Novel retraces the immigrant experience, then and now

A similar sense of the indefensibility of bloodshed underlies Aleksandar Hemon's stunning new novel, "The Lazarus Project." The book opens on March 2, 1908, but the date could be a century later. A "slim, swarthy young man" with cold eyes turns up at the door of Chicago's police chief, and thrusts an envelope at him. Taking the stranger for an anarchist, the lawman restrains him, summons the missus, and orders her to do a pat-down. A struggle ensues; she thinks she feels a pistol. Soon the man is dead, his blood spattered across the room. The assistant chief pulls down the victim's pants to verify his ethnicity. " 'He's a Jew all right,' he announces, leaning over the young man's crotch. 'A Jew is what he is.' "

The deceased is one Lazarus Averbuch - a fitting name, given that Hemon has resurrected a real man, an immigrant who escaped a brutal Kishinev pogrom only to be gunned down in the Land of Opportunity. Lazarus's death, and the grieving of his sister Olga, unfold in alternate sections from the story of Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian native turned Chicagoan, who's obsessed with understanding what happened to the Averbuchs 100 years before. Eventually these two separate threads wind together.

Brik, like Hemon himself, was visiting the states when civil war erupted in his native Sarajevo. He stayed, worked odd jobs, and mastered English. Now he's a newspaper columnist writing about immigrants' experiences. Although the column pays a pittance, Brik devotes himself to writing, thanks to his American surgeon wife Mary. Our hero is uncomfortable being "kept by my wife," when he hails from a country where "money has a man's face." Soon, though, he lands a research grant that funds a trip with his boyhood pal Rora to Lazarus's hometown.

Hemon has always drawn on his own experiences in fiction, and Brik's quest has a real-life counterpart. Several years ago the author traveled with an old photographer friend to retrace Averbuch's path. In the book at least, the search is not merely for the facts of one man's life, but for more complex truths about life and death, hope and despair, love and hate.