Interaction of history and fiction

With all the interruptions over the last couple of weeks it took me a while to finish reading Zachary Lazar's Pity the Poor Immigrant. I have read James Wood's review of this book in the New Yorker and I was intrigued. The Hutt library had no book by Zachary Lazar, but they got for me from another library Sway Lazar's novel about the early days of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Anita Pallenebrg, and the avant-guard film maker Kenneth Anger. I was captivated. This is how fiction should be written, a mix of the real and the imagined. This is what I would like to do with my own writing. I asked the Hutt Library to order Pity the Poor Immigrant and now I had a chance to read it. Let's face it, it is a convoluted book, lots of characters, lots of stories, all interwoven. But it is also a book of very great depth. One of the main characters is the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. He moved to Israel, claiming the right of return, but Israel was in no need of American gangsters. He was deported to American, where he faced trial and was acquitted. But Lansky was one of the founders of Las Vegas, a city of dreams in the middle of the desert. The parallels with the founding of a Jewish state in the middle of the Palestinian desert to fulfil a Jewish dream is fairly obvious. The novel's fictitious narrator, a New York journalist in Israel writing about the unsolved murder of a fictitious Israeli poet, David Bellen who might have been killed by Palestinians during the Intifada, or by Jewish fundamentalists for his poems about paintings by Ivan Schwebel, a real painter, 'out of place in a foreign context, out of touch with the culture around him but also with the "mother" culture he left behind' (The Report: Abrahamson),whose fictitious series of paintings depicted King David as a contemporary gangster, or he might have been killed by drug dealers who did business with his son, a drug addict, or he might have committed suicide. The link between these is Gila, a survivor of Bergen Belsen, a waitress in the Dan Hotel, who embarked on a liaison with Lansky, and moved to New York to pursue her dream as a fashion designer, where she became the mistress of the father of the narrator. Then there is the informer and guide of the narrator, who is also her indifferent, uncommitted lover damaged by his experiences in the Lebanon  war, who disappears and then returns. This is a very rich thick soup indeed, But complicated as this book is, it is beautifully written with an economy of style reminiscent of Hemingway, and with the power to encapsulate a scene or emoption in a brief apt phrase. Zackary Lazar, though not well known in these parts, is treated as a major contemporary American writer by the American literary establishment, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and is the recipient of a number of awards and grants.