Left: Aleksandar Hemon. Photo: Velibor Bozovic. Right: Deborah Baker. Photo: Julienne Schaer.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of the hard-to-categorize but dazzling works Nowhere Man and The Question of Bruno. To varying degrees, the condition of living in exile, of being grotesquely pinned between the past and the present, becomes fodder for his outraged and outrageous representation of the human condition. The Lazarus Project is the first of Hemon’s books to sport the tag “novel.” As a novel it weaves together two stories: one set in 1908, the other in the present. The first is the story of a young immigrant Jew named Lazarus Averbuch who is shot and killed on suspicion of being an anarchist when he arrives at the Chicago mayor’s home to hand-deliver a letter, leaving behind a distraught sister and a restive community. The second is that of the narrator, Brik, who is intent on learning all he can about Lazarus and writing a book about him. Like Lazarus, Brik is an immigrant from a troubled homeland; he has lived in Chicago since the outbreak of the Bosnian War prevented his return to his native city of Sarajevo. As part of his research on Lazarus, the book relates his return to his former homeland, accompanied by Rora, a photographer he had known before the war.

I have never met Aleksandar Hemon. This interview took place in the airy realm of the Internet, where language and a good connection is the only passport, the only currency required to move from one place to another. I cannot tell you what time of day it was or whether the man was wearing a woman’s dressing gown or fashionable jeans; drinking coffee or whiskey straight up; whether he was sitting in an airport, an internet café, or in his home under a thundering Chicago sky, dog barking; or all of these things at different times. I myself was on the fly between various Indian cities, awake and talking to him on a dial-up in Calcutta while he was perhaps asleep in Bosnia and dreaming in English. So I suppose I’m not at all certain what personal impressions I came away with about Hemon because sometimes language, like facts or photographs, can also get in the way of knowing. So, I haven’t met him, but I’d like to.

 

—DEBORAH BAKER

 

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Deborah Baker In The Lazarus Project the main characters are both recent immigrants to America from Eastern Europe. One, Lazarus, is murdered soon after he arrives and the other, Brik, after marrying an American, nonetheless decides to return to his homeland. To what extent did you consciously decide to subvert the usual immigrant narrative, to upend the American paradigm of cultural assimilation and upward mobility in the conception of this novel?

Aleksandar Hemon I have always been bothered by the American dream mythology. It is inherently assimilationist and it entirely denies all the exploitation, injustice, and loss that immigrants experienced upon arrival here. This mythology casts immigrants into the role of people who arrived in the US half-human inasmuch as their human possibilities were unfulfillable where they came from. For them to become fully human, they had to fulfill the dream, for that dream, we are told, is essentially human. Bush still talks about it, except now you can export the dream and get their oil in exchange. Immigrants had to forget about what they left behind and pass through all this hardship—as though an unlivable wage were a way to teach them how to be American—and finally become human by virtue of becoming American. Those who could not, did not, or would not adjust and accept the conditions of being American have been eliminated from the story of the American dream. That’s what happened to a large number of immigrants who went back to their homelands, as they never wanted to be American. (One of my best friends’ grandfather worked as a hotel detective—a bouncer, really—in Chicago for ten years, saved money, then went back to Bosnia to buy a piece of land.) That’s what happened to all those politically invested immigrants—anarchists, socialists, communists—who experienced the same exploitation here as in their half-human homelands. That’s what happened to Lazarus; he did not and does not fit into the story of the American dream.

DB: So, apart from Lazarus Averbuch’s failure to redeem himself according to the American script, what else about his story appealed to you? Was there any particular archival detail that made him more, in your eyes, than martyred immigrant? A detail that launched you beyond facts into a work of fiction?

AH: The photos. The photos of Lazarus sitting dead in a chair and a neatly bearded police captain behind him are haunting; their cruelty is crushing. They are in An Accidental Anarchist by Walter Roth and Joe Kraus, the book that was my main source for The Lazarus Project and they were shot for the Chicago Daily News, which is now defunct. The Daily News photo archive is online and I went through it a few times—there are very few photos of dead people in their archives. It wasn’t all that common, in other words, to take pictures of dead anarchists. In one of the two dead Lazarus photos, the police captain has moved while the photo was being taken and his face is smeared, as the photo was taken inside and required long exposure. Hence the police captain looks like a ghost, whereas Lazarus, still and dead, is more present in the picture. And behind them you can discern a crowd of onlookers. There are also beautiful photos of Olga, Lazarus’s sister. I knew very early on that I wanted to find a way to include photos in the book.

Chicago Police Chief Shippy with a dead Lazarus Averbuch (1908). Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society. All images appear in The Lazarus Project.

DB: These archival photos of Lazarus, bleak Chicago cityscapes, and homely interiors are interspersed throughout the book and establish a kind of documentary factuality à la W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. They set the mood. The outrage of the Chicago police captain posing alongside a dead anarchist has to be seen, the photographs insist, to be believed. As a reader, I felt you were inviting me to look at them alongside you, Aleksandar Hemon, who chose to include them in his novel. Yet these photos are themselves interspersed with contemporary photographs taken by Velibor Bozovic. In contrast to the earnestness of the archival photos, Bozovic’s are developed with an antique effect and act as a contrived record of the journey of Brik and his photographer-friend Rora across a much later landscape of the Ukraine, Moldova, and post-war Bosnia. They seem to announce their inauthenticity, but obviously they were as integral to your conception of the novel as the photos of Lazarus. Can you explain how?

AH: Authenticity is a problematic concept in fiction, perhaps even in general. Sebald addressed the problem of authenticity, of truth, by using photos in his books—they constantly fail as documents of the past, they can only signify loss. And pointedly, they interrupt the text. In Austerlitz, there are only nine paragraph breaks, I think, not counting the photos, which is to say that the photos interrupt the testimonial flow. I learned from Sebald. I wanted to create a situation in which writing would confront photographs. Language (and thus a work of literature) cannot authenticate itself but has to be authenticated through the reader’s experience, whereas photographs are always—or at least in the pre-digital era—physical traces of physical objects. The question then becomes whether the story in my book becomes authentic because of the presence of photos or the photos become inauthentic because of the presence of the story. The line between what happened and what could have happened is blurred, the border between the real and the imagined is rendered irrelevant. For the goal, and the challenge, is to make the reader trust his or her experience and imagination—as both are necessary to read a book—rather than measure the reality of the book by its distance from what is taken to be self-evident. Ideally, the reader would question his or her relation to the real, but not for the sake of my postmodern whimsy. Rather, the goal is to find ways to relate to the lives outside one’s immediate experience, for which imagination is indispensable.

DB: This notion of a blurred border seems to echo Brik’s take on the typically American craving for “truth” and “reality” at the expense of interrupting a good war story. Just last month, the war criminal Radovan Karadzic, sporting a bizarre little sadhu topknot, was arrested in Belgrade, having decided to transform himself, through the medium of Eastern medicine and costume, into a lifestyle guru. To what extent has your experience of what happened in Bosnia, both that which you lived through and that which you were compelled to imagine, given you a different set of imaginative tools for your novels? Was this an experience that obliged you, perhaps, to craft a different sort of book, whether it is The Lazarus Project or Nowhere Man? Could you have conceived of these strategies if you had not left?

AH: Different from what? From standard psychological realism fare? I don’t know what the standard is. At the peril of sounding pompous, I have to say that I write out of inner necessity. I write what I feel I must write. Writing—indeed, literature—is my vocation. Which is to say that I have no imaginative box in which well-designed tools sit waiting to be used. I seek the forms that could contain what I need to write about. The forms are created on the spot, so to speak, except the history of literature provides so many beautiful designs. All I know about writing I learned from other writers, and from their books, not from their workshops.  

The Bosnian historical experience made me confront and deal with the ethical aspects of writing and literature. My interest in the ethics of literature, however, precedes the war in Bosnia, but before the war it was somewhat theoretical. The war made so many things intensely real and I had to construct realities from that.

DB: I guess what I meant by “different sort of book,” is one in which the “story” seems to take a back seat to more philosophical concerns, as explored through Brik’s various journeys and reflections as well as formal innovations like the inclusion of photographs. To take one example, you write that Lazarus was carrying a letter for the mayor when he was shot. The letter and its delivery seemed to have been an urgent matter for him. But its existence is simply noted and then forgotten. Brik doesn’t seem to worry about it, though he has made understanding Lazarus’s motivations and fate the subject of his research for his own book. Is my expectation that I would learn more about it beside the point? Am I meant to mistrust my desire to know what is in Lazarus’s letter and, by extension, my investment in the question of what happens next and why?

Photo: Velibor Bozovic.

AH: The police claimed that the only thing that was in the envelope was a blank sheet of paper, which was somehow evidence of Lazarus’s ill intent. But that also pointed out to me the fact that the letter was irrelevant as such. Lazarus was killed because he was a dark-skinned immigrant which made Shippy—the Chief of Police—suspicious, and his suspicion was, in the spirit of the day (and today), considered perfectly reasonable. It didn’t matter what was in the envelope.  

At the same time, I am generally loath to explain anything in my books. To have described what was in the letter would have established a cause-and-effect chain which could go in only one direction, whatever the direction. It would have also established a chronological hierarchy—because of what happened in the past, this is what is happening in the present. I wanted to complicate all that. Brik projects back into the past. He wanted to understand what happened, but the further away from Chicago he is, the less he understands. But he knows and imagines more. Sometimes facts get into the way of knowing. And yes, the reader would ideally begin to question the need for explanation.

DB: How would you characterize your relationship with the English language?

AH: Love. It has been fully absorbed by my subconscious mind and the heart of my hearts. I am not a foreigner in this language, it belongs to me.

DB: When did you begin to feel this? Was it something you read? Or something you heard on the streets of Chicago? Or something that came out of your own head? And how does your mother tongue feel about being sidelined?

AH: I am not sure. But in the early ’90s, after I came here and decided I should write in English, I set out to acquire the language for writing by reading incessantly, obsessively. I re-read a lot of stuff I used to like and had read in translation, and then read some more. I had read Lolita in translation, but in English it was a marvel. I went to graduate school and took a lot of Renaissance Lit courses, many of which had a lot of Shakespeare, who is a marvel beyond marvels. I read and read and read. Along the way, the English language entered my subconscious mind—I caught myself not only dreaming in English, but remembering in English.  

As for my mother tongue, I write a column in Bosnian for a magazine in Sarajevo and have been doing so for at least 12 years. But I have fewer registers in my native language—I mainly sound like a well-read Sarajevo thug in Bosnian. I can have many more voices in English; I can contain multitudes in this language.

DB: Why do you think English is so elastic for writers whose mother tongues are not English? Do you feel any particular kinship with or curiosity about those sensibilities like Nabokov or Conrad for whom English was a second or third language? Which contemporary writers who write in English do you feel take greatest advantage of the registers you mentioned?

AH: Well, English is huge. There is a long history of it being published, and a lot of people speak it and read in it. And, most importantly, it contains histories of immigration: people moving within the language or coming into the language from elsewhere. I used to teach English as a second language and would sometimes start my classes by showing the map of the world on which words that came to English from other languages marked their countries of origin. Words like pogrom or perestroika or chutzpah or sushi. And I would also tell them how William Carlos Williams was asked in an interview about a particularly odd idiom he had used in one his poems. He said he got it from “our Polish mothers.” I love that.  

The thing with English is that its borders can be pushed. It can be transformed and recharged. At the same time, because it is so fluid, so limitless, people feel that the rules and idiomatic strictness must be enforced—otherwise the foreigners will take the language away. It often happens that reviewers, even those who like my books, give me a little lecture in their review about the way I use language—“this is not the way we say it,” they suggest. Though I screw up an idiom or misuse a word here and there, I do not care all that much about how “we” say it. My ex-wife, a native English speaker, used to read my early drafts and she would sometimes say, “We don’t say this.” And I would say: “Now we do.”  

As for Conrad, I don’t particularly like him, fascinating though he may be. I find his language clunky, not because it is unidiomatic, but because he has a temperamental inclination toward grand, important statements. Nabokov, on the other hand, is a great writer in any language. The Gift, written in Russian, is one of the great novels of the 20th century. He is a great immigrant writer; his immigrant stories are symphonies of displacement. And it gives me great pleasure that the greatest American novel of the past couple of centuries, Lolita, was written by a Russian immigrant.  

Michael Ondaatje is by far my favorite living writer in the English language. He is one of those people whose homeland is the language.  

I often find that American fiction tries much too hard to be American. Writers pursue their relevance as Americans and their registers are limited. Everybody wants to be understood by the American reader, whoever that is, so they limit their language to be within the range of the American idiom. As though they would be thrown out of the language or America if they didn’t. Language requires no passport, there are no illegal immigrants in the language. I can do whatever I want—nobody will revoke my language license.  

 

Deborah Baker, a former book editor, is the author of the biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2008 Penguin published her book A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a non-fiction narrative exploring the idea of India in the American imagination. She is presently a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.