Point of View

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant" offers a variety of points of view. In some areas, the story is in first person, while in others, it's in third person.

The novel is fiction, but the premise is that it's Hannah Groff's memoir. It begins with an explanation, then goes on to tell a story about her former caregiver, Gila Konig, and her lover, mobster Meyer Lansky. Hannah never witnessed any of the things she writes about. She knows them only from an account from Gila. She does the same with snippets from Lansky's life, then David and Eliav Bellen. It's not possible to know how accurate the accounts are. David Bellen's own account of Lansky points out that people have come to accept legends and rumors as facts, so that there's no way to know for certain what really happened.

Hannah she briefly tells a childhood...