The Lazarus Project

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon is a novel, published in 2008. Mixing historical and contemporary features, Hemon begins the book with Vladimir Brik. Vladimir is a Bosnian-American journalist who is trying to solve a murder from 1908 of a man named Lazarus Averbuch. Lazarus was a suspected anarchist, and his murder remains a mystery. Hemon’s novel works on dual timelines—one set in 1908 with Lazarus’s story and the other in 2004 with Vladimir’s investigation.

In 1908, on March 2, Lazarus’s story begins. He was nineteen years old at the time, a Jewish immigrant living in the Chicago area. He goes to George Shippy’s home—Shippy is the Chief of Police. Shippy receives a letter written by Lazarus and also knows that Lazarus is coming to his house, armed. Shippy decides to fire first, but he accidentally ends up shooting his driver and his own son before he can fire at Lazarus. Shippy and the driver both shoot Lazarus, killing him. When an investigation into who Lazarus was reveals that he was an anarchist associated with Isador Maron, there’s evidence suggesting that Lazarus was planning a suicide mission with Maron, and Shippy thinks he was Lazarus’s target.

Lazarus had an older sister named Olga, and she’s among the first questioned in the investigation. Olga tells investigators that not only does she not know of any anarchist activities her brother was involved in, but she also has no idea where Isador might be found. She mourns Lazarus. When she finds Isador in hiding within an outhouse cesspit, she brings him into her home and hides him in her wardrobe.



Olga wants the truth from Isador. Why did he drag her brother into anarchism? She demands he answer her but finds his response unsatisfactory. Isador tells her that Lazarus was his own person and that his decisions were his own—he didn’t drag Lazarus into anything. Isador tells her more about her brother’s death; he insists that there’s more to it, and that Lazarus’s murder is being used to gather support for anti-immigration within the city.

Lazarus is buried without ceremony in potter’s field. Grave robbers steal his corpse to sell it for medical research, and that’s when the public begins to wonder about the circumstances surrounding Lazarus’s death. By the time the police get his body back, many of his organs are gone. The police plan to rebury Lazarus and ask Olga to attend the second funeral so as to show unity with the police force. Meanwhile, Isador’s friends plan to smuggle him out of the United States and into Canada.

Vladimir is inspired to learn more about Lazarus when he finds the story of his death, nearly forgotten almost 100 years after the event. Vladimir decides that he will use Lazarus’s death as a way to talk about the immigrant experience in his work-in-progress book. However, Vladimir’s research into Lazarus runs dry because so much time has passed, and his story has been forgotten. Thankfully, a photographer and old friend of Lazarus named Rora tells Vladimir the best place to start would be to travel to the Ukraine and Moldova to learn about Lazarus’s origins. Together they travel to those places, as well as Bosnia.



The trip is an emotional one for both men, who both survived the genocide that took place in Bosnia. They discover that Lazarus’s father was killed, so his mother sent him and Olga to the United States. They also learn that the letter Lazarus carried contained a warning that Emma Goldman, the anarchist movement’s leader, was coming to Chicago. The letter might have been designed to keep Lazarus in the good graces of the police. Olga eventually returned to Europe but did not survive the Holocaust.

When Vladimir and Rora return to Sarajevo, Rora is murdered and his camera stolen. The official story surrounding his death is that a drug addict took his life. However, Vladimir is convinced that Rora rubbed some people the wrong way during the unrest in Bosnia in the 1990s. Vladimir believes that Rora photographed something they didn’t want documented, most likely a murder. The Lazarus Project ends after Rora is shot to death.

In addition to The Lazarus Project, one of Hemon’s other best-known works is his novel Nowhere Man, which was published in 2002. He also writes essays. Hemon’s essays and critiques have often appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and BH Dani, a magazine circulated in Sarajevo. He’s won a number of prestigious awards. The Lazarus Project brought home the Premio Gregor von Rezzori award for foreign fiction translated into Italian in 2011. In 2008, the novel was a National Book Award finalist and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Some of his other awards and honors include: the 2017 PEN America Jean Stein Grant, the 2012 United States Artists Fellow Award, and the 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.