The Lazarus Project

My book club elected to read The Lazarus Projet by Aleksandar Hemon. It's one of those meta books, in which the narrator, an accidental Bosnian immigrant to Chicago in 1992, has the same back story as the author. The narrator becomes obsessed with the case of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant who survived a pogrom in Europe and comes to the US, only to be killed by the chief of police, who decides that he is an anarchist. This is also a true story, although like the narrator/author intermingling, some facts have been changed. Everything about the book is fantastic.

I spent some time this afternoon reading, but in the morning I did some internet research for the story I am writing about my family's tragic history with anti-Semitic violence. Not that the Lazarus story is the same as mine (I think all of Eastern European Jewish immigration stories share certain characteristics), but it one only amplifies how interconnected things are. The American Jewish Historical Society wrote that Lazarus's sister Olga never recovered from the murder of her brother, returned to Europe, "and was almost certainly killed in the Holocaust." Thinking about that just hurts.