Then things really get complicated, in a gratifying and artful way. A trip to Tel Aviv to investigate the murder of a poet named David Bellen acquaints Hannah with the legend of Lansky, which resonates, as Bellen’s death might be connected to a book in which he reimagined King David as a modern gangster. In other words, King David is Meyer Lansky, on the Mount of Olives, begging sanctuary. It will not be a huge leap to anyone who has read the books of Samuel or Kings. Indeed, Francis Ford Coppola’s first and second “Godfather” movies also read like a retelling of the David story: Michael Corleone, the overlooked kid brother, sent away to tend sheep, comes to power by a daring act of violence. McCluskey, the corrupt cop, is Corleone’s Goliath. (David’s first spoken words in the Bible: “What shall be done to the man that killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the reproach from Israel?”) He finds refuge in Sicily (read: Gath), returns to power, then deteriorates, becoming as sinful as all the others: a king among kings, a nation among nations. “They said God was dead, but God is not / God is the small hard stone / in the boy’s sling,” Lazar writes as Bellen. In this way, God is also the bullet in Lansky’s gun and the F-16 waiting in the Negev. It’s the poet’s book inside Lazar’s book that probably got Bellen killed. Not because it defames David — God already did that — but because it implies that modern Israel is a gangster state filled with Lanskys, victims who have become oppressors.

This is Lazar’s second title to evoke a Bob Dylan song, and his third borrowed from a pop tune. There was the memoir “Evening’s Empire” (the phrase comes from Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”), about the murder of Lazar’s father, an Arizona real estate accountant who got in over his head. Then there was “Sway” (the Rolling Stones, “Sticky Fingers”), a novel that, like this one, mixes fact with fiction and moves in and out of the minds of historical figures. The mere invocation of pop songs, masterpieces of the rock era, is telling; these books are put together less like traditional novels than like pieces of music — “Casino Boogie,” say, in which Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, aping the techniques of William S. Burroughs, cut and stitched together bits of text, in search of spontaneity, jarring juxtaposition. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” is all about juxtaposition. That’s where it gets its power. Extended quotations from history books sit beside newspaper articles, correspondence, psalms. The book weaves like a melody. It’s beautiful, full of passages and bursts of dialogue that break through the noise of complaint and countercomplaint that define so much of the talk about modern Israel. As I went along, it began to remind me of one of those 3-D posters you stare at and stare at — it gives you a headache and becomes maddening until, all of a sudden, a landscape rises from the morass: the displaced persons camps, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn in the dead hours (“The bridge was empty and gleaming in the dark, and Ben had his pistol on the seat between them as they crossed the river into Manhattan”), the boxy apartment houses of Tel Aviv, the ethereal light of Jerusalem, the first Lebanon war. It all appears in these pages, shattered and reconstructed and shattered again.

I’ve thought a lot about the title. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” is a Dylan song that seems to be written from the point of view of God, a melancholy deity meditating on the fate that will befall those poor wayfarers who rebel, wreak evil, don’t believe. Every character in this book is, in one way or another, an emigrant or immigrant, in flight to or from, so it’s easy to see judgment falling harshly on all. But I hold out hope for those Jews who came through the 20th century determined to persist, even if it meant getting dirtied by the muck of existence. As the Israeli politician Yigal Allon said, before Israel launched the pre-emptive strike that brought victory in the Six-Day War: “They will condemn us, and we will survive.”