An immigrant's rude reception
CHICAGO LIT | Hemon hits the road to research tragic 'Lazarus Project'
On the morning of March 2, 1908, a 19-year-old Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe named Lazarus Averbuch presented himself at the Lincoln Park home of George Shippy, Chicago's chief of police. He was turned away -- it was too early for the chief to be disturbed -- but returned, as invited by the housekeeper, at 9 a.m. Just inside the doorway, Averbuch tried to hand Shippy a letter. The chief, convinced that this swarthy, foreign-looking young man was an anarchist assassin, shot him dead.
Averbuch, who'd come to Chicago after escaping pogroms in his homeland, had never uttered a word. Chicago police, still jumpy about anarchists in the aftermath of the Haymarket incident several years earlier, proceeded to terrorize the young man's sister, Olga, telling her nothing about her brother's death before taking her -- in a maneuver known as "the matchbox treatment," designed to elicit confessions -- to view his body at the morgue.
(Richard Chapman/Sun-Times)
A bit less than a century later, Chicago writer Aleksandar Hemon -- himself an immigrant from Eastern Europe -- came across the story. Hemon, who was stranded in Chicago in the early 1990s by the war in his native Bosnia, felt so drawn to the story that he spent months researching it at the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum). In 2003, he even retraced Averbuch's steps in Ukraine and Moldova in the company of Hemon's longtime friend and fellow Bosnian, Velibor Bozovic, who documented the three-week trip in photographs.
After a lengthy gestation period (and the distraction of simultaneously writing Love and Obstacles, a book of short stories to be published next year), the research and the journey produced The Lazarus Project, a novel which imagines the tragic saga of the Averbuchs and, in alternating scenes, presents a fictionalized version of Hemon's trip.
Brik, the novelist in the book, is both like and unlike Hemon, while Rora, Brik's photographer pal, shares certain qualities -- but decidedly not others -- with Bozovic, whose photos stand in for Rora's.
"Brik is not my alter ego, and the book is not a surreptitious confession," says Hemon, who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004. "He's not me -- he's someone in a situation like mine, but he reacts to it differently. As a writer, I imagine alternative possibilities in any given situation. So when we went on the trip, I was always asking myself, 'What would Brik do?'"
No, Hemon and Bozovic did not go gambling in a gangster-run casino, as Brik and Rora do in the book. Hemon did not break his hand, as Brik does. And unlike Rora, Bozovic managed to make it back home alive.
Still, Hemon is resigned to the fact that many readers will assume that he and Brik are essentially the same person, and that Brik's wife, a Chicago neurosurgeon, is modeled on Hemon's. "Even before the book was published," he says, "I was asked if my wife is a neurosurgeon." (She's actually a photo editor.)
But the fact remains that Hemon identifies with Brik -- and, for that matter, with Averbuch, whose story resonates with Hemon's most obsessive themes. (His earlier books, the novel Nowhere Man and the short-story collection The Question of Bruno, both dwell on issues of immigration and displacement.)
And the anger that fuels Brik's depiction of Averbuch's ill treatment by the Chicago authorities is closely related to Hemon's own rage at what he sees as contemporary American inhumanity in relation to immigration, the torture of terrorism suspects and the war in Iraq.
"I'm both angry and not angry at the way this country works," he says. "There are so many great things and so many awful things, just like everywhere else. It's complicated. But certainly I am angry about the situation with the Bush administration, the general decline of ethics in political and public life, the Iraq fiasco. To my mind, the country is run by war criminals. This is the second time I have lived in a country run by such people."
Will Hemon, like Brik, never find peace in Chicago? Will it never seem like home? "I love Chicago, live happily here, and think of it as my adopted home," he says. "But a true home, conceptually, is impossible for me now. Chicago is never going to be the place that holds everything that constitutes me."
Recently, Hemon attended a wedding with 20 to 30 of his old friends from Bosnia, all now scattered throughout the world. "If all of those people were in one place, I would go and live there," he says. "But there is no such place."
Kevin Nance is editor of Sunday Show.
THE LAZARUS PROJECT
By Aleksandar Hemon
Riverhead, 294 pages, $24.95
When: Noon, May 18
Where: Writers on the Record, Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan
