2018 School Spending Survey Report
I Pity the Poor Immigrant
Little, Brown. Apr. 2014. 256p. ISBN 9780316254038. $25; ebk. ISBN 9780316254045. F
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When investigative crime reporter Hannah Groff decides to write about the murder of Israeli poet David Bellen, she has no idea what she will uncover. Soon she is learning about the 1972 attempt by American Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky to gain Israeli citizenship. She meets Bellen's son, Eliav, a recovering drug addict; learns that her Hebrew school teacher Gila Konig had an affair with Meyer Lansky and also with Hannah's father; and she reads Bellen's depiction of King David as a biblical thug. As various stories converge, the reader is taken on a dizzying ride through the crimes of the Jewish mob in the 1920s and 1930s, through the mind of an antiestablishment Israeli poet, through the lives of the women who service these men, and eventually to a challenging definition of Jewish identity.
VERDICT Lazar, whose novel Sway brought together Charles Manson's horrific crimes, the life of filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and the rise of the Rolling Stones, is a master of combining disparate stories into one complicated revealing narrative. In this novel, he has again succeeded in taking the reader through various seemingly unconnected lives and demonstrating how we are all immigrants striving for some inexplicable dream.
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