"The Lazarus Project," by Aleksandar Hemon

            The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon, is told from the prospective of Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer who has gotten a grant and is researching Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant to America accused of anarchy.  The story is told from the present (during Brik’s life) and the past (right after Averbuch is killed).  This makes the story hard to read at times.  The flipping back and forth between time periods interrupts the flow of the separate stories.

            I found most interesting how the characters viewed America as immigrants.  At one point, Vladimir Brik is telling a cab driver of his experiences in America:

“I had served food at the Ukrainian Cultural Center; I had done data input for a real estate broker; I had worked as a teacher of English. I assured him it was very easy to make money in America. I wanted him to think that my life in America was all about hard work, rather than an embarrassing mixture of luck and despair.”

During that same conversation, Brik describes his wife as:

“ A full-blooded American, she was. She took me to baseball games and held her hand on her heart to sing the anthem, while I stood next to her, humming along. She used the national we when talking about the U.S. of A… she often craved cheeseburgers. George and Rachel had bought her a car for her sixteenth birthday. She had the bright, open face that always reminded me of the vast Midwestern welkin.  She was routinely kind to other people, assumed they had good intention; she smiled at strangers; it mattered to her what they thought and felt.  She was often embarrassed; she dreamt of learning a foreign language; she wanted to make a difference. She believed in God and seldom went to church.”

I, as a reader, found the line “she believed in God and seldom went to church” very ironic.  I was a little bit disturbed by the cruelty to the dog where the man and woman throw the dog in a trashcan full of glass bottles and watch as it cuts itself trying to escape the trap.

            At the end of this section, Olga, Lazarus Averbuch’s sister, meets Herr Taube, a lawyer whose client wants Olga’s help.  This grips the reader and pulls them in deeper into the story making them want more.

Vocabulary:

Anarchy - absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.

Deviousness - 1 showing a skillful use of underhanded tactics to achieve goals

Proclivities - a tendency to choose or do something regularly; an inclination or predisposition toward a particular thing

Verdant - green with grass or other rich vegetation.

Yarmulke - a skullcap worn in public by Orthodox Jewish men or during prayer by other Jewish men.