The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

It was when I went to Germany for a year as an undergraduate student that I first realized how much of my self identity and view of reality had been shaped by growing up in California. In Germany, when I saw movies that took place 'at home' and heard the Mamas and Papas singing California Dreaming or any Beach Boys song, I saw how much I was a product of California.

Getting out of your own country and own language is a profound experience. It forces you to confront who you are. For immigrants this must be even more challenging. In my travels I always knew I was going back home. I was expanding my identity, but not changing into something else. How can you change from being, say a Moldovan or a Bosnian, into an American citizen? If you come as an adult, so much of you has already been formed.

Hemon explores these dilemmas of existence and self identity on several different levels in The Lazarus Project. The title refers to a grant he's gotten to write about a Moldovan refugee of the 1908 pogrom in Kishinev, Lazarus Averbuch, who gets shot by the Chicago police chief in the first chapter of the book (so I'm not giving much away.)
[Update in response to a reader's question: I read this because it's my bookclub's next book. If I recall right, David Sedaris recommended it at the end of a book talk one of the members attended.]

Hemon himself is a Bosnian refugee who was in the US when the siege of Sarajevo began. His alter-ego is Brik, a Bosnian refugee who has a grant to write about Lazarus Averbuch, the Moldovan Jewish refugee killed by the Chicago police chief.

The chapters alternate between the story of Lazarus and the story of Brik/Hemon. There are lots of other subtle connections; here are a few.

Assistant Chief of Police Schuettler immediately takes charge of the investigation. (1908) p. 25

So on March 3, 2004, I was seated next to Bill Schuettler. . . The patriotic people of the organizing committee want me to impress Bill and his wife with my writerly success and personal charm, since the Schuettlers were board members of the Glory Foundation and thereby controlled all kinds of glorious funds. (present) p. 17

"William P. Miller, the Tribune's first pen, is already in the living room, sucking on a cigar, ever dandily dressed." (1908) p. 25

On page 81 we first (I think) learn about another Miller.

Miller was crazy about poker. . . Rora was pitching himself as a fixer to Miller, so he promised him a regular poker game. He knew Rambo was a gambler, too, and that playing with Miller would appeal to him - a Sarajevo warrior playing tough poker with an American war reporter.

So the 1908 Miller is a reporter who has a fix in with the Chicago police and writes his exclusives to make the cops look good and the present day Miller, after losing badly to Rambo in poker, repays his debt by making Rambo into a a hero in his reports.

Rora, by the way, is a Sarajevo boyhood friend that Brik runs into in Chicago - at the same event he met the Schuettlers (who end up getting him the grant to write this book) who accompanies Brik to Eastern Europe to follow Lazarus' trail to the US.

Rora is a photographer who uses real film, not digital, one of many small but important details that build up in this story. We are constantly testing reality and truth and how these are documented - in the archives of Chicago and Kishinev, in Brik's and other people's memories, in Rora's stories and photographs. Rora insists on real film. And stark black and white photos begin each chapter of the real book and in the acknowledgments Hemon writes,

As my best friend, Velibor Božović, is beyond thanks, but his mind and photography were indispensable and I must acknowledge that.

So, let's look at some of the themes. Immigration and what that does to one's self-identity plays a big role. Brik's first chapter begins,

I am a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries. In America - that somber land - I waste my vote, pay taxes grudgingly, share my life with a native wife, and try hard not to wish painful death to the idiot president. But I also have a Bosnian passport I seldom use; I go to Bosnia for heartbreaking vacations and funerals, and on or around March 1, with other Chicago Bosnians, I proudly and dutifully celebrate our Independence Day with an appropriately ceremonious dinner. p. 11

Then we get an immediate contrast between his Bosnian self and American self, and it's clear, the Bosnian self is the real Brik beneath his American veneer.

Bosnians come in droves and early; parking their cars, they might run into a fight over a parking space for the disabled: a couple of men swing their crutches at each other, trying to determine who might be more impaired - the one whose leg was blown off by a land mine, or the one whose spine was damaged by a beating in a Serbian camp. While waiting in the vestibule, for no discernible reason, to enter the preposterously named dining hall (Westchester, Windsor, Lake Tahoe), my fellow double-citizens smoke, as numerous signs inform them that smoking is strictly prohibited. Once the door is opened they rush toward the white-clothed tables with an excess of glasses and utensils, driven by a poor people's affliction: the timeless feeling that plenty never means enough for all. They spread the napkins on their laps; they hang them on their chests; they have a hard time explaining to the wait staff that they would like to eat their salad with the main dish, not before it; they make disparaging remarks about the food which then turn into contemptuous contemplation of American obesity. And pretty soon whatever meager Americanness has been accrued in the past decade or so entirely evaporates for the night; everybody - myself included - is solidly Bosnian, everyone has an instructive story about cultural differences between us and them. . .

Americans, we are bound to agree, go out after they wash their hair, with their hair still wet - even in the winter! We concede that no sane Bosnian mother would ever allow her child to do that, as everybody knows that going out with your hair wet commonly results in lethal brain inflammation. At this point I usually attest that my American wife, even though she is a neurosurgeon - a brain doctor, mind you - does the same thing. Everybody around the table shakes their head, concerned not only about her health and welfare but about the dubious prospects of my intercultural marriage as well.

I remember once a student who was upset about employees who spoke Spanish to each other at work. All I had to do was ask, "So, if you were working in Korea, and you were on a break with an American colleague, would you speak to each other in Korean or English?" He got the point. Even Americans who have lived abroad for years and years and would never consider moving back, will reminisce about football, and Thanksgiving turkey, and grimace about various local practices that they still can't bear. Hemon shows us these contradictions that people living in two cultural realities deal with all the time.

By meshing the 1908 murder of the Jewish immigrant with his own Christian/atheist immigrant experiences nearly 100 years later, and the pogrom in Kishinev with Rora's stories of the war in Sarajevo, Hemon takes the older stories out of history and places them into the story of humanity. We see racial profiling by the reporter and police in 1908. (Hemon, of course, never would use that term or point it out. He just puts it on the table for us to see for ourselves.)

The March 3 morning edition of the Chicago Tribune is led by William P. Miller's story. The terrible deed of yesterday morning, he writes, was planned and carried out to death by a dreamlike Jewish boy whose mind was distorted with the inflammatory ideas of remedying social conditions and so-called injustices, promulgated by Emma Goldman and other leaders of "liberal thought" in America. The condition of his mind is further revealed by the facts that last week Lazarus Averbuch planned to commit suicide with another young Jew, one who is identified only as the "curly-haired young man" and is thought by police to have helped in the murder attempt upon Chief Shippy.

Hemon distinguishes the words of Miller from his own, using italics. The reader knows that at this point, Miller is making most of this up because he has no information at all.

Hemon goes on to offer us police practices, that unfortunately linger today.

Indeed, the police cast a wide net in their hunt for the curly-haired man. . .

Joseph Freedman, despite being rather bald, was arrested on a Halsted streetcar for anarchist talk, at the request of several patriotic passengers. . .

Anton Stadlwelser (scant blond hair) was arrested at home. (pp. 58-59)

We also have people seeing what they expect to see in the autopsy report:

The cranium is of peculiar formation. The hair is dark, the skin is of dark complexion. The nose is not of pure Jewish type but has a Semitic cast.
From other evidence, however, it is clear that the man was a Jew.
No filling in the teeth. Hands well formed, indicating manual labor. . .
The thin skull cap, the large mouth, the receding chin, the low forehead, the pronounced cheekbones and the oversized simian ears all indicate a well-marked type of degeneracy. (pp. 88-89)

Truth and fiction get discussed directly in a contrast between American and Bosnian story telling.

In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarjevo way of doing it - Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity - you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permantly suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story and, maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.(pp. 102-103)

He demonstrates through a discussion among couples together at a wedding telling stories about how they met. Eager to contribute, he tells a story he'd heard from Rora about rabbits along the Berlin wall during mating season wailing for their mates on the other side of the wall. How the guards don't shoot them only because bullets must be saved for defectors and how this was the worst time to try to escape because the guards were so jumpy.

Outrageous though it may have been, I always found the story funny and poignant - the unnaturalness of the Cold War, the love that knew no boundaries, the Wall brought down by horny rodents. It required no effort for me to suspend my disbelief and admire Rora's narrative embroidery. But my Wisconsin audience stared at me with the basic you're-ok-but-strange smiles, waiting for a more potent punch line. Whereupon Mary [his wife] said: "I find that hard to believe." . . . it was rather humiliating to be publicly distrusted by your own wife. Josh asked: "Why didn't the rabbits find a mate on their own side of the Wall? Why would they only be interested in a rabbit from the other side?" I had no answer, as it had never crossed my mind to ask Rora such a question; the story and its reality disintegrated right before me.

This ability to identify the unspoken rules of culture is a product of leaving one's own culture for another culture where you can see both the new culture (where it differs from one's own) and see that what one thought was "reality" was really just one's own cultural way of interpreting a particular action. In this case Bosnians enjoy the story for its own sake, and Americans need it grounded in truth.

The questions of identity get deeper and deeper. It turns out that Brik's parents were immigrants from the Ukraine to Sarajevo while Rora came from an important Sarajevo Muslim family. During the siege he pretended he was a Christian to avoid anti-Muslim antipathy. Brik is tracing the history of a Jew and when interviewing the people at a Jewish museum in Kishinev plays along with their assumption that he is a Jew. At a cemetery in his family ancestral home in the Ukraine, they find a tombstone with a picture and the name Brik. Rora sees a resemblance between the long dead Brik and the living author Brik.

He's your tribe, Rora said. he looks like you. He certainly did look like me - in fifty years or so: the same large nose and low forehead, the same prominent cheekbones and large, apish ears, the same hirsute eyebrows.

This sounds very similar to the autopsy report of the dead Lazarus. But then he's called Lazarus because he keeps coming back to life throughout the book, often in hidden details like this. But Brik goes on about faces and identity:

A human face consists of other faces - the faces you inherited or picked up along the way, or the ones you simply made up - laid on top of each other in a messy superimposition. When I taught ESL, I had students who would come to class with a different face very day; it took me a whiule to remember their names. Eventually, from a certain angle, I could see what was buried under their fleeting grimaces. I discerned the deep faces beyond their acting out the person they imagined themselves to be. Sometimes they would flash their new, American face: the raised eyebrows and the curved mouth of perpetual worry and wonder. Mary could see no deep face of mine, because she did not know what my life in Bosnia had been like, what made me, what I had come from: she could see only my American face, acquired through failing to be the person I wanted to be. (pp. 105-6)

And also, as you can see from the quote above, he explores the barriers that culture sets up for two humans, husband and wife even. Another example:

Mary and I had a desultory, hurtful fight over the Abu Ghraib pictures . . . what she saw was essentially decent American kids acting upon a misguided belief they were protecting freedom, their good intentions going astray. What I saw was young Americans expressing their unlimited joy of the unlimited power over someone else's life and death. They loved being alive and righteous by virtue of having good American intentions; indeed, it turned them on; they liked looking at the pictures of themselves sticking a baton up some Arab ass. (page 188)

Americans can respond to this in anger - rejecting the possibility that there is any other interpretation but their own - or they can recognize that theirs is just one possible narration tying together the facts we've seen about Abu Ghraib.

Hemon could have simply written a book about Lazarus Averbuch. Instead he told a layered story, mixing centuries, mixing people, mixing nationalities, mixing religions, mixing realities, and leaving uncertainties. A story that more closely mirrors the complexities of real life. He told us a lot about himself - though as with Rora's stories, we don't know where Hemon ended and Brik began and vice versa - which let us understand why he was writing this and how his own experiences perhaps gave him insights into Lazarus that born Americans might miss.

This was a very rich book. This is a writer I'd love to have dinner with.

The link to The Lazarus Project offers many more photos - archival and those taken by Velibor Božović. The site takes you on a slide show of photos and quotes from the book along with sound.