For a country built by immigrants, America has an almost pathological distrust of foreigners. It’s been true since 9/11, it was true during the ‘reds under the bed’ years of McCarthyism and it was true a hundred years ago when the minor historical footnote around which Aleksandar Hemon has constructed his third novel, The Lazarus Project, took place.
In 1908 Lazarus Avenbach, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, tried to deliver a letter to George Shippy, Chicago’s chief of police. Shippy, taking in Avenbach’s dark features, decided he looked like a murderous anarchist, panicked and shot him dead.
A hundred years later, Hemon retraced Lazarus’ journey to America with the photographer Velibor Bozovic, whose images are found throughout the book. In The Lazarus Project Hemon’s fictional alter ego Vladimir Brik, a Bosnian writer who, like Hemon, escaped Sarajevo in 1992 before the war, does the same with his photographer friend Rora. The result is a compelling novel of two interwoven narrative strands – a buddy story following Rora and Brik’s travels through the cockroach-and-hooker infested hotels of Eastern Europe, and a meditation on immigration, nationality and the concept of home.
On the surface Brik and Lazarus are very different men, from different backgrounds, countries and religions a hundred years apart, but the experience of immigration links them. Hemon draws parallels between the two by recurring names, people and places. “I wanted to show there is a continuity between the past and present,” he states.
Like the current bout of Islamophobia, at the beginning of the 20th century America was gripped by the fear of anarchists. After Avenbach’s death, Chicago’s newspapers styled the 19-year-old as a determined assassin, carried articles on how to spot the ‘anarchist type’, and suggested that a violent revolution was imminent.
Distrust of foreigners is endemic to various characters in the book. Brik’s Irish-American father-in-law regards him with suspicion; travelling through the Ukraine, Brik is wary of his fellow bus passengers. “I don’t think this is innate,” says Hemon, but as he notes, xenophobia is frequently used as a political tool.
“There has been a steady inflow of foreigners to the United States for a long time. Unfortunately, to handle that, people cast a particular group of foreigners as internal enemies. This is a tradition – the faces and the ethnic identities change, but the method is much the same. I was shocked and horrified by 9/11. But shortly thereafter, the mantra was ‘United We Stand.’ I never understood that – why did we have to stand united, and against whom? It’s a reflex. People unite against the perceived threat of enemies – whether they are armies, countries or just foreigners. The result was that Bush’s approval rating after 9/11 was 90 per cent, and by and large most of the population supported the war in Iraq, and this started with ‘United We Stand.’ I don’t like to stand united – I like to lie down individually!”
It’s not the idea of nationality, but rather nationality warped by jingoism and intolerance that worries Hemon. As he observes, nationality is not an ethnicity, and for the immigrant especially, trying to balance the values, customs and culture of the old country with the new, the concept of nationality is fluid. This is why Hemon says he “prefers nationality to ethnicity.” Brik says he is as “a reasonably loyal citizen of a couple of countries.” Hemon regards himself as both Bosnian and American; and as an American he is “constitutionally guaranteed the right to criticise the government.”
While some immigrants immerse themselves in the new nation, for others “home” becomes an idealised place, an ethnic heartland. Hemon explores how this can lead to both large and small tragedies – pogroms, ethnic cleansing and the untimely death of a young Jew on a cold spring morning.
“The wars in Yugoslavia were financed and supported by the Diaspora for whom home was a complete fantasy. They financed the wars to make reality comply with the fantasy – an ethnically pure homeland, whereas in reality it is impossible to establish ethnic purity unless there is genocide. Just like a chunk of the Irish Diaspora supports the IRA. So home is a dangerous concept in some ways as well as a personal feeling of attachment.”
In a world of increased mobility, immigration and displacement, the idea of home can become romanticised. The world’s a big place and so the idea that you ‘belong’ somewhere is an attractive one. As he travels from Chicago to Sarajevo, from one home to another, Brik is forced to conclude that home isn’t a country or city – it’s wherever people miss you when you’re gone.
“Yes,” says Hemon. “But that’s the problem. If home is defined by your absence from it, then you are never really there, are you?”

The Lazarus Project is published by Picador