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Thursday, September 18, 2014
I Pity the Poor Immigrant / Zachary Lazar 249 pp.
A fascinating novel that I can't quite categorize. Hannah is an American journalist in Israel investigating the murder of a poet. She is estranged from her father, as the poet was estranged from his son. In a way I can't explain, this is all connected to the story of gangster Meyer Lansky who, when faced with prosecution in the US, spent time in Israel before being re-patriated. (He too had strained relations with his son, severely disabled from birth.) Another character is a Holocaust survivor who might have been Lansky's mistress, and who surfaces in New York during Hannah's childhood. Nominally this is the story of the poet's murder, but it's written as almost a collage of parent/child images with a strong echoes of the Abraham and Isaac story. The writing is graceful and strange without feeling overly 'experimental.' Appreciated if not quite understood.
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