I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

This stunning novel by the author of Sway is another "brilliant portrayal of life as a legend" (Margot Livesey).

In 1972, the 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 finds 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. As she connects the dots between the murdered writer, Lansky, Gila, and her own father, Hannah becomes increasingly obsessed with the dark side of her heritage. Part crime story, part spiritual quest, I Pity the Poor Immigrant is also a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.

Genres: Fiction, Israel, Middle East, Novels, Adult Fiction, Jewish, Historical Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about identity. Its characters -- some fictional, some historical -- are actual or metaphorical immigrants, products of the turbulence of Jewish history. Meyer Lansky fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, became a notorious American gangster and, denied citizenship by Israel, returns to the U.S. to face charges; Gila Konig, concentration camp survivor and Lansky's mistress, never at home in Israel, emigrates to New York but always feels herself a refugee; Hannah Groff, a journalist who travels to Israel to investigate the death of an Israeli writer, unearths her own family's history as she pursues her story and wrestles with her own feelings of rootlessness.

Underlying the displacement felt by the characters is an examination of the moral underpinnings of the state of Israel and its place in the world today. Was the writer murdered because he depicted King David as the forebear of the Jewish gangster and compared the founding of Israel to the vision Lansky and Bugsy Siegel had of building a shimmering city in the desert of Nevada? As a plot device, that's an easy question to answer. As a moral/political question, it's a heavy burden for a novel to bear and it's hard work for the reader to stay afloat.

Lazar skillfully weaves together multiple narrative threads across oceans and decades. But when I closed the book, I instinctively slapped only 3 stars on it, thinking all those narrative threads were confusing and the angst suffocating. On reflection, I'm more comfortable with Lazar's ambition. The reflection in modern Israel of the brutality and existential threat suffered by Jews over centuries makes this more than a complex story about characters looking for a home. The novel is difficult but fascinating and ultimately satisfying. (Now to get the damn song out of my head.)

[Uwe Hook · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zachary Lazar is a university professor of English, and a renowned author of three previous novels. Reading his fourth novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, was a frustrating experience, because I knew I should be enjoying it more than I was, and that it really should be a better novel than it seemed to be.

I Pity the Poor Immigrant is a multi-layered story that crosses times and oceans. When an American journalist travels to Israel to cover of the murder of a writer, she discovers more about her own family's history entwined in the writer's story. The way Lazar brings her story together with her father's and reveals the connection while creating this very believable history is artful. In fact, maybe too artful. This reads more like non-fiction than fiction. I felt compelled from time to time to Google the places, events, and characters to discern what was real (much of it was) and what merely could be real.

Alas, whether because of my short attention span, Lazar's indirect story-telling style, or just a matter of taste, I couldn't really get into the characters of the plot of I Pity the Poor Immigrant. Pity me, if you would, for missing out on a true appreciation of this potentially great novel. Or pity you for having to find out for yourself whether you like it or not.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this free from a Goodreads Giveaway.

This story is from several different perspectives which made it a little confusing in parts but it all comes together. The relationships and personalities are all well written. It's a good mix of family relationships, a murder mystery plus some religious history thrown in. As I reached the end, I was getting nervous that I wasn't going to find out who committed the crime and was on the edge of my seat. I kept checking to see how many pages were left, wondering if I would find out! So glad I wasn't left hanging!

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very interested in the three stories interwoven in this novel: the real life gangster Meyer Lansky's, the fictional Israeli poet David Bellen's, and the Jewish American journalist's. However, I hated the way the author jumped back and forth between the characters and between time periods And I never saw the point of the novel itself. Seems like the author just wanted to say how complicated and conflicted are the lives of Jews and the state of Israel. This is an awkward paragraph - just like the book!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book requires attentiveness. The narrative jumps between stories and chronologically, but it was worth the effort. It's one of those books were the stories the author is telling add up to much more than their literal sum.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and researched, but requires attentive reading as it jumps around a lot chronologically as well as location wise. Probably worth re-reading, especially for readers with ADD.

[Joanna Mongelluzzo · Rating 1 out of 5]

The description of the book was promising but the book itself was not catchy; didn't flow well and the characters were not to be liked.
I was unable to finish this book.

[Ellis Shuman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zachary Lazar's novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant evokes a sense of nostalgia for places you've never been, for homes you've never had.

Like other book reviewers before me, I've given a certain amount of thought to the title of Zachary Lazar's third novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant (Little, Brown and Company, April 2014). Fans of Bob Dylan, and I am not included among them, will connect the title to the song featured on the singer's 1967 album 'John Wesley Harding'. Perhaps the title was chosen because of this particular phrase in Dylan's haunting lyrics: "I pity the poor immigrant / Who tramples through the mud / Who fills his mouth with laughing / And who builds his town with blood."

One of the characters in this novel is Meyer Lansky, a central figure in American organized crime. During the 1940s, Lansky and his associate Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel persuaded leading Mafia investors to back the construction of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Following endless delays and huge cost overruns, Siegel was shot and killed in Beverly Hills. The Flamingo, forerunner of all the Vegas glitzy resort hotels, played a starring role in the history of a town built with blood.

Decades later, Lansky fled federal tax evasion charges and moved to Israel, hoping to receive citizenship as a Jew under the Law of Return. "In a lifetime of scrutiny, he had never been convicted of a serious crime. That was why he had come here, because they were supposed to accept even someone like him." But, two years after his aliyah, Israeli authorities deported Lansky back to the United States.

In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Lansky wondered why he had been rejected: "How much can an elderly sick man do to Israel… I can enter, as I have, any other country without criticism, except the place of my heritage…"

The journey starts with a crime

To state that Lansky is the central character in this multi-layered story is far from accurate. Actually, the protagonist is Hannah Groff, a divorced American woman in her forties who sets out on a journey. "The journey starts with a crime and the crime ramifies, the woman finds she has dishonored people without quite intending to, including her father, who knew Gila Konig, who knew David Bellen, who wrote a book called Kid Bethlehem in which the biblical King David is presented in the guise of a twentieth-century gangster."

In a sense, this book is almost like a memoir, a scrapbook of incidents and stories and essays, but for Hannah, it is "a memoir about somebody other than 'me'". She thought she was "investigating a fairly straightforward crime story. But it became a story that led elsewhere, a story that led everywhere, a story I would have had no interest in if I hadn't accidentally found myself inside it."

The story, told in Hannah's narrative voice, makes her "feel like a kind of immigrant in my own life, inhabiting a world of reflections and images of people I can't fully know, some of whom are dead, and I see now that my life has been shaped by this network, in ways I didn't always perceive."

To make this statement better understood for the reader, the term 'immigrate' is defined for us as one who "comes into a new country, region or environment, esp. in order to settle there, as in the newborn entering the world, consciousness entering the brain, the corpse returning to the earth, silence on either side of the transit."

Yet, as we know, not all immigrants who move to Israel, stay in the country. Some, like the crime-linked Lansky, end up going back to their country of origin. Those who leave Israel are considered yordim. "They have 'descended.' They have gone down to the corrupt world outside, so to speak, abandoned the holy land that is their rightful home."

"We would always be yordim," Hannah says. Looking back on the book detailing her journey, the protagonist says, "I see now that this book is my idea of a Jewish story. It's an unflattering story, negative in many ways. I suppose it begs the question, why tell such a story?"

Readers of Lazar's novel will not hesitate with their response to Hannah's question. The journey described, at one level depicting the Biblical escapades of King David and at another detailing the poet's bloody murder, captivates from the very first page. The reader is drawn into the story, which makes such a strong impression that, as described by one of the characters, we experience "a kind of potent nostalgia for a place she'd never been, a home she'd never had."

[Ilana · Rating 3 out of 5]

While admirably succeeding to knit interwoven stories, add fragments of reality and history and mix them until becoming myths and then breaking the myths into pieces, telling the story was relegated to the second or third place. In the corners of almost every page there are details that you hope to get together to explain or deny an enigma, but they end up like simple details and nothing more. When talking politics, there is so much oversimplification but maybe there is just the same 'mystification' process that lead to the creation of the 'myth' of Meyer Lansky that was considered when his request to obtain the Israeli citizenship in the 1970s was refused. It just my hopeful assumption, otherwise it doesn't deserve the 3-star as too stereotypical. Seriously, you can use many more smart literary topics than repeating ad nauseam the arguments against 'the settlements'. I don't regret reading the book, but it promised more than delivered.

[Perlie · Rating 1 out of 5]

It began as a loosely fictionalized story of Lansky, a gangster who sought to escape his crimes by fleeing to Israel under the law of return. The weaving in of King David was not a welcome addition. The narrator as character was interesting initially, but then less appealing. I was prompted to do some historical research, however!

[John Magee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had high hopes but couldn't really get into it.

[Rhodopa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative look into the various facets of Jewish identity.

[Lorri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was one where I had to pay attention at all times while reading it, or else I could have been thrown off track, regarding the characters.

[Shalom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Realized I didn't care about what happened to the characters, stopped reading halfway through.

[Jeff Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story of Israel is the story of immigration. Whether it is those early pioneers who began the country, or those who immigrated later on, the extreme hardship and loss is profound. Zachary chooses to tell this story through the eyes of a reporter, his mistress, a writer, and a gangster.

Meyer Lansky was once known as the accountant to major organized crime, fictionalized in The Godfather movies. He was also a Jewish gangster who was denied immigration to Israel on the wane of his career. David Bellem is a reporter who took it upon himself to write Kid Bethehem, an expose of Lansky with the intent of blocking his immigration. Hannah Groff is a reporter who is attempting to discover who murdered Bellem, and Gila Konig was his mistress.

In telling these stories, Zachary is attempting to tell the story of Israel. The problem is that everything is so jumbled together, there isnt a solid cohesive story to pull out of it. The immigration story is powerful, but one could read the recently published Our Promised Land and understand more of what Zachary is trying to say. There are too many stories going in too many directions without any kind of cohesion. It's a frustrating read.

[Catherine Woodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, yes, this book is titled like the Bob Dylan song:

I pity the poor immigrant

ho wishes he would’ve stayed home

Who uses all his power to do evil

But in the end is always left so alone

That man whom with his fingers cheats

And who lies with ev’ry breath

Who passionately hates his life

And likewise, fears his death


This is a book about outsiders and immigrants and crime bosses and escaping justice. Journalist Hannah Groff travels to Israel to investigate the murder of poet David Bellen. Over the course of her research, she learns about Meyer Lansky, the gangster who emi­grated from Poland to New York and helped to establish the American mob—and build Las Vegas. Facing a murder charge, Lansky sought asylum in Israel, but the government turned him down. Hannah draws connections between Lansky, his mistress Gila Konig—a Holocaust survivor—and Hannah’s own family, leading her to uncover some unsavory aspects of the Groff legacy. The intricate story becomes a meditation on violence and power and their relationship to Jewish identity specifically and personal identity in general. Short and meaningful. Check it out.

[Valeria · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received an advance reader's copy of this novel through the goodreads giveaway program in exchange for a review.

Zachary Lazar’s new novel, I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel, tells the fictionalized story of American gangster Meyer Lansky, Israeli poet David Bellen and American journalist Hannah Groff; intertwined within the stories of all these individuals is that of Gila Konig, and how she comes into each of their lives. This was at first a difficult novel to read and follow because the author goes back and forth between the characters and their relation to one another. But as the story progressed it became much more interesting, the author also interspersed photos, essay's and poems within the character’s storyline to lend more credence to their story. There is definitely a lot going on in this book while it isn’t very long it does cover quite a bit of history, in particular the mafia, the bible’s David and Goliath, and Israel. If you enjoy twists and turns, intricate plot lines and complex and ambivalent characters then this is the novel for you.

[Johanna Miklos · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the title.

I am glad I read this book in hard copy and not on a device. How do readers cope on a device when the structure of the story is fragmented? I was constantly flipping back and forth to follow the timeline of the piece.

There are endless layers in this slim book: from King David (biblical complete with psalms and his life story as stated and interpreted)to the present day unreliable narrator who sets out to write a memoir through the lives of others. I tried to take a single layer - or thread if you will - as a guide through the story - hence the flipping. Israel, Las Vegas, New York . . .all three populated by miserable people - victims or perpetrators - a real world Hunger Games society without a noble heroine.

Is this book a cry against violence? I have no idea. There is certainly a great deal of violent detail - both physical and emotional. A cry against fanaticism? Apathy? Or just a dismal recording of miserable lives?

I really wish the book had a single character who isn't interesting and unlikeable or if likeable then bland.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the parts about Meyer Lansky and birth of the Jewish mafia, but didn't really like the rest, so overall I can only rate this an "it was okay." The novels blends several story lines. The first, and most interesting one, is about (one of?) Lansky's mistresses, an Israeli hotel waitress whom he meets late in life, when he's applying for Israeli citizenship. Other plots include the death of an Israeli poet, his son''s drug overdose, the daughter covering the story, her affair with her Israeli translator/guide, her father's affair and shady antiques business . Confused? I was a little. While they connect the stories just aren't tied tightly enough. So much of the action happens in the past that the pace drags. Our narrator think this and that, wonder this and that, but doesn't do a whole lot. For me there were tooo many questions and not enough answers.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult novel to review. One one hand, it was for the most part well written, with moments of brilliance. On the other hand, it frenetically jumped around between three different times, places and various characters, which frequently made me lose interest, put it down, and then have to later re-read several pages to remind me where I was and what point the author was trying to make. I'm not Jewish; perhaps if I was, it would have held a deeper meaning for me, since it deals primarily with Jewish identity in all its forms. If so, I apologize for not being more knowledgable in order to better appreciate this book.
I received this novel in ARC form from a First Reads giveaway.

[Sari · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel that reads like an authentic memoir. Zachary Lazar's "I Pity the Poor Immigrant" was a wonderful discovery. I thought that I would be reading a fictional version of Meyer Lansky's life. While Meyer Lansky does have a significance presence in the story, I was delightfully surprised to find that I was reading a novel that wrestles with contemporary issues of what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century in America and in Israel.

A worth addition to contemporary American Jewish literature.

[Chris Wharton · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disjointed (intentionally so) tale of Jewish uprootedness in America and Israel. Through a web of mutual acquaintances and contacts, including the American Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky and Holocaust survivors and descendants, the young woman reporter/narrator pursues the story of a mysteriously murdered Israeli writer. Some parts quite good -- edgy in the mode of Lazar’s Sway about the early Rolling Stones from a few years ago (which I liked a lot) -- but I bogged down and rushed through some parts.

[Michael Milgrom · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a high-concept book. I wish I knew what the concept was. The author succeeds in writing a book with a first person narrator of the opposite sex, but the bar is pretty low. Most of the time the narrator is simply thinking like a generic journalist. This is basically a rumination on immigrants and Jews and not terribly original or deep. I wanted to like this book because Adam Kirsch gave it a good review in Tablet. I'm losing faith in him as a reviewer.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could give this anohter half star. I like it, although it never completely came together for me. It's about a journalist writing about the death of an Israeli poet whose final work was on Meyer Lansky. In the course of her research, she relaizes that someone in her own life had ties to Lansky as well and it goes from there. Very fragmented, more a meditation on identity, Jewishness, memory, than a novel and one that intrigued more than it satisifed.

[Joelle Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wish they had half star ratings. Would give it a 3 1/2. I found the story interesting and the book hard to put down, but at little confusing at the end. Found the choppy, jumping around narrative irritating at times. I enjoyed the familiar references to Israeli streets and towns. It piqued my interest in Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Seigel and I'm now interested in reading up on both of them. Would I recommend it? I think yes.

[Abner · Rating 1 out of 5]

I appreciated the intent of this novel but felt it was poorly executed, with layer upon layer of stories that were more confusing than artful. We also got too little of the most interesting characters - Gila and Meyer Lansky - and the ending was disappointing. Why tell us what exactly happened to Bellen? Why not keep us suspended, thinking about all the possibilities? That would've been more artful, I think.

[Racquel · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be quite honest.. even after reaching the last line of the book, I really didn't understand what the author was trying to say. Everything was so confusing, Who the heck is Bellen, Lansky, who is telling the story, is it Hannah or Gila... I kept on and on simply because I hoped there would be an "eureka!" part in the story, but unfortunately, the only sound I made was after finishing the book - and it was a sigh of relief.

[Arnetta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did learn a lot about Jewish identity from the book. However, it was a hard read. The book covers many different people in diff times and places. When a new section would begin-it would take me awhile to figure out who was talking, and when and where we were at. Maybe not a good book to read late at night!

[Mary · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this as a Goodreads win. Was thrilled. I tried several times to read the whole book, but it just didn't interest me. Sorry to say I did not enjoy it and could not finish it. I did pass it on though to another avid reader who thought it might be a good read. When I pass on books, I ask that the book keep being passed so others may enjoy.

[Elina · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a fairly easy read and it told an interesting story but I really did not enjoy the delivery. The story jumped back and forth in time with little or no indications on which time it was in at any given point. The characters were unlikable. couldn't wait to finish it and move on.