The Lazarus Project |
From Cervantes to Proust to Joyce, long before the clatter of postmodernism, the best narrative fiction has come from imaginative literary rebels determined to transgress against whatever brew constituted the well-made novel of their time. The very talented Aleksandar Hemon, mixing fact, fiction and genre with great aplomb, has clearly thought a lot about form. His stunning first short story compilation, The Question of Bruno, was followed by the equally impressive Nowhere Man, a short story collection that when read in its entirety transforms itself into a novel. The Lazarus Project includes a photographic journal by his friend, photographer Velibor Bozovic.
The bloody 20th century is at the heart of this new book, which Hemon considers his first full-length novel. He takes as his starting point the 1908 killing in Chicago of 19-year-old Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch, meshing early history with more contemporary concerns: the Holocaust, the war in Bosnia and ethnic cleansing, resulting in the liquidation of populations, where the survivors are moved about not through individual choice, but by random premeditated violence. Hemon’s title alludes both to Averbuch and the Biblical Lazarus. It may also be a reference to the Manhattan Project and the making of the atom bomb.
Vladimir Brik, the pivotal figure in the novel, is a young writer from Sarajevo (like Hemon), stranded in Chicago when war breaks out in his native Bosnia. Brik is a complicated modern exile, a wandering intellectual whose life is replete with absurdities. He is uneasy about the material advantages of his cushy new existence: At the height of the devastating war in Bosnia, his American wife Mary, a brain surgeon, supports him with her income and her love, and a generous philanthropic couple tosses even more money his way, giving him what Brik wryly refers to as the “Susie grant.” While researching a column for a Chicago newspaper, he comes across the real-life story of Lazarus Averbuch, documented in Walter Roth and Joe Kraus’s book An Accidental Anarchist: How the Killing of a Humble Jewish Immigrant by Chicago’s Chief of Police Exposed the Conflict Between Law and Order and Civil Rights in Early Twentieth Century America.
Averbuch had been hired to deliver a letter to the police chief, but, because of his lack of English, he was unable to communicate that he was merely a delivery boy. Suspicious of Averbuch’s immigrant looks, the paranoid chief instantly shot Averbuch dead. There was no remorse. To the contrary, a reporter in cahoots with the police compounded the crime by claiming that Averbuch was an anarchist agitator who had attempted to kill the chief. Hemon likes to juggle opposites—Brik’s wife Mary, a healer, is in the business of saving lives, but scientists barbarically removed Averbuch’s brain so they could study the presumed deranged mind of an anarchist.
The world that Hermon describes is one of Emma Goldman and Chicago immigrants struggling with a new country and language with considerable sagacity. But the soul and sardonic brilliance of the novel is contained in Brik’s journey to Middle and Eastern Europe (fortified by the Susie grant) to discover the truths of Averbuch’s early life. Suddenly we are in the marvelous gritty territory of Joseph Roth, Jerzy Kosinski and Gregor Von Rezzori.
Brik is not alone on these travels. His sidekick is the cynical war photographer, Rora, who bears no resemblance to Velibor Bozovic, the Slovenian-born photographer who actually made a similar trip with Hemon. The first stop in their journey is a night spent in the pathetically misnamed Grand Hotel in Lviv, Ukraine, near the town where Brik’s grandfather was born. Brik turns on the TV only to see a heavyset woman singing Madonna’s “Material Girl”: “And a frightening possibility of a parallel universe presented itself to me—a universe in which there was a Ukrainian Madonna, with exactly the same voice, and exactly the same me listening to her … while everything else was entirely, horribly different. For a moment, the two narrow cots and the socialist-fifties furniture were overlit like a prison cell, until a couple of bulbs hiccupped and died; the air stank of lead-based paint and suicide.”
War had transformed Rora from a patriot defending Sarajevo against the nationalistic Chetniks to a smuggler of bodies dead and alive, a dealer in “requisitioned” loot. “I may be sometimes a thief, Rora says, but I am honest: I do not rob neighbors.” As a war photographer in the midst of chaos, Rora needs all his cunning. When asked at a demarcation checkpoint to identify himself, he “could either lie and say he was a Serb, which the Chetnik would know wasn’t true, or admit he was a Muslim, for which they could accuse him of being a spy. Either way, he could be shot. So Rora said, “I am a gambler.”
In the final stage of their trip, Brik and Rora reach Chisinau (formerly known as Kishinev), Lazarus Averbuch’s birthplace. “Having been bombed and burned in the Second World War, much like the rest of the city, the yeshiva was nothing but the tall walls and the hollow yard; here and there on the walls I could see a fading Star of David … the two of us who could never have experienced the pogrom went to the Chisinau Jewish Community to find someone who had never experienced it and would tell us about it.”
There Brik meets the beautiful, dreamy Jewish Juliana, the part-time guide to the neglected yeshiva. In her rather impersonal museum guide persona, Juliana shows Brik and Rora a forlorn assortment of Jewish artifacts. In order to emphasize Juliana’s remoteness to her own history, Hemon gives us few defining facts about her present—all we know about her is that she is married. When Brik asks her if she knew of any Jews named Averbuch, Juliana first answers vaguely, then, in response to his persistent questioning, off-handedly recalls that her grandmother was named Averbuch.
The floodgates open: Juliana tells Brik about the endless suffering of Jews in Moldavia, its glorious medieval architecture destroyed by war and replaced by Nikita Khrushchev’s fast, cheap mass housing. She talks about the Russian pogroms, the Romanian occupation, the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation and provides Brik with new details about the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which she says has remained indelibly stamped on the consciousness of the almost-extinct Jewish community. We have come full circle back to the Lazarus story.
Averbuch, brutally beaten, barely survived the Kishinev pogrom; he was rescued by his sister Olga, who was already living in Chicago. Still, her vigorous help in obtaining entry for him to the United States came to naught—almost immediately after his arrival in the Windy City, thanks to the police chief. Finito to the young man’s life. Finito to the Averbuch family in Chisinau; their name now exists only in the Jewish cemetery.
At times Hemon constructs his novel too much like a set of nesting Russian wooden dolls—underneath every reference is another reference. But this is a quibble. What I found particularly compelling is the way the author connects the Holocaust and the historic fate of the Jews to what seems to be never-ending brutality and genocide in Eastern Europe. He doesn’t equate the two, but his landscape, as in Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy, includes all the death and chaos. (In a sort of homage to Abel Gance’s film J’Accuse, Roth’s film producer in the Hotel Savoy is named Abel Glanz.) Brik tells of a dog thrown to a brutal death in a garbage heap and smothered with broken glass. A street vendor sells a newly minted version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And, to quote Vonnegut, “so it goes.”
Hemon’s strength is that in the midst of savage death and senseless war, his characters are faced with moral choices. Thus, the police chief who shot Lazarus need not have been so trigger happy, so prejudiced against new immigrants. The reporter who twisted the truth of the murder need not have participated in a cover-up of the crime. All the characters make choices. Even Brik. Rora asks him why, since he was so drawn to the luminous Juliana, he hadn’t tried to sleep with her, and Brik somewhat sanctimoniously replies that she has a husband. Rora dryly points out that Brik has a wife—Why didn’t she figure into his thinking?
Right after World War II, war stories, at least American ones, were about soldiers. For quite a few years, the Holocaust remained nameless; it was referred to somewhat obliquely as “the six million dead,” and it wasn’t until the late l950s, when André-Schwarz-Bart wrote The Last of the Just, that the Holocaust began to be known as the genocide of the Jews, and the full horror was revealed.
Hemon has managed to tell us a new story despite all that’s been written. It’s not a tidy book but it remains compelling. And there isn’t a cliché in it. Hemon is a powerful narrator, and The Lazarus Project is an impressive achievement.
Barbara Probst Solomon is an essayist and novelist. She is cultural correspondent of El Pais and the editor-in-chief and publisher of the literary journal The Reading Room.