Open Access
Subscription Access
Open Access
Subscription Access
"He Is Basically a Decent Man": Some Notes on the Historical Background of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project
Subscribe/Renew Journal
Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the murder of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish survivor of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, who was killed in Chicago in 1908, Aleksandar Hemon published "The Lazarus Project" (2008), a novel that is greatly based on the life and death of this Russian-Jew immigrant. This article examines the historical framework within which The Lazarus Project was written, focusing on (1) how the devastating effects of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 on the local population made many Jews like Lazarus emigrate and (2) the socio-political tensions found in the United States of the 1900s due to the pervasive fear of anarchism that terrorized many Americans at the turn of the 20th century.
Keywords
Aleksandar Hemon, "The Lazarus Project", Lazarus Averbuch, Kishinev, Pogrom, Chicago, Anarchism/Anarchist.
Subscription
Login to verify subscription
User
Font Size
Information
- Aberbach, David. Bialik. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
- Aronson, Michael I. Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
- Ben-Amos, Batsheva. "A Tourist in 'Ir ha-Haregah (A Tourist in the City of Slaughter)-Kishinev 1903." The Jewish Quarterly Review 96(3): 359-384, 2006.
- Bialik, Hayyim Nahman. "The City of Slaughter." in Complete Poetic Works of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Ed. Israel Efros. New York, Vol. 1, 129-43, 1948.
- Goldman, Emma. Living my Life. New York: Cosimo Classics, vol. 1, 2008 [1931].
- Hemon, Aleksandar. The Lazarus Project. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
- Horowitz, Sara R. "The Rhetoric of Embodied Memory in 'In the City of Slaughter.'" Prooftexts 25: 73-85, 2005. "An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon." Accessed 6 December 2012. http://www.powells.com/interviews/aleksandarhemon.html.
- Judge, Edward H. Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York & London: New York University Press, 1992.
- Owens, Jill. "Author Interviews: Aleksandar Hemon." 18 May 2008. Accessed 8 October 2012. http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/?author_number=1557&Hemon-interview.
- Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Edited by John D. Klier and ShlomoLambroza. Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Penkower, Monty Noam. "The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History." Modern Judaism 24(3): 187-225, 2004.
- Roth, Walter and Kraus, Joe. An Accidental Anarchist. San Francisco: Rudi Publishing, 1998.
Abstract Views: 158
PDF Views: 0