Immigration

Immigration is an important theme in the novel “The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon. Immigration, both legally and illegally accomplished, involves the moving of one or more individuals from country to another. Immigration, its effects, its consequences, and its experience are treated extensively throughout the novel. The immigrant experience is seen through the eyes not only of Lazarus in Chicago of 1908, but through the eyes of Brik in Chicago in 2004 as well.

Brik’s own interest in the immigrant experience comes from the fact that he himself is an immigrant from Bosnia, having fled genocide there in the early 1990s. He has since married an American girl and settled down, though he retains dual citizenship with his home country because he no longer feels at home in Bosnia, but does not quite feel at home in America, either. Brik reads much of his own experiences into...