I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

Genres: Historical Fiction; Jewish Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The stunning new 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.

Release date: April 8, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 256

Sample

I remember taking my father to lunch at an Italian restaurant on 76th Street a few years ago, after my first book, a memoir of my brief marriage, had come out. It was October, and a waiter circulated among the tables with a plate of white truffles beneath a tiny bell jar so that when he lifted it you could take in the aroma before he shaved the truffles over small plates of risotto in black squid ink. Eighty dollars each, those small plates. I can recollect the pungent taste, the Sangiovese in our glasses. It was a daughter’s gesture of affection or self-aggrandizement—these things were always murky between my father and me.

“You remember things,” my father said. “I have the opposite problem. I live in the present too much.”

It’s been almost a year now since my father and I last saw each other. I should tell you that this is a recurring pattern in the story I’m about to tell—fathers and their children drifting apart, losing contact. Perhaps losing contact with my father was some unconscious fear or goal on my part when I flew to Israel for the first time in the spring of 2009 to investigate the murder of an Israeli writer named David Bellen. I went to cover Bellen’s murder, but after my return I learned that the story led elsewhere. It led to a woman from my father’s past named Gila Konig, who was born Tsilya Konig somewhere in Hungary, and who when I saw her briefly gave me her part of this story. Not that what she gave me was sufficient, only tantalizing. Gila Konig, like David Bellen, once lived in Tel Aviv. She is also now dead. My father isn’t speaking to me anymore. These are some of the limitations of my sources for this new book.

Before his death, David Bellen said: “We don’t choose our obsessions—our obsessions, invariably against our deepest wishes, choose us. Against our deepest wishes, we become suddenly, inexplicably, committed to a path we had avoided, a line of thought we’d had no interest in.”

I once said in an interview: “What we need is a memoir without a self. A memoir about somebody other than ‘me.’ An understanding that the story of other people connected to ‘me’ might communicate more than the usual ‘me,’ might show the cultural context of ‘me,’ might even cast doubt on the viability of ‘me.’ ”

I said this in the aftermath of a book scandal, another memoirist caught embellishing his or her “true story,” telling lies. I’m quoting myself here with the same detachment with which I just quoted the writer David Bellen, who is one of the figures in what follows, this odd new “memoir” about people mainly other than “me.” I don’t know if any of this will make sense. What I mean is that the people in this story have become my story, or I have become their story. They are my proxies—I am imagining them as I imagine myself, both from a distance and from the inside. In writing this book, I have come to 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.

A woman, Hannah Groff, goes on a journey. She’s close to forty, divorced, without children, not unhappy but not what anyone would call “settled,” a person in transit, on her way from New York to Tel Aviv to cover a murder. 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.

Gangsters are in this story too. They too are a part of who I’ve become.



Gila Konig looked at the photographs in the newspaper and tried to connect them to the man she’d been secretly meeting this past year, but the pictures came from a different order of reality. They were separate from what she knew about him—what she thought she knew about him. His essential self was like his body, which you could only take in one aspect at a time—the belly, the slick gray hair, the small dark pupils of his eyes.

The photographs were in black and white—they were almost kitsch, they were so old—and it required an effort of imagination to see the violence in them as truly real. In one, a man was slumped over on a floral print sofa in Beverly Hills. One of his eyes had been shot out, his face a clown mask of gore. The blood blended with the darkness of his necktie to cover half his chest in a dark stain. He had been one of her lover’s oldest and closest friends, Benjamin Siegel—“Bugsy,” the captions always called him. The nickname served to cheapen his murder into something picaresque and quaint.

The next picture was also an antique—fifteen years ago, 1957. In this one, there was little visible blood, just the body of a man flat on his back on a hairdresser’s floor. His name was Albert Anastasia. He lay there in a near-cruciform position between two barber’s chairs, his legs draped by a sheet and his head, shoulders, and arms by another sheet, or maybe they were towels. The only things exposed were an armpit, a chest covered in hair, a nipple, an outstretched hand.

The photos and the words were sensational—that is, they managed to paradoxically both magnify and diminish their subjects. The Meyer she knew was calm, not friendly, fastidiously clean, strategic. There was a reason, she thought, that his body had never turned up in a tabloid newspaper photograph.



On the ride into Tel Aviv, he noticed that the sidewalks were full of people looking up at the sky. His driver came off Kings of Israel Square—the city hall like an assemblage of cheap building blocks, pigeons in the big asphalt emptiness—and suddenly everything was cast in shadow. Outside the cafés, waiters stood at the edges of mostly empty tables, arms crossed over their pressed shirts. Right on Frishman, past Dizengoff, Ben Yehuda—juice stands, falafel, laundromats—then farther toward the beach, where the concierges had come out of the hotels, peering and twisting, finding it. Crowds of people silently looking up at the sky, not looking at the car, not looking at him. They turned to each other over their shoulders, then went back to watching what was above, then slowly resumed their courses, heads still raised. There was no way to see from the car what they were looking at.

“What’s happening?” Lansky finally asked the driver.

“I don’t know,” the driver said. “There must be an eclipse. Something like that.”

He spoke fluent English, though with an Israeli accent that at times sounded oddly German.

“I read the paper this morning,” Lansky said. “There was nothing about an eclipse.”

“Clouds maybe.”

“Maybe a patch of clouds. Not an eclipse.”

A crowd of men in suits stood outside the lobby doors, the driveway two lanes thick with black cars. Everyone kept looking at the sky. Lansky waited in the backseat while the driver went in to clear his way. He saw his bag sitting in the sun on the bellman’s cart. The driver returned and he got out of the car, and he and the driver walked past the doorman into the brown lobby. The driver nodded as Lansky got into the elevator by himself and the doors closed.

Gila was sitting in a chair, smoking, still in her uniform, slumped like a child in the beige blouse and black skirt, black nylons. Instead of looking at him, she closed her eyes and exhaled.

“Yosha took my shift,” she said. “I need the money, but it’s okay. What is bad is the way she makes me grovel for it. She knows I’m coming up here, so she makes me grovel.”

He looked over at the bar, the ice bucket, the tongs. “You shouldn’t be begging around like that. You shouldn’t be working here at all.”

“I should be in Ramat Gan, shopping for a new Mercedes. Is that what your wife drives?”

He nodded absently or dismissively and walked toward the window. Beneath them was the Mediterranean, Hayarkon Promenade, the beach with its spatter of orange umbrellas, green umbrellas, swimmers standing in the shallows. Everything was ordinary—the sun had come back out. He went to the bar and made them both a drink.

“I drove into town and all the sudden it was very cloudy,” he said. “Like an eclipse, that was how cloudy it was. Everyone looking up. The whole way down here, I’m worrying how I would get in the hotel without everyone seeing, all the cameras lately, but everyone was just watching the sky. There weren’t any cameras anyway. It was just luck—the clouds, no cameras. My whole life I said that people who believed in luck, they lose, period. Fate, luck, whatever. I guess you can’t really get away from it.”

She was taking off her shoes. He watched, sipping his drink. She knew he was watching. She looked up at him, bent forward, her hair falling in her eyes.

“Where will you go if they make you leave?” she said.

“What makes you think I’ll have to leave?”

“Fate, luck. Those are dangerous words. Maybe you should go back to Poland, that would give them a surprise.”

“You should watch your mouth.”

“Watch my mouth.”

“Whatever comes into your head, you just say it. Maybe that’s why you’re still serving cocktails at a hotel.”

His luggage arrived, five identical changes of clothes. He was tipping the bellman when she put on the bracelet he’d brought her. She looked at it in the mirror, a line bracelet of white gold and small diamonds. Her drink sat untouched on the nightstand. He watched her look at the bracelet and he knew she was already thinking about where to sell it.

Tel Aviv—the sun reflected by water, the coolness between you and it when you looked out the window. The run-down buildings, concrete and stripped paint, the fish lunch in Jaffa, crumbling by the sea.

She had grown up partly in Foehrenwald, a DP camp not far from Munich. Before that, ten months in Bergen-Belsen. When she and her mother came to Israel, her mother changed her name from Tsilya to Gila. It meant “happiness.” He looked at the flatness of her stomach, her breasts, the faint shadows along her rib cage. Sometimes it was beyond him, an effort of patience, but now he relaxed, slow, cognizant, closing his eyes. The sound of her name and the sight of her body as he let his eyes come open again.



Gangster, racketeer, mobster—she could not get the words to adhere to the physical person. Not that she disbelieved the stories, but the stories’ language glared, whereas the truth of him resided in understatement. The gray trousers and the pressed shirt, white linen or pale blue linen. The leather shoes and the blue blazer and the Herald Tribune. Everything important was invisible, maybe glimpsed for just an instant when he turned to her in a certain way and his eyes accused her of looking too closely.

Albert Anastasia had been shot ten times, one of the shots blowing open his skull. Ben “Bugsy” Siegel sprawled in death as if napping on the sofa, his jacket lapel turned up toward his neck, as if he had sought warmth against the onslaught, blood gushing from his eye. Both of them killers before being killed. Both of them Meyer’s partners or vassals or something. She wondered how much of a killer you had to be for others to do your killing for you, to be that separate from the particulars, if that was the truth about him.

A proliferation of rumors, he would say, rumors and lies. He had come to Israel seeking a reprieve from all that—the FBI tail, the false indictments, the subpoenas, the attorney’s fees. 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. As a Jew, even he had the right of return, the birthright of Israeli citizenship.



They drove the hour from Tel Aviv barely talking, the journalist watching the road, sleeves rolled back on his tanned arms. His name was Uri Dan; he was a military correspondent, a sympathetic ear, according to Lansky’s lawyer, Yoram Alroy. Dan had long black hair, a Swiss watch, a chalk-striped shirt half unbuttoned in the heat. An ability to tolerate silence, the first sign of poise.

They parked near the InterContinental Hotel amid the tour buses and stood for a few minutes by the rail with the crowd. Below them, the Mount of Olives was a huge lunar space of white stone, white sand, dark gray cedar trees, the cemetery descending like a dusty quarry cut in steps. The old graves looked like part of the hillside, eternal, sloping down in endless terraces toward the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where the dead would rise. Above it glowed the Old City of Jerusalem—the gold Dome of the Rock, the crenellated wall, the remnants of David’s ancient kingdom, covered over now by the Arab district of Silwan, run-down, cubist, hung with laundry.

Dan squinted down at the cemetery. “It’s unfortunate, the neglect,” he said, raising a flat hand at the panorama. “There’s never enough money to restore it, and once you restore some of it, the boys come down from East Jerusalem and smash it to bits again.”

“Arabs,” Lansky said.

“Yes, of course, Arabs.”

A photographer said hello in English and took their photograph.

“You don’t mind?” Dan said, turning his head.

Lansky bowed and lit a cigarette. He shook out the lit match, then slid the book back inside the lower pocket of his blazer, pushing it down behind the flap with two fingers. “I’m not crazy about it,” he said. “I’m not really crazy about any of this.”

He had explained himself to Dan back in Tel Aviv, how he hoped Dan might write a more balanced account of who he was and why he was here, something to counter the tabloids. His grandparents were buried in Jerusalem—when life had become impossible in Grodno, his grandparents had come here to Jerusalem, while he and his family had gone to New York. He had not been able to find their graves before. Maybe Dan could help him—maybe that was a way they could begin the conversation.

They started down the steep hill, the scenery blinding. They passed the Church of the Ascension, Christian tour groups in the Garden of Gethsemane. The olive trees with their scarred trunks looked like enormous hunks of driftwood. Benjamin Suchowljansky, plot 15, column B, grave 80. His grandfather Benjamin, whom he had last seen sixty years ago, when the languages he spoke were Polish and Yiddish and he was nine years old.

Dogs wandered among the rocks, the broken gates, the weeds. A decrepit rabbi had led them to the grave, where he bent down and cleaned the dirty inscription with his coat sleeve. Lansky pushed his sunglasses back over his head and wiped his eyes. He looked out across the valley without seeing anything but the brightness. He saw his grandfather in a full-length coat, beard, fur-trimmed hat. The dim shul with its broken Torah scrolls decaying on the shelves. The smell of the spice box, the moldy smell of men among books, the yahrtzeit candle in its glass. In Tel Aviv, you never thought about these things, you lived in 1972. He saw himself at twelve, smashing a plate in someone’s face—whores on Madison Street, shtarkes and pimps. New York faces crammed beneath the awnings, wagons and pushcarts and rain.

He took his sunglasses all the way off and held them folded in his hand. He closed his eyes and said the prayer for the dead, remembering the foreign words from three or four lifetimes ago.

“Before we left Poland, there was a big argument,” he said to no one in particular. “I was nine years old, so I remember. My grandfather wanted to be buried here in Israel—he was already an old man. My father wanted all of us to go to America. He thought there would be opportunity there—the old story. Opportunity. In Grodno, one day the rabbi came across a dead girl in the woods, a Polish girl, she’d been raped and killed. So the rabbi ran back for help and they said it must have been him who killed her. He wanted her blood for the Passover—that’s what they said. They cut him up into pieces while he was still alive. They took the four pieces of his body and they nailed them to the city walls of Grodno. It was a brave thing just to take them down and give him a proper burial. We left in 1911, and my parents and my brother and I went to . . .