Arts & Entertainment

I Pity the Poor Immigrant: Zachary Lazar Reads at Canio's Books

On Saturday, at 5 o’clock on a lovely summer afternoon, a standing room only crowd of people gathered at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, forsaking the pleasures of the beach and pool, to listen to Zachary Lazar read from his new book “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.”

Lazar, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, as well as a resident of Southampton, is the recipient of numerous literary awards including a Guggenheim fellowship. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” has been favorably reviewed in The New Yorker  as well as The New York Times.  It is the tale of an Israeli poet’s murder and an American sleuth’s journey to unravel the mystery of his death, intertwined with the stories of the gangster Meyer Lansky and the biblical King David. It is described by the publisher as equal parts crime story and spiritual quest as well as “a novelistic consideration of Jewish identity.”

At the reading, Lazar touched on the news this past week of the kidnapping and death of three Israeli youths, reportedly by Hamas, and reflected that after having traveled there several times to do research for his book he came away more convinced than ever of the complexity of the dilemma in the Middle East. The book is a journey through the history as well as the topography of Israel told through a the female narrator, Hannah, as she muses on which of the constituents in the increasingly violent Palestinian-Israeli conflict would wish to crush a poet’s dead body by rolling over it multiple times with a vehicle.

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The audience was deeply moved by the reading and the book, which several members of the audience confessed to having read multiple times. After the reading, Lazar answered questions about the genesis of the story, the parallels with music that are a frequent motif in his writing and his decision to assume the voice of a female narrator. After the discussion members of the audience gathered around the podium to have Lazar sign copies of their books.

“I Pity the Poor Immigrant” was published on April 8, by Little Brown & Company.

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