I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel - Softcover

A New York Times Notable Book of 2014

"Lazar concocts a beautifully written hybrid text of remembrance, essay, speculation, and poetic prose.... Unforgettable."--Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant...offers confident testimony that the novel, even in the age of memoir, has its own irreplaceable role."--Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant is work of intricate and precise mystery, a book that is like a bold monument in an empty desert, a thing built of dread, and silences, and dazzling elegance, by a worldly and masterful hand."-Rachel Kushner, author of 2013 National Book Award finalist The Flamethrowers

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant conveys on every page a radical intensity of emotion and intellect. It's epic in scope and yet, in bursts of fine flinty prose, of great economy. Plus it has gangsters in it, and murder, and old lovers, and, above all, a father and daughter whose story turns out to be a heartbreaker."-Joshua Ferris, author of The Unnamed

"Here's a truly exciting novel. The conception is bold, the execution mesmerizing. Zachary Lazar makes the old stories dangerous and urgent again, and reveals the terror beneath our tidy versions of the now."-Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and The Ask

"Zachary Lazar's brilliant I Pity the Poor Immigrant considers Jewish identity in the provocative and riddling way that Walter Abish's How German Is It asked a similar question about Germans-but Lazar's is an even more daring project, for Jews have seldom been willing to look at themselves as perpetrators. Here Lazar deploys once again that signature mixture of panorama, poetry, and intimate observation that he invented, in his novel Sway, to evoke the chaotic, hypnotic world of sixties rock 'n' roll. In I Pity the Poor Immigrant, the maze of interlocking voices, bloody crime scenes, and rubble-strewn, blighted cityscapes from the West Bank to the Lower East Side, suggests a disturbing question: How Jewish is violence? Lazar never exactly answers: rather, he mesmerizes the reader with a somber, ever moving, kaleidoscopic demonstration: the will to violence, as a strategy as well as a defense, an ambition as well as a compensation, has been with us from the beginning, from King David to Meyer Lansky, from ancient Israel to Las Vegas, New York and Tel Aviv. These are aspects of "the poor immigrant" experience that respectably fixed later generations prefer to forget: how some of the first to arrive-however impeccable their excuses-looked about them and took the violent opportunity, used the weak and the greedy to force their way up, sometimes to the top. And yet, as it catches him in its strange, flickering, unstable narrative light, I Pity the Poor Immigrant somehow generates authentic-if bitter-pity even for a gangster like Lansky, stranded in his habit of silence when the State of Israel refuses to take him in."--Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for fiction

"Hannah Groff's story includes gangster Meyer Lansky-a major figure in the development of Las Vegas-and makes room for the Biblical King David. And in Lazar's deft narrative, the lives of those tough Jewish men are convincingly woven into a rich cast of imagined characters."--Chris Waddington, NOLA.com

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant is an inventive, taut, and refreshing take on a crime novel."--Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins, in The Rumpus

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant, like Lazar's award-winning earlier book, Sway, merges fictional people and events with real people and events to great literary effect... It's a brutally honest and beautifully written account of the need to love, be loved and belong... Lazar makes the reader think, ask questions and discover connections, all of which make his novel that much more rewarding to read."--Sharon Chisvin, Winnipeg Free Press

"Lazar knows how to paint the brief vivid picture, and draws the reader into a beguiling air of lost connections...." -James Wood, The New Yorker

In 1972, American gangster Meyer Lansky petitions the Israeli government for citizenship. His request is denied, and he is returned to the U.S. to stand trial. He leaves behind a mistress in Tel Aviv, a Holocaust survivor named Gila Konig.

In 2009, American journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the killing of an Israeli writer. She soon begins to connect the dots between Lansky, Gila, the murdered writer, and her own father, finding herself inside a web of violence that takes in the American and Israeli Mafias, the biblical figure of King David, and the modern state of Israel. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT is "a novel that does the work of a hundred history books."*

*Joshua Ferris