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The Street Sweeper
How breathtakingly close we are to lives that at first seem so far away. From the civil rights struggle in the United States to the Nazi crimes against humanity in Europe, there are more stories than people passing each other every day on the bustling streets of every crowded city. Only some survive to become history. Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can't locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A few kilometres uptown, Australian historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging out of the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally and perhaps even personally. As these two men try to survive in early twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. Two very different paths - Lamont's and Adam's - lead to one greater story as The Street Sweeper, in dealing with memory, love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness, spans the twentieth century to the present, and spans the globe from New York to Melbourne, Chicago to Auschwitz. Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.
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First published January 1, 2011
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About the author
Elliot Perlman
19 books332 followersElliot Perlman is an Australian author and barrister. He has written two novels and one short story collection. His work "condemns the economic rationalism that destroys the humanity of ordinary people when they are confronted with unemployment and poverty". This is not surprising in a writer who admires Raymond Carver and Graham Greene because they "write with quite a strong moral centre and a strong sense of compassion". However, he says that "Part of my task is to entertain readers. I don't want it to be propaganda at all. I don't think that for something to be political fiction it has to offer an alternative, I think just a social critique is enough". He describes himself, in fact, as being interested in "the essence of humanity" and argued that exploring this often means touching on political issues.
Perlman often uses music, and song lyrics, in his work to convey an idea or mood, or to give a sense of who a character is. However, he recognises that this "is a bit of a risk because the less familiar the reader is with the song, the smaller the pay off.
Perlman often uses music, and song lyrics, in his work to convey an idea or mood, or to give a sense of who a character is. However, he recognises that this "is a bit of a risk because the less familiar the reader is with the song, the smaller the pay off.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 686 reviews
July 18, 2023
In another book conversation, I described The Street Sweeper as giving me a
have-my-emotions-turned-upside-down-then-ripped-out-and-stomped on
kind of feeling. Pretty apt to add it to this review, I think
Elliot Perlman's work is compelling to the ninth degree, relentless, colossal, intelligent, unsettling, unwavering and deeply, deeply moving. It is one of those rare novels which teaches, reminds and moves us about historical truths simply too important to be forgotten. The phrase from the book which has haunted me ever since I finished the novel:
“Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.”
Reading this novel, I have been reminded of all the atrocities dealt to the Jewish people and the injustices served to the African Americans. Seventy years after the fact and after reading this novel, I found the site for David Boder (Dr Border in the book), his actual recordings in 1946 of Jews liberated from Auschwitz. http://voices.iit.edu/search_results.... I listened to the recording of a 22yo Jewish woman; absolutely chilling to hear the voice of a person who was in Auschwitz. I will note here that I am the woman who, when on a tour of Europe, stood outside the gates of Auschwitz, frozen to the spot; simply unable to submit myself to the records of the horror perpetrated within. This novel has made me brave.
“As characters interact and fates intertwine, Perlman tells an engaging multi-generational saga witnessing personal histories that heroically endure and survive brutal and horrific racism to become what we know as the history of the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement. At his best, Perlman accomplishes this literary feat by evoking remarkable depth and meaning in otherwise commonplace events and characters…. What is most memorable about this richly woven tale is the lessons about the importance of memory and remembering, and the novel’s underlying compassion and sense of history” USA Today
This is probably the most important novel I have ever read. Put aside your squeamishness – as I did, make yourself read and listen to these voices from across the decades and from the recent years. I urge everyone to read this dynamic page-turner. Tell everyone what happened here. My ultimate book of the decade 5★
**This review is dedicated to the memory of the man who was my childhood neighbour, the man with the strange set of numbers tattooed on his arm, the man who my mum said “had been through more than any human being deserved to have been put through.”
Elliot Perlman's work is compelling to the ninth degree, relentless, colossal, intelligent, unsettling, unwavering and deeply, deeply moving. It is one of those rare novels which teaches, reminds and moves us about historical truths simply too important to be forgotten. The phrase from the book which has haunted me ever since I finished the novel:
“Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.”
Reading this novel, I have been reminded of all the atrocities dealt to the Jewish people and the injustices served to the African Americans. Seventy years after the fact and after reading this novel, I found the site for David Boder (Dr Border in the book), his actual recordings in 1946 of Jews liberated from Auschwitz. http://voices.iit.edu/search_results.... I listened to the recording of a 22yo Jewish woman; absolutely chilling to hear the voice of a person who was in Auschwitz. I will note here that I am the woman who, when on a tour of Europe, stood outside the gates of Auschwitz, frozen to the spot; simply unable to submit myself to the records of the horror perpetrated within. This novel has made me brave.
“As characters interact and fates intertwine, Perlman tells an engaging multi-generational saga witnessing personal histories that heroically endure and survive brutal and horrific racism to become what we know as the history of the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement. At his best, Perlman accomplishes this literary feat by evoking remarkable depth and meaning in otherwise commonplace events and characters…. What is most memorable about this richly woven tale is the lessons about the importance of memory and remembering, and the novel’s underlying compassion and sense of history” USA Today
This is probably the most important novel I have ever read. Put aside your squeamishness – as I did, make yourself read and listen to these voices from across the decades and from the recent years. I urge everyone to read this dynamic page-turner. Tell everyone what happened here. My ultimate book of the decade 5★
**This review is dedicated to the memory of the man who was my childhood neighbour, the man with the strange set of numbers tattooed on his arm, the man who my mum said “had been through more than any human being deserved to have been put through.”
September 30, 2020
“… history is vitally important because perhaps as much as, if not more than, biology, the past owns us and however much we think we can, we cannot escape it. If you only knew how close you are to people who seem so far from you… it would astonish you.”
If I were to use a boxing analogy in terms of this book, I would definitely classify The Street Sweeper as a heavyweight. It’s epic in scope, massive in detail, and determined to gets its point across. It’s a triumphant accomplishment in terms of what it set out to do. It successfully brings together two narratives in order to highlight the links between human beings and the stories and legacies we shoulder. Joining an incredibly moving story of a Holocaust survivor and an equally compelling account of the civil rights movement and racism in America, Elliot Perlman achieved a tremendous task.
“The trick is not to hate yourself. If you can manage not to hate yourself, then it won’t hurt to remember almost anything: your childhood, your parents, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you…”
Lamont Williams is an African-American man that spent the past six years of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit. A story we know all too well about the injustice towards a man of color who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he strikes up a friendship with Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor now diagnosed with incurable cancer, we come to understand the real power of storytelling and the connections between individuals that on the surface appear completely different, but at heart are really not so dissimilar from one another after all. Through Mr. Mandelbrot’s sharing of a horrific past with Lamont, the reader also becomes immersed in a history of a people that were despised, tortured and killed due to the unfounded prejudices of a group of individuals who saw them only as persons to be scorned due to their ‘otherness.’ Mandelbrot is a Jewish man who was forced to work in the Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What he says to Lamont about his servitude took my breath away when the enormity and monstrousness of it all sank in.
“Here was the end of every slur, racial or religious, every joke, every sneer directed against the Jews… that belief or suspicion, sometimes barely conscious, adds momentum to a train on a journey of its own; this is where the line finally ends, at this mountain of corpses. The prejudices, the unfounded states of mind, that grow from wariness to dislike to hatred of the “other,” they all lead to where Henryk Mandelbrot now stood.”
When we meet another character, Adam Zignelik, Columbia University professor and son of an influential civil rights advocate, we begin more clearly to see the connections between the various histories of groups of people. Adam has taken on the challenge of researching the theory that African-American men were some of the first to liberate the concentration camps of World War II. In doing so, he uncovers the work of a man named Henry Border, a Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States and therefore escaped the camps. Border, however, is still haunted by his own past, and after the war speaks to the survivors of these camps in order to bring to light a story of an entire race that was persecuted and largely ignored by the rest of the world.
“Everybody! Tell everybody what happened here!”
When all the various threads of the story converge, it is indeed a monumental feat on the part of the author. It was truly astounding! And for that reason as well as for Perlman’s ability to make this reader heartsick, sympathetic and downright enraged many times throughout, I can’t rate this any less than four stars. What keeps me from awarding that final star is that I often felt the story to be repetitive at times. Perlman had the habit of reminding me too often of who a character was in relation to another (“son of Jake," “Border’s black housekeeper"). Facts were occasionally repeated. For a book this length, at more than 600 pages, these things only managed to pull me out of the story rather than enhance it for me. Furthermore, the characters themselves were not so brilliantly drawn as individuals but more as representative of the group of people to which they belonged – Holocaust survivor, African-American man, struggling history professor, etc. Yet in doing so, Perlman managed to shake me to the core and remind me that the injustices and crimes we commit against groups of individuals is something we cannot simply brush off as something for which we are not responsible. It’s happening now. I can’t imagine a time when cruelties towards one another no longer exist. It makes me truly sick at heart.
“The enemy is racism. But, see, racism isn’t a person. It’s a virus that infects people. It can infect whole towns and cities, even whole countries. Sometimes you can see it in people’s faces when they’re sick with it. It can paralyze even good people. It can paralyze government. We have to fight that wherever we find it. That’s what good people do.”
If I were to use a boxing analogy in terms of this book, I would definitely classify The Street Sweeper as a heavyweight. It’s epic in scope, massive in detail, and determined to gets its point across. It’s a triumphant accomplishment in terms of what it set out to do. It successfully brings together two narratives in order to highlight the links between human beings and the stories and legacies we shoulder. Joining an incredibly moving story of a Holocaust survivor and an equally compelling account of the civil rights movement and racism in America, Elliot Perlman achieved a tremendous task.
“The trick is not to hate yourself. If you can manage not to hate yourself, then it won’t hurt to remember almost anything: your childhood, your parents, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you…”
Lamont Williams is an African-American man that spent the past six years of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit. A story we know all too well about the injustice towards a man of color who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he strikes up a friendship with Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor now diagnosed with incurable cancer, we come to understand the real power of storytelling and the connections between individuals that on the surface appear completely different, but at heart are really not so dissimilar from one another after all. Through Mr. Mandelbrot’s sharing of a horrific past with Lamont, the reader also becomes immersed in a history of a people that were despised, tortured and killed due to the unfounded prejudices of a group of individuals who saw them only as persons to be scorned due to their ‘otherness.’ Mandelbrot is a Jewish man who was forced to work in the Sonderkommando unit at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What he says to Lamont about his servitude took my breath away when the enormity and monstrousness of it all sank in.
“Here was the end of every slur, racial or religious, every joke, every sneer directed against the Jews… that belief or suspicion, sometimes barely conscious, adds momentum to a train on a journey of its own; this is where the line finally ends, at this mountain of corpses. The prejudices, the unfounded states of mind, that grow from wariness to dislike to hatred of the “other,” they all lead to where Henryk Mandelbrot now stood.”
When we meet another character, Adam Zignelik, Columbia University professor and son of an influential civil rights advocate, we begin more clearly to see the connections between the various histories of groups of people. Adam has taken on the challenge of researching the theory that African-American men were some of the first to liberate the concentration camps of World War II. In doing so, he uncovers the work of a man named Henry Border, a Polish Jew who immigrated to the United States and therefore escaped the camps. Border, however, is still haunted by his own past, and after the war speaks to the survivors of these camps in order to bring to light a story of an entire race that was persecuted and largely ignored by the rest of the world.
“Everybody! Tell everybody what happened here!”
When all the various threads of the story converge, it is indeed a monumental feat on the part of the author. It was truly astounding! And for that reason as well as for Perlman’s ability to make this reader heartsick, sympathetic and downright enraged many times throughout, I can’t rate this any less than four stars. What keeps me from awarding that final star is that I often felt the story to be repetitive at times. Perlman had the habit of reminding me too often of who a character was in relation to another (“son of Jake," “Border’s black housekeeper"). Facts were occasionally repeated. For a book this length, at more than 600 pages, these things only managed to pull me out of the story rather than enhance it for me. Furthermore, the characters themselves were not so brilliantly drawn as individuals but more as representative of the group of people to which they belonged – Holocaust survivor, African-American man, struggling history professor, etc. Yet in doing so, Perlman managed to shake me to the core and remind me that the injustices and crimes we commit against groups of individuals is something we cannot simply brush off as something for which we are not responsible. It’s happening now. I can’t imagine a time when cruelties towards one another no longer exist. It makes me truly sick at heart.
“The enemy is racism. But, see, racism isn’t a person. It’s a virus that infects people. It can infect whole towns and cities, even whole countries. Sometimes you can see it in people’s faces when they’re sick with it. It can paralyze even good people. It can paralyze government. We have to fight that wherever we find it. That’s what good people do.”
March 23, 2014
While it has been many years since the liberation of the Jews from the last concentration camp, we still need to be told about what happened there because it would be more than disgraceful if we forget. Elliot Perlman masterfully does this in this incredibly important novel, inspired by the lives of some real people. It will shake your sensibilities; it is deeply moving, gut wrenching, and heart breaking and this doesn't aptly describe it .The description of what happened in the gas chambers in the death camps is so disturbing that it will make you sick to your stomach and this is precisely why this this book has to be read.
I have read a good number of other books on the holocaust from different perspectives – from The Diary of Anne Frank to Night to Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, to name a few. But I am ashamed to say that I didn’t know there was a difference between concentration camps and death camps and I didn’t know there was a Resistance Movement at some of the camps. I do now.
An unlikely friendship develops between Lamont Williams, an ex-con and hospital maintenance worker, who had been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and a Henryk Mandelbrot, a holocaust survivor who is dying of cancer. Henryk tells his story to Lamont and why he did the work he had to do in the death camp. He tells Lamont : “ …all the time you’re thinking that somebody has to survive just to tell what happened. Somebody has to get the story out. Maybe that will be me that gets the story out so that the world will know. Otherwise, how will anybody know what they did there?”
Lamont and Henryk’s narrative is just one of several that are layered here. Adam, the failing university historian , trying to help out William McCray, a family friend, who is convinced of the role of black soldiers in World War II and the role they played in the liberation of the Jews from a concentration camp. McCray believes that it was these soldiers who were instrumental in the civil rights movement. He wants to get their story out and tell what happened there.
It shouldn’t be lost on the reader that it is through this investigation that Adam discovers the story of Dr.Border. Dr. Border, a Polish Jew, an immigrant makes it his life to interview holocaust survivors in order to tell their story and what happened there. So yet another narrative unfolds. The recordings are found by Adam and then he must get the story out and tell what happened there. It is also in Dr. Border’s story that we learn of the injustices and racist treatment of black people in the meat industry in Chicago.
While the stories of the holocaust survivors and the fight for civil rights are the guts of this book, it is worth noting the amazing way these stories are told, and linked. The narratives expand and there are new stories and then the author alternates between these narratives moving from the past to the present, linking these characters and their stories in a magnificent way. I really was amazed at how much was going on here and how many people were in these stories, but mostly amazed that I was fully engaged in all of it and in all of them. I have not listed all of them here. You have to read it yourself to discover them.
I can only ask if we will really ever be able to comprehend these atrocities against humanity ? Most likely not but I would thank Mr. Perlman for telling us what happened there.
August 18, 2016
"Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all of its own that you can never know. It can capture, corner you or liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile."
Early in the novel Perlman revives the memory of the four little black girls who are killed by a bomb planted by white supremicists while attending Bible class at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama. He then recounts the story of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine chosen black students attempting to become the first students of their race to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth’s parents don’t have a phone so don’t know the other eight students are to be taken to the school in police cars. She arrives there alone on the bus. She is wearing a black and white pleated skirt. Perlman shows us Elizabeth is a kind and intelligent fifteen year old girl. “She has always been very polite, always been a good girl, been no trouble to her teachers, always paid attention.” A large crowd is hurling abuse at her. The guards offer no protection. She walks the gauntlet. The crowd begins to surge towards her. She seeks kindness in the eyes of the guards but finds none. They block her way. The hatred of the crowd increases. She decides to retreat back to the bus stop. “These people didn’t know her. Where in her fifteen years of life was the thing she had done that was so bad they should hate her this much? There were so many of them and they all hated her.” The crowd presses closer and she hears the cry “Lynch her! Lynch her! Drag her over to this tree.”
This highly emotive set-piece sets the theme of the novel. Perlman is going to revive moments of history in which the innocent have suffered unspeakable persecution because of their race. And not only that, he is going to do it in a way that engages the full surge and sweep of your protective instincts as a reader. He is going to get you to care deeply about his characters.
Essentially The Street Sweeper is a novel about storytelling itself and its redemptive power. And because Perlman is writing about oral histories this book is cleverly recounted, in the main, through dialogue. Perlman is no wordsmith and his prose is very direct and straightforward which makes it very easy to read. The two historians of the novel are Adam Zignelik, a drifting Jewish academic whose father was a prominent lawyer in the civil rights movement and Lamont Williams, the street sweeper himself, recently out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit – he drives his friend to a store out of kindness, unaware his friend is going to rob the store. Each of these characters, through an act of fate, will have a story told to him. The two narratives will eventually converge on one historical event – the Sonderkommando uprising at Auschwitz. This historical attempt at liberation will, at least, many years down the line, bring forth a liberation in the lives of the people who have kept the story alive.
In a nutshell this is an intelligent, cleverly constructed and moving page turner of a novel. Big thumbs up from me. Thanks to Angela M and B the Book addict whose brilliant reviews drew my attention to it.
Early in the novel Perlman revives the memory of the four little black girls who are killed by a bomb planted by white supremicists while attending Bible class at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama. He then recounts the story of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine chosen black students attempting to become the first students of their race to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth’s parents don’t have a phone so don’t know the other eight students are to be taken to the school in police cars. She arrives there alone on the bus. She is wearing a black and white pleated skirt. Perlman shows us Elizabeth is a kind and intelligent fifteen year old girl. “She has always been very polite, always been a good girl, been no trouble to her teachers, always paid attention.” A large crowd is hurling abuse at her. The guards offer no protection. She walks the gauntlet. The crowd begins to surge towards her. She seeks kindness in the eyes of the guards but finds none. They block her way. The hatred of the crowd increases. She decides to retreat back to the bus stop. “These people didn’t know her. Where in her fifteen years of life was the thing she had done that was so bad they should hate her this much? There were so many of them and they all hated her.” The crowd presses closer and she hears the cry “Lynch her! Lynch her! Drag her over to this tree.”
This highly emotive set-piece sets the theme of the novel. Perlman is going to revive moments of history in which the innocent have suffered unspeakable persecution because of their race. And not only that, he is going to do it in a way that engages the full surge and sweep of your protective instincts as a reader. He is going to get you to care deeply about his characters.
Essentially The Street Sweeper is a novel about storytelling itself and its redemptive power. And because Perlman is writing about oral histories this book is cleverly recounted, in the main, through dialogue. Perlman is no wordsmith and his prose is very direct and straightforward which makes it very easy to read. The two historians of the novel are Adam Zignelik, a drifting Jewish academic whose father was a prominent lawyer in the civil rights movement and Lamont Williams, the street sweeper himself, recently out of prison for a crime he didn’t commit – he drives his friend to a store out of kindness, unaware his friend is going to rob the store. Each of these characters, through an act of fate, will have a story told to him. The two narratives will eventually converge on one historical event – the Sonderkommando uprising at Auschwitz. This historical attempt at liberation will, at least, many years down the line, bring forth a liberation in the lives of the people who have kept the story alive.
In a nutshell this is an intelligent, cleverly constructed and moving page turner of a novel. Big thumbs up from me. Thanks to Angela M and B the Book addict whose brilliant reviews drew my attention to it.
August 19, 2016
The best novel I’ve read so far this year. It’s about the redemptive powers of storytelling and is intelligent, compelling and deeply moving. It features a cast of brilliantly drawn characters and does a fantastic job of demonising racism.
The street sweeper is Lamont Williams, an American black man in his 30s and an ex-convict who has lost touch with his young daughter. He is living with his grandmother in the Bronx, and after doing a good deed is offered a job as a janitor at a New York cancer hospital. Lamont is immensely likeable. Perlman does an excellent job of making us feel very protective towards him. One of the patients he meets is Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. Williams begins visiting the elderly man, purely for the love of talking with him and Mandelbrot begins sharing his wartime memories.
A second narrative features Adam Zignelik, a young historian whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer. Adam, like Lamont, is at a dead end and losing the love of his girlfriend Diana. He is persuaded by a friend of his father’s to explore a cache of interviews with Holocaust survivors. Adam, like Lamont, becomes a listener.
Perlman does a masterful job of unfurling the plot which extends ever further back in time, bringing the past back to life. Soon it becomes as gripping as the best murder mysteries.
Highly recommended.
The street sweeper is Lamont Williams, an American black man in his 30s and an ex-convict who has lost touch with his young daughter. He is living with his grandmother in the Bronx, and after doing a good deed is offered a job as a janitor at a New York cancer hospital. Lamont is immensely likeable. Perlman does an excellent job of making us feel very protective towards him. One of the patients he meets is Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. Williams begins visiting the elderly man, purely for the love of talking with him and Mandelbrot begins sharing his wartime memories.
A second narrative features Adam Zignelik, a young historian whose father was a prominent civil rights lawyer. Adam, like Lamont, is at a dead end and losing the love of his girlfriend Diana. He is persuaded by a friend of his father’s to explore a cache of interviews with Holocaust survivors. Adam, like Lamont, becomes a listener.
Perlman does a masterful job of unfurling the plot which extends ever further back in time, bringing the past back to life. Soon it becomes as gripping as the best murder mysteries.
Highly recommended.
April 29, 2019
This is one of those books that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. FINALLY!
I knew I’d like it....but as *Publishers Weekly* wrote....(which I could never have fully
imagined until I read it myself).....
“Perlman brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and crafts a moving and literate page turner”.
I read and reread the first page 4 different times — at different crossroads in this story. I needed to stop and think about the power behind these words and how they spill over every inch of our lives.
“Memory is a willful dog. It won’t be summoned or dimissed but it cannot survive without you. It can’t sustain you or feed on you. It visit when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all it’s own that you can never know. It can capture you,
corner you or liberate you. It can have you howling and it can make you smile”.
“The trick is not to hate yourself. That’s what he’d been told inside. If you can manage not to hate yourself, then it won’t hurt to remember almost anything: your childhood, your parents, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you”.
Memory helps make individuals who they are. Without the help of memories, someone would struggle to learn new information, from lasting relationships, or function in daily life.
And as *The Guardian* says:
“Epic is a word that one must use carefully. But this is an epic, in scope and moral seriousness...Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing”.
Almost nobody believed Lamont Williams, an African American man in his 30’s, was innocent.... but he really ‘was’ innocent.
Some of his friends went into a liquor store, robbed it and ruined his life.
Lamont spent three years in the Woodbourne Correctional Facility. Then - because he was a model prisoner, he was transferred to Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. It was less violent there and prisoners could almost see the street so they tended to behave better.
So, for three years at Mid-Orange, Lamont swept up cigarette butts and mess left by prisoners and imagined a day when he would see his daughter. The child was only 2 years of age when Lamont was in incarcerated.
Once Lamont was out of prison - ( and went to live with his grandmother in the Bronx - he got a job - a probationary employee in the Building Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
While at the Cancer center, Lamont meets an elderly Holocaust survivor, named Henryk Mandelbrot. Lamont had never heard of ‘the death camps’. And he certainly did not know the difference between the death camps, and concentration camps...which Mandelbrot teaches Lamont.
Lamont listens. Mandelbrot speaks......
.....about Auschwitz...Nazi horrors, Polish history, various resistance movements, the thousand of Hungarian Jews who had perished in the gas chambers, and about the destruction from Creamatorium IV and how he got off the ground.
“Of the 663 Sonderkommando men alive before the rising, only 212 were left”.
Mandelbrot also teaches Lamont the importance for remembering everything he tells him.
Lamont is also searching for his daughter. She was only 2 years of age when he was first locked up in prison. His ex-wife, moved on -re-married. Even if his daughter had taken a New last name - Lamont is determined to find his 8 year old daughter.....hoping she will look at his with loving eyes.
We also meet Adam Zignelik, a history professor at Columbia University. He’s not doing too well... professionally or personally.
His girlfriend, Diane of eight years, moved out of their apartment- not because they didn’t love each - but because Adam didn’t want to bring a child into this world and felt the greatest gift he could do was break up with Diane so that she could have a baby that she so wanted with somebody else. Diane thought Adam was insane!! They had a great relationship- loved each other deeply. They shared things - so many joint memories- that would never be the same if they separated.
I RE-READ the FIRST PAGE THINKING ABOUT Adam & Diane & MEMORY.
It was just the first of 4 of those times in the storytelling when I referred back to a major theme in this book: A BOOK ABOUT MEMORY.
When Adam was teaching a history class - the same day Diane was packing her bags to leave his apartment- I was cringing imaging PROFESSOR ZIGNELIK struggle through his lecture. It was a totally engaging & embarrassing college class... I was hanging on to every word at how it might turn out. Poor Adam....who already is not going to make tenure....but now his students were on to him - ( those funny true or false stories he told his students was only making Adam look like a ‘loser’. Adam just needed to survive his class...his own lecture... get through it.
We will learn much more about Adam as the story goes on and his connection to Lamont.
There are so many great things to say about this book. We look at the Holocaust - discrimination, and racial intolerance through an array of varied characters. I felt tears coming on a few times.
Elliot Perlman is a wonderful storyteller.
We look at Jewish persecution....and racial prejudice.
The historical details are gut wrenching....(cruelty is always horrific).
The way the storytelling and main characters come together - evolve into friendship is really moving.
It’s a story that stands for freedom and peace.....and telling us THESE STORIES MUST BE REMEMBERED.
In memory of the recent horrific shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego...Jewish families everywhere are saying....”we will not be broken”.....
Thoughts and prayers to all those affected... ( which is all of us).
I knew I’d like it....but as *Publishers Weekly* wrote....(which I could never have fully
imagined until I read it myself).....
“Perlman brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and crafts a moving and literate page turner”.
I read and reread the first page 4 different times — at different crossroads in this story. I needed to stop and think about the power behind these words and how they spill over every inch of our lives.
“Memory is a willful dog. It won’t be summoned or dimissed but it cannot survive without you. It can’t sustain you or feed on you. It visit when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule all it’s own that you can never know. It can capture you,
corner you or liberate you. It can have you howling and it can make you smile”.
“The trick is not to hate yourself. That’s what he’d been told inside. If you can manage not to hate yourself, then it won’t hurt to remember almost anything: your childhood, your parents, what you’ve done or what’s been done to you”.
Memory helps make individuals who they are. Without the help of memories, someone would struggle to learn new information, from lasting relationships, or function in daily life.
And as *The Guardian* says:
“Epic is a word that one must use carefully. But this is an epic, in scope and moral seriousness...Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing”.
Almost nobody believed Lamont Williams, an African American man in his 30’s, was innocent.... but he really ‘was’ innocent.
Some of his friends went into a liquor store, robbed it and ruined his life.
Lamont spent three years in the Woodbourne Correctional Facility. Then - because he was a model prisoner, he was transferred to Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. It was less violent there and prisoners could almost see the street so they tended to behave better.
So, for three years at Mid-Orange, Lamont swept up cigarette butts and mess left by prisoners and imagined a day when he would see his daughter. The child was only 2 years of age when Lamont was in incarcerated.
Once Lamont was out of prison - ( and went to live with his grandmother in the Bronx - he got a job - a probationary employee in the Building Services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
While at the Cancer center, Lamont meets an elderly Holocaust survivor, named Henryk Mandelbrot. Lamont had never heard of ‘the death camps’. And he certainly did not know the difference between the death camps, and concentration camps...which Mandelbrot teaches Lamont.
Lamont listens. Mandelbrot speaks......
.....about Auschwitz...Nazi horrors, Polish history, various resistance movements, the thousand of Hungarian Jews who had perished in the gas chambers, and about the destruction from Creamatorium IV and how he got off the ground.
“Of the 663 Sonderkommando men alive before the rising, only 212 were left”.
Mandelbrot also teaches Lamont the importance for remembering everything he tells him.
Lamont is also searching for his daughter. She was only 2 years of age when he was first locked up in prison. His ex-wife, moved on -re-married. Even if his daughter had taken a New last name - Lamont is determined to find his 8 year old daughter.....hoping she will look at his with loving eyes.
We also meet Adam Zignelik, a history professor at Columbia University. He’s not doing too well... professionally or personally.
His girlfriend, Diane of eight years, moved out of their apartment- not because they didn’t love each - but because Adam didn’t want to bring a child into this world and felt the greatest gift he could do was break up with Diane so that she could have a baby that she so wanted with somebody else. Diane thought Adam was insane!! They had a great relationship- loved each other deeply. They shared things - so many joint memories- that would never be the same if they separated.
I RE-READ the FIRST PAGE THINKING ABOUT Adam & Diane & MEMORY.
It was just the first of 4 of those times in the storytelling when I referred back to a major theme in this book: A BOOK ABOUT MEMORY.
When Adam was teaching a history class - the same day Diane was packing her bags to leave his apartment- I was cringing imaging PROFESSOR ZIGNELIK struggle through his lecture. It was a totally engaging & embarrassing college class... I was hanging on to every word at how it might turn out. Poor Adam....who already is not going to make tenure....but now his students were on to him - ( those funny true or false stories he told his students was only making Adam look like a ‘loser’. Adam just needed to survive his class...his own lecture... get through it.
We will learn much more about Adam as the story goes on and his connection to Lamont.
There are so many great things to say about this book. We look at the Holocaust - discrimination, and racial intolerance through an array of varied characters. I felt tears coming on a few times.
Elliot Perlman is a wonderful storyteller.
We look at Jewish persecution....and racial prejudice.
The historical details are gut wrenching....(cruelty is always horrific).
The way the storytelling and main characters come together - evolve into friendship is really moving.
It’s a story that stands for freedom and peace.....and telling us THESE STORIES MUST BE REMEMBERED.
In memory of the recent horrific shooting at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego...Jewish families everywhere are saying....”we will not be broken”.....
Thoughts and prayers to all those affected... ( which is all of us).
August 10, 2019
Occasionally you come across a book that rips your insides into ribbons or makes you feel like you are underwater and in danger of having your lungs burst. When you do, you find you have to stop, lay the book aside, and come up for air. I felt that way a number of times while reading The Street Sweeper. The horror of what men will do to one another, have done and still do, is somehow overwhelming, no matter how many times you have encountered it before.
Perlman achieves a perfect balance between the past and the present in this novel, and he explores some of the hardest issues we face as human beings, our prejudices against one another, our ability to see the “other” as less human than ourselves, the complete suspension of compassion in some, and the horrid evil that lurks in others. It is subject matter that has been explored before, particularly with regard to the Holocaust, but Perlman does it so well that it feels freshly horrendous, sickening and unspeakable.
From his characters Lamont Williams, a man who has spent six years of his life incarcerated for a crime he did not commit; Adam Zignelik, a history professor who is facing the collapse of his career and personal life; William McCray, an early civil rights lawyer who wants his son and others who have benefited from the struggle to recognize that it is on-going; Dr. Border, who attempts to record the history of those who have survived the attempted annihilation of their race, and Henryk Mandelbrot, a man who endured the unthinkable in Auschwitz and wants no one to forget what happened there, Perlman squeezes every drop of emotion and injustice and hope that can be salvaged.
History can provide comfort in difficult or even turbulent and traumatic times. It shows us what our species has been through before and that we survived. It can help to know we’ve made it through more than one dark age. And history is vitally important because perhaps as much as, if not more than, biology, the past owns us and however much we think we can, we cannot escape it. If you only knew how close you are to people who seem so far from you...it would astonish you.
Indeed, that is the reason for history and also the reason we need to read books like this one and have writers like Elliot Perlman who are willing to face the atrocities of both the past and the present, pull them into the light, and ask us if we cannot be better than this going forward.
There were no towers with armed guards surrounding the Mecca, the malnutrition that the children tearing around the foyer screaming at one another suffered was subtle, and no one was being shipped off to be exterminated, but this was unequivocally a ghetto. It was the ghetto one got in a country pretending to be at peace with itself. Where did you put your slaves when you were no longer allowed to keep them? Henry Border knew a ghetto when he saw one.
This book is well researched and all too real. It cannot fail to make you stop and think about your own life, to look a bit more closely at the lives of those around you, and, if you are a praying man, it will force you to your knees.
Perlman achieves a perfect balance between the past and the present in this novel, and he explores some of the hardest issues we face as human beings, our prejudices against one another, our ability to see the “other” as less human than ourselves, the complete suspension of compassion in some, and the horrid evil that lurks in others. It is subject matter that has been explored before, particularly with regard to the Holocaust, but Perlman does it so well that it feels freshly horrendous, sickening and unspeakable.
From his characters Lamont Williams, a man who has spent six years of his life incarcerated for a crime he did not commit; Adam Zignelik, a history professor who is facing the collapse of his career and personal life; William McCray, an early civil rights lawyer who wants his son and others who have benefited from the struggle to recognize that it is on-going; Dr. Border, who attempts to record the history of those who have survived the attempted annihilation of their race, and Henryk Mandelbrot, a man who endured the unthinkable in Auschwitz and wants no one to forget what happened there, Perlman squeezes every drop of emotion and injustice and hope that can be salvaged.
History can provide comfort in difficult or even turbulent and traumatic times. It shows us what our species has been through before and that we survived. It can help to know we’ve made it through more than one dark age. And history is vitally important because perhaps as much as, if not more than, biology, the past owns us and however much we think we can, we cannot escape it. If you only knew how close you are to people who seem so far from you...it would astonish you.
Indeed, that is the reason for history and also the reason we need to read books like this one and have writers like Elliot Perlman who are willing to face the atrocities of both the past and the present, pull them into the light, and ask us if we cannot be better than this going forward.
There were no towers with armed guards surrounding the Mecca, the malnutrition that the children tearing around the foyer screaming at one another suffered was subtle, and no one was being shipped off to be exterminated, but this was unequivocally a ghetto. It was the ghetto one got in a country pretending to be at peace with itself. Where did you put your slaves when you were no longer allowed to keep them? Henry Border knew a ghetto when he saw one.
This book is well researched and all too real. It cannot fail to make you stop and think about your own life, to look a bit more closely at the lives of those around you, and, if you are a praying man, it will force you to your knees.
July 31, 2019
I've been pretty useless for the past week because I went down the rabbit hole with this book, and just like Alice, I wasn't the same person when I returned. Every time I opened the book, I literally fell into it, losing any conciousness of what was going on around me. It was impossible to read very long at any one time because of the intensity of the storytelling. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about the characters.
Let's just say this novel was a masterful combination of history and storytelling. Using fictional characters as stand-ins for real people involved in actual historical events, we begin to understand more than we ever wanted to know about the Nazi death camps during WWII, and also about hatred and racism, not just for Jews, but blacks and Muslims and women and ex-cons, and anyone that may be down and out, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The connections between all of us are closer than we may think.
I don't know how the author pulled this off, or how long it took him, but the magnitude of his accomplishment is almost unbelievable. Every time I see pictures on the news of groups of people chanting "Send her back" or "Lock her up" or any other short phrase intended to belittle any person or group, I'm going to think of this book.
"Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here."
It's more important than you think.
Let's just say this novel was a masterful combination of history and storytelling. Using fictional characters as stand-ins for real people involved in actual historical events, we begin to understand more than we ever wanted to know about the Nazi death camps during WWII, and also about hatred and racism, not just for Jews, but blacks and Muslims and women and ex-cons, and anyone that may be down and out, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The connections between all of us are closer than we may think.
I don't know how the author pulled this off, or how long it took him, but the magnitude of his accomplishment is almost unbelievable. Every time I see pictures on the news of groups of people chanting "Send her back" or "Lock her up" or any other short phrase intended to belittle any person or group, I'm going to think of this book.
"Tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here."
It's more important than you think.
April 11, 2017
What a beautiful story that is full of emotion. Fortunately, I was very patient with this book and was not in a hurry to finish. There are lots of characters and lots of historical happenings that take some time to get through. When everything comes around full circle I found it impossible not to give this a 5 star rating. It's very detailed in explaining the death camps of the war. I guess that's a trigger warning. It's very disturbing. I loved this book!!!! Grab a box of tissues and brace yourself for a great read!
February 16, 2012
I had strong and contrary reactions to the opening of this novel. It’s because it opens with two story trajectories – of black civil rights in America and of Jews and the Holocaust. The positive reaction was to the opening scene with Lamont, the African American man who has just got out of prison and been able to find a placement in a job – against the odds. He is catching a bus to work and is full of anxiety – compounded by the fact that a Hispanic man gets on the bus angry with the driver who is apparently running late. Lamont is the only other man on the bus and feels under some pressure to try to end the argument between to two men. This is very good writing – full of tension, visually strong, interesting in its exploration of the expectations and values circulating in this busload of low-socio-economic individuals. I immediately started to care about Lamont. The second reaction was more wary. Adam is an untenured historian at Columbia who is about to lose his job because he hasn’t published anything for a few years. A credible situation. What I initially struggled with was the idea that he would therefore want to end his long-term relationship with his girlfriend Diana. She wanted kids. He felt that he could not provide for a family in the short term and broke up with her. I didn’t quite believe it even though it seemed to connect with an old preoccupation of Perlman’s – that was initially a significant part of his novel Three Dollars – the pressure on the man to provide for the family.
Then I thought of M, a friend of mine. About 22 years ago, he announced that his then girlfriend J was pregnant, that they would get married and that he was renouncing his former life. He sold his record player and extensive record collection (and maybe lots of other things) as a symbol of this new road he was taking. It felt sacrificial (with a tinge of martyr). It seemed like he felt that he needed to be a different kind of person if he was married with a child and a mortgage. I didn’t really understand it then but the strength of the ‘fork in the road’ feeling for him was obvious. At the time I thought that maybe he hadn’t thought of J as being “the one” but they are still together.
So this was Adam – making dramatic gestures because of this sense of what men should offer. The book is only slightly about this of course – it’s about lots of things and I liked it a lot. What it is about is racism – in many forms. Perlman covers a LOT of new ground. Even though this is a book which deals with the seemingly familiar events of the Holocaust, there is a lot of new material that I was unaware of. In an interview with Jane Sullivan, Perlman said he was inspired by a number of key things: “One was a poetry reading Perlman attended, where he heard poems from Greetings from Sloan-Kettering, a posthumously published book by Abba Kovner, a cancer patient who had been a Jewish partisan during World War II. Another was a radio documentary he chanced to hear about David Boder, a Chicago psychologist who had gone to Europe just after the war and had done something quite unheard of at the time: he had recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. Perlman listened to the last interview Boder conducted. He broke off speaking in Yiddish and the woman he was interviewing was in a flood of tears. Perlman says: ''For the first time, he lost control of his emotions. He said to this woman, 'Who is going to stand in judgment over all of this and who is going to judge my work?'''That was another question the author had to answer, Perlman decided. Only he changed the man's name to Henry Border and the question to, ''Who is going to judge me?'' because the man's voice ''was dripping in guilt. What was this guy so guilty about?'' (http://www.theage.com.au/entertainmen...)
The radio show was This American Life (my favourite podcast) – and the episode ‘Before it had a name’. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio...) The name of that episode is derived from the idea that the Holocaust is a term of only recent widespread usage and understanding. Before we knew the Holocaust as the Holocaust – before people realised the enormity of what had happened to the Jews (I am not sure here about when that realisation did strike the world – and to what extent people and governments buried knowledge of it – not sure when everyone knew what the Holocaust was – I have grown up with it as a concept in recent history. Wikipedia says this: The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt (kaustos). For hundreds of years, the word "holocaust" was used in English to denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews. The mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word Shoah, meaning "calamity", became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom.”
I digress. It’s easy with this novel – there are lots of little bypaths that are worthy of exploration. For example, I would like to know heaps more about the civil rights history which we get a glimpse of – the de-segregation of schools, the resulting riots, the intake of African Americans into the union movement, the silence about the roles of black soldiers in WW2, the uprisings in Auschwitz etc etc. I can’t do these justice – read the book. It’s very interesting reading about a period that I know little about. This creates a strain for the writer – he needs to tell us a lot and I sometimes felt that it was a little didactic – “I’m glad you asked” was the kind of tone – especially over the pages to do with black history. Worth putting up with this though – it’s a great story – based on a degree of personal connection. Perlman had relatives who disappeared in the Holocaust – his great-uncle Rafal Gutman had a prestigious job in charge of Jewish education in Warsaw at the outbreak of war. The Nazis said he could stay as long as he provided them with a list of Jews to be transported. Gutman refused and committed suicide.
I felt that Perlman had taken some risks in writing about two uber-politically laden narratives. You can get in a lot of trouble in this terrain. However he is so clearly guided by the desire to put “Tell everybody what happened” (as the brave and doomed Auschwitz prisoners urge). I felt swept up in the merging stories. I will read more about the themes of the novel and I’m sure it will resonate for a long time.
PS. I went to hear Perlman speak about the novel last night. A woman asked him about the preponderance of coincidences in the book and in response he told this story: He'd been invited to speak at the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne and an old woman approached him after. It was in reference to the Rosa charcter. She said that she'd sat opposite the real Rosa in the clothes-sorting room in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The real Rosa had been a genuine source of support to the woman who was then 12 years old, even though they had to speak in whispers. She advised the young girl that her mother, who was ill with malaria, would need quinine - and that they only people who may be able to get hold of it were the SonderKommando. This little girl took enormous risks to get across the camp to the Sonderkommando and was helped by the real life version of a character named Chaim who supplied the quinine. The old woman said that Rosa had told her to be brave because "They", the surrounding SS, would all be shot eventually. Rosa died, Chaim died but this old woman lives on in Melbourne.
Perlman told it better than I have. He continues to hear stories about that time from elderly survivors - some about the existence of black soldiers in teh liberation, and some about the actual people in the camps. It's fantastic that this book is generating this kind of oral history and re-kindling interest in this period amongst many people.
Then I thought of M, a friend of mine. About 22 years ago, he announced that his then girlfriend J was pregnant, that they would get married and that he was renouncing his former life. He sold his record player and extensive record collection (and maybe lots of other things) as a symbol of this new road he was taking. It felt sacrificial (with a tinge of martyr). It seemed like he felt that he needed to be a different kind of person if he was married with a child and a mortgage. I didn’t really understand it then but the strength of the ‘fork in the road’ feeling for him was obvious. At the time I thought that maybe he hadn’t thought of J as being “the one” but they are still together.
So this was Adam – making dramatic gestures because of this sense of what men should offer. The book is only slightly about this of course – it’s about lots of things and I liked it a lot. What it is about is racism – in many forms. Perlman covers a LOT of new ground. Even though this is a book which deals with the seemingly familiar events of the Holocaust, there is a lot of new material that I was unaware of. In an interview with Jane Sullivan, Perlman said he was inspired by a number of key things: “One was a poetry reading Perlman attended, where he heard poems from Greetings from Sloan-Kettering, a posthumously published book by Abba Kovner, a cancer patient who had been a Jewish partisan during World War II. Another was a radio documentary he chanced to hear about David Boder, a Chicago psychologist who had gone to Europe just after the war and had done something quite unheard of at the time: he had recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. Perlman listened to the last interview Boder conducted. He broke off speaking in Yiddish and the woman he was interviewing was in a flood of tears. Perlman says: ''For the first time, he lost control of his emotions. He said to this woman, 'Who is going to stand in judgment over all of this and who is going to judge my work?'''That was another question the author had to answer, Perlman decided. Only he changed the man's name to Henry Border and the question to, ''Who is going to judge me?'' because the man's voice ''was dripping in guilt. What was this guy so guilty about?'' (http://www.theage.com.au/entertainmen...)
The radio show was This American Life (my favourite podcast) – and the episode ‘Before it had a name’. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio...) The name of that episode is derived from the idea that the Holocaust is a term of only recent widespread usage and understanding. Before we knew the Holocaust as the Holocaust – before people realised the enormity of what had happened to the Jews (I am not sure here about when that realisation did strike the world – and to what extent people and governments buried knowledge of it – not sure when everyone knew what the Holocaust was – I have grown up with it as a concept in recent history. Wikipedia says this: The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt (kaustos). For hundreds of years, the word "holocaust" was used in English to denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews. The mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978. The biblical word Shoah, meaning "calamity", became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and Israel. Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer to the Greek pagan custom.”
I digress. It’s easy with this novel – there are lots of little bypaths that are worthy of exploration. For example, I would like to know heaps more about the civil rights history which we get a glimpse of – the de-segregation of schools, the resulting riots, the intake of African Americans into the union movement, the silence about the roles of black soldiers in WW2, the uprisings in Auschwitz etc etc. I can’t do these justice – read the book. It’s very interesting reading about a period that I know little about. This creates a strain for the writer – he needs to tell us a lot and I sometimes felt that it was a little didactic – “I’m glad you asked” was the kind of tone – especially over the pages to do with black history. Worth putting up with this though – it’s a great story – based on a degree of personal connection. Perlman had relatives who disappeared in the Holocaust – his great-uncle Rafal Gutman had a prestigious job in charge of Jewish education in Warsaw at the outbreak of war. The Nazis said he could stay as long as he provided them with a list of Jews to be transported. Gutman refused and committed suicide.
I felt that Perlman had taken some risks in writing about two uber-politically laden narratives. You can get in a lot of trouble in this terrain. However he is so clearly guided by the desire to put “Tell everybody what happened” (as the brave and doomed Auschwitz prisoners urge). I felt swept up in the merging stories. I will read more about the themes of the novel and I’m sure it will resonate for a long time.
PS. I went to hear Perlman speak about the novel last night. A woman asked him about the preponderance of coincidences in the book and in response he told this story: He'd been invited to speak at the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne and an old woman approached him after. It was in reference to the Rosa charcter. She said that she'd sat opposite the real Rosa in the clothes-sorting room in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The real Rosa had been a genuine source of support to the woman who was then 12 years old, even though they had to speak in whispers. She advised the young girl that her mother, who was ill with malaria, would need quinine - and that they only people who may be able to get hold of it were the SonderKommando. This little girl took enormous risks to get across the camp to the Sonderkommando and was helped by the real life version of a character named Chaim who supplied the quinine. The old woman said that Rosa had told her to be brave because "They", the surrounding SS, would all be shot eventually. Rosa died, Chaim died but this old woman lives on in Melbourne.
Perlman told it better than I have. He continues to hear stories about that time from elderly survivors - some about the existence of black soldiers in teh liberation, and some about the actual people in the camps. It's fantastic that this book is generating this kind of oral history and re-kindling interest in this period amongst many people.
December 23, 2014
What a truly amazing and well written novel by an Australian writer, Elliot Perlman.
The book starts off in the present tense, New York City with Lamont William, an African American who was recently released from prison. He find a job as a cleaner at a hospital for cancer patients. Lamont is currently on a probation period in his job. He desperately needs to stay clean and on track so he has the security and income to trace the daughter he’s left behind. At the cancer ward that he met and befriends Henryk Mandelbrot. Henryk is a holocaust survivor and he tell Lamont of his horrific time as a prisoner of war in Auschwitz and I must say it was the most intense and heart wrenching account I have read in years.
On the other side of New York and unrelated to Lamont. Adam Zignelik is a historian professor who is having his own personal issues. He is on the brink of depression, his relationship is falling apart and his career is in tatters. With nothing to lose, and as a favour to a friend, Adam conducts some research into the African American involvement into the WW2. In the mist of this, and unrelated to the original research, Adam makes a remarkable discovery; boxes upon boxes full of documents and tape recordings of a very important time in our history.
Initially I was so hesitant to read this book. Just from pure the size and content but a friend highly recommended to me and I’m so glad I gave it a go. It was a powerful and compelling book about history and racism. It looks at the big issues such as the American civil rights movement, the holocaust, but it also looks at these people/characters in the story and how they cope with the day to day pressure of life. There were many character introduced though out the book and the time period shifts from past to present. And sometimes I had to wonder; where is this piece of discovery taking them is or how this character is connected to the others. But with the writers clear, precise and detailed storytelling everything fits together like a glove, and the writing just flows beautifully. I highly recommend it – it’s a must read if you like Historical Fiction.
The book starts off in the present tense, New York City with Lamont William, an African American who was recently released from prison. He find a job as a cleaner at a hospital for cancer patients. Lamont is currently on a probation period in his job. He desperately needs to stay clean and on track so he has the security and income to trace the daughter he’s left behind. At the cancer ward that he met and befriends Henryk Mandelbrot. Henryk is a holocaust survivor and he tell Lamont of his horrific time as a prisoner of war in Auschwitz and I must say it was the most intense and heart wrenching account I have read in years.
On the other side of New York and unrelated to Lamont. Adam Zignelik is a historian professor who is having his own personal issues. He is on the brink of depression, his relationship is falling apart and his career is in tatters. With nothing to lose, and as a favour to a friend, Adam conducts some research into the African American involvement into the WW2. In the mist of this, and unrelated to the original research, Adam makes a remarkable discovery; boxes upon boxes full of documents and tape recordings of a very important time in our history.
Initially I was so hesitant to read this book. Just from pure the size and content but a friend highly recommended to me and I’m so glad I gave it a go. It was a powerful and compelling book about history and racism. It looks at the big issues such as the American civil rights movement, the holocaust, but it also looks at these people/characters in the story and how they cope with the day to day pressure of life. There were many character introduced though out the book and the time period shifts from past to present. And sometimes I had to wonder; where is this piece of discovery taking them is or how this character is connected to the others. But with the writers clear, precise and detailed storytelling everything fits together like a glove, and the writing just flows beautifully. I highly recommend it – it’s a must read if you like Historical Fiction.
April 9, 2014
This is an intensely powerful and moving novel, rich with various themes. I'm not sure whether I can do this book justice with a review.
The story is set in two times. In the present day, we follow the stories of Adam Zignelik, an untenured historian academic at Columbia University who has produced no original research for years, meaning the university will be compelled to let him go, and young Lamont Williams, an ex-prisoner and a hospital janitor on probation. In the story of 60+ years previously - before, during and after WWII - we follow the story of the Polish Jews as they're being swept up into ghettoes and then extermination camps, specifically Henryk Mandelbrot - a Holocaust survivor. As Adam, whose interests are in twentieth-century political history specialising in civil rights history, is looking for something he can take on as a project, he starts with investigating rumours that African-American soldiers liberated Dachau (something the military refused to confirm or deny) and he stumbles upon evidence of people who survived the extermination camps collected almost immediately after the war ended and left sitting unheeded for years because no one had wanted to hear their stories. We meet Henryk Mandelbrot in the present day through Lamont Williams, and we hear his story as the older man tells the younger man his story.
There is a large list of characters, skilfully woven into the story line, and Elliot Perlman's writing is just beautiful. Having said that, the size of the chapters is a little daunting - I like to be able to put a book down between chapters, but that wasn't always possible with this one.
However, the stories of the injustices committed against both African Americans on US soil and against the Jews on European and US soil are just horrendous and so powerful that I almost didn't notice the size of the chapters once I became immersed in the book. But beware - this is not a book for the faint-hearted. Some of the actions of "man's inhumanity to man" are described in quite graphic detail. Not that I would wish to deter people from reading this, but I think you do need to be in a good frame of mind when reading it. I read this as a buddy read with a friend (thanks, Elaine!) which was good because I had someone to discuss the terrible events with, as well as to present a different perspective which I may not have considered.
I was a little disappointed by the ending, as I felt it was slightly weak just at the last. However, this was still a great read - I was engrossed throughout most of the book. And I'm keen to read more of Elliot Perlman's other work. 4.5 stars for this one.
The story is set in two times. In the present day, we follow the stories of Adam Zignelik, an untenured historian academic at Columbia University who has produced no original research for years, meaning the university will be compelled to let him go, and young Lamont Williams, an ex-prisoner and a hospital janitor on probation. In the story of 60+ years previously - before, during and after WWII - we follow the story of the Polish Jews as they're being swept up into ghettoes and then extermination camps, specifically Henryk Mandelbrot - a Holocaust survivor. As Adam, whose interests are in twentieth-century political history specialising in civil rights history, is looking for something he can take on as a project, he starts with investigating rumours that African-American soldiers liberated Dachau (something the military refused to confirm or deny) and he stumbles upon evidence of people who survived the extermination camps collected almost immediately after the war ended and left sitting unheeded for years because no one had wanted to hear their stories. We meet Henryk Mandelbrot in the present day through Lamont Williams, and we hear his story as the older man tells the younger man his story.
There is a large list of characters, skilfully woven into the story line, and Elliot Perlman's writing is just beautiful. Having said that, the size of the chapters is a little daunting - I like to be able to put a book down between chapters, but that wasn't always possible with this one.
However, the stories of the injustices committed against both African Americans on US soil and against the Jews on European and US soil are just horrendous and so powerful that I almost didn't notice the size of the chapters once I became immersed in the book. But beware - this is not a book for the faint-hearted. Some of the actions of "man's inhumanity to man" are described in quite graphic detail. Not that I would wish to deter people from reading this, but I think you do need to be in a good frame of mind when reading it. I read this as a buddy read with a friend (thanks, Elaine!) which was good because I had someone to discuss the terrible events with, as well as to present a different perspective which I may not have considered.
I was a little disappointed by the ending, as I felt it was slightly weak just at the last. However, this was still a great read - I was engrossed throughout most of the book. And I'm keen to read more of Elliot Perlman's other work. 4.5 stars for this one.
April 6, 2014
"Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits when it is hungry, not when you are. It has a schedule of its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or it can liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Sometimes it's funny what you remember."
This is Elliot Perlman's Masterpiece. What a brilliantly written book. It tugs at your heart strings. It is confronting, shocking, leaves you gasping out loud. There is so much in this book that a review just cannot capture. The raw emotions it reveals, the suffering, the hope.
If you think you know everything there is to know about the Holocaust....think again. If you think you know what human nature is and can endure....think again and if you think you know what this book is about and it's all been said before, trust me you don't. Reading this book is something everyone must experience for themselves.
This is Elliot Perlman's Masterpiece. What a brilliantly written book. It tugs at your heart strings. It is confronting, shocking, leaves you gasping out loud. There is so much in this book that a review just cannot capture. The raw emotions it reveals, the suffering, the hope.
If you think you know everything there is to know about the Holocaust....think again. If you think you know what human nature is and can endure....think again and if you think you know what this book is about and it's all been said before, trust me you don't. Reading this book is something everyone must experience for themselves.
Read
December 12, 2018Going to set this aside for now as I’m just not connecting.
August 18, 2016
“Tell everyone what happened here.” An old man, dying, a survivor of the death camps in Europe, tells the story of his life to an improbable listener, an African-American ex-con trying to get his life together. The old man insists that the younger man remember and repeat every detail – the hard-to-pronounce names of towns in Poland, the names of people who didn't survive – so he can become part of the chain of memory and tell everyone what happened there.
Meanwhile, a nontenured professor of history at Columbia University, son of a prominent white civil rights lawyer, coming unmoored as his life falls apart, reluctantly pursues a shred of unverified historical rumor – were segregated African-American troops among the liberators of Dachau? – with little hope that it can revive his doomed career. His research takes him in unexpected and revelatory directions.
These two threads form the narrative structure on which Elliot Perlman has built a hugely ambitious saga that encompasses the Holocaust, the lives of immigrant refugees, the civil rights struggle, the labor movement and life in 21st century New York City. I really wanted to like this book. It had such good intentions. Even allowing that it wouldn't be great literature, it might have been absorbing storytelling rooted in the importance of history and memory. But it's astonishingly badly written. The characters are stick figures and it is clunkily constructed, with all the seams showing. Perlman takes us back and forth in time and in and out of many lives, using repetition...and repetition...and repetition... to ensure that we don't lose track of the myriad characters and don't forget their stories. The plot is intricate and contrived and he tries to do too much -- working in too many examples of man's inhumanity to man and clumsily integrating the history. Early on, there's a scene in which the noble civil rights lawyer sits on a park bench with his son and delivers a two-page lecture on the history of the movement. The kid is eight years old!
Being in a generous mood, I added a star for the story of the Sonderkommandos, those inmates assigned to the gas chambers and crematoria. It's a story that is brutal and compelling and hasn't often been told in this detail.
Perlman did prodigious research for the novel but he seems to have felt the need to make use of every bit of it and the story often feels like an excuse for the history. Nevertheless, if you make it to the end where the threads of narrative are (predictably) brought together you can't help but be moved. “Tell everyone what happened here.”
Meanwhile, a nontenured professor of history at Columbia University, son of a prominent white civil rights lawyer, coming unmoored as his life falls apart, reluctantly pursues a shred of unverified historical rumor – were segregated African-American troops among the liberators of Dachau? – with little hope that it can revive his doomed career. His research takes him in unexpected and revelatory directions.
These two threads form the narrative structure on which Elliot Perlman has built a hugely ambitious saga that encompasses the Holocaust, the lives of immigrant refugees, the civil rights struggle, the labor movement and life in 21st century New York City. I really wanted to like this book. It had such good intentions. Even allowing that it wouldn't be great literature, it might have been absorbing storytelling rooted in the importance of history and memory. But it's astonishingly badly written. The characters are stick figures and it is clunkily constructed, with all the seams showing. Perlman takes us back and forth in time and in and out of many lives, using repetition...and repetition...and repetition... to ensure that we don't lose track of the myriad characters and don't forget their stories. The plot is intricate and contrived and he tries to do too much -- working in too many examples of man's inhumanity to man and clumsily integrating the history. Early on, there's a scene in which the noble civil rights lawyer sits on a park bench with his son and delivers a two-page lecture on the history of the movement. The kid is eight years old!
Being in a generous mood, I added a star for the story of the Sonderkommandos, those inmates assigned to the gas chambers and crematoria. It's a story that is brutal and compelling and hasn't often been told in this detail.
Perlman did prodigious research for the novel but he seems to have felt the need to make use of every bit of it and the story often feels like an excuse for the history. Nevertheless, if you make it to the end where the threads of narrative are (predictably) brought together you can't help but be moved. “Tell everyone what happened here.”
September 8, 2017
The Street Sweeper is an intense novel about several disparate individuals, improbably linked. The novel is at times a bit didactic, the characters serving as props for the story Perlman wants to tell about the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement. It is educational! However, there was also plenty of drama and tension and I tore through the 623 pages.
January 12, 2012
I'm a bit spasmodic with my book reviews but I think this one deserves some of my time to gather some thoughts and share them. Having read The Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich, much other primary and secondary historical material, including the Goebels Diaries, as well as many novels about the Holocaust, including Lily Brett's work and William Styron's, clearly the subject matter is familiar to me, and to many others. When I bought Elliot Perlman's latest novel, I was also aware that it would be probably be a meticulously crafted story about lives colliding and the commonality of the human condition, as these seem to be his preferred themes.
Unlike his previous novels, all of which I've read, it didn't grip me straight away, largely because the mechanics of the narrative were a bit clunky and also because I am familiar with how he orchestrates his characters towards the endpoint of the story, so I'd told a Book Poof pal of mine that I wasn't particularly engaged with it. I was surprised however to find that much of the novel involves first hand descriptions of the Auschwitz death camps, from the point of view of a surviving Sonnerkommando, Henryck Mandelbrot, a Jew who upon arrival in the camp, was not selected by the SS for extermination, but for the job of escorting other newly transported Jews to the gas chambers and thereafter, to the ovens. Perlman also attempts to deal with the question of how this fate befell so many Jews without much apparent resistance.
The term Holocaust porn sprang to my mind when I read Lily Brett and also when I read Elliot Perlman and for this reason I realised that I couldn't put it down but most of all, I decided that I shouldn't put it down. It's a tough read, and the urge to walk away was strong. But I reasoned that if Perlman had the tenacity to write it, I should keep reading it.
I think perhaps Holocaust porn is a term that has been unavoidably coined because of the subject matter. It is simply not necessary to embellish this material. It speaks for itself. Based on meticulous research, Perlman has written about the facts. That they are interwoven around a story where disparate lives collide is possibly secondary to the real message from this novel, from my point of view.
"Tell them what happened here" is articulated by many of the characters in Perlman's novel, The Street Sweeper. Whether you are a historian who has stumbled upon records of interviews with survivors in Displaced Persons camps after the war , one of the armed forces who liberated the Nazi concentration camps but particularly the death camps of Auschwitz, a relative of a survivor, a doctor, or indeed a street sweeper with no apparent connection to the Holocaust, it is important that we all know and never forget what happened there.
None of this exonerates the subsequent actions of a Zionist state, Israel, and the displacement of the Palestinians and the state of Palestine in my mind. Students of history are aware of ALL the reasons for the creation of the state of Israel, not just the Holocaust. It seems important, far more important, however, for these matters to be carefully separated from the facts that are denied by the David Irvings of this world, with their empiricist calculations about logistics.
Elliot Perlman can say with his hand on his heart that he has told us what happened there, and thus honoured, in whatever way he's felt able, their pleas for us to remember. And that's the reason I've written this review, to acknowledge his efforts to tell us what happened there.
Unlike his previous novels, all of which I've read, it didn't grip me straight away, largely because the mechanics of the narrative were a bit clunky and also because I am familiar with how he orchestrates his characters towards the endpoint of the story, so I'd told a Book Poof pal of mine that I wasn't particularly engaged with it. I was surprised however to find that much of the novel involves first hand descriptions of the Auschwitz death camps, from the point of view of a surviving Sonnerkommando, Henryck Mandelbrot, a Jew who upon arrival in the camp, was not selected by the SS for extermination, but for the job of escorting other newly transported Jews to the gas chambers and thereafter, to the ovens. Perlman also attempts to deal with the question of how this fate befell so many Jews without much apparent resistance.
The term Holocaust porn sprang to my mind when I read Lily Brett and also when I read Elliot Perlman and for this reason I realised that I couldn't put it down but most of all, I decided that I shouldn't put it down. It's a tough read, and the urge to walk away was strong. But I reasoned that if Perlman had the tenacity to write it, I should keep reading it.
I think perhaps Holocaust porn is a term that has been unavoidably coined because of the subject matter. It is simply not necessary to embellish this material. It speaks for itself. Based on meticulous research, Perlman has written about the facts. That they are interwoven around a story where disparate lives collide is possibly secondary to the real message from this novel, from my point of view.
"Tell them what happened here" is articulated by many of the characters in Perlman's novel, The Street Sweeper. Whether you are a historian who has stumbled upon records of interviews with survivors in Displaced Persons camps after the war , one of the armed forces who liberated the Nazi concentration camps but particularly the death camps of Auschwitz, a relative of a survivor, a doctor, or indeed a street sweeper with no apparent connection to the Holocaust, it is important that we all know and never forget what happened there.
None of this exonerates the subsequent actions of a Zionist state, Israel, and the displacement of the Palestinians and the state of Palestine in my mind. Students of history are aware of ALL the reasons for the creation of the state of Israel, not just the Holocaust. It seems important, far more important, however, for these matters to be carefully separated from the facts that are denied by the David Irvings of this world, with their empiricist calculations about logistics.
Elliot Perlman can say with his hand on his heart that he has told us what happened there, and thus honoured, in whatever way he's felt able, their pleas for us to remember. And that's the reason I've written this review, to acknowledge his efforts to tell us what happened there.
April 15, 2017
I've been reading this novel for over three years. Each time I'd pick it up, I'd read-or reread-the first chapter and fall into a deep slumber. I came to think of it as the "sleep sweeper." Finally my clever wife got it added to the list for our Florida book club. She knew I'd have to finish it because of my inability the admit defeat in front of all those persnickety ladies. As usual, I started reading it, got to the end of chapter one, fell asleep and woke up to find myself with only 36 hours to read the next 400 pages. And read it I did: dishes piled up in the sink, laundry went unwashed, and the litter box stunk like a skunk, but I barely noticed, so intent was I on crossing the finish line. With only minutes to spare, I turned the last page, jumped into the shower, threw on some clothes and raced to the club house. Catching my breath, I tried to collect my thoughts: should I be snarky or sincere; should family loyalty trump group solidarity; what possessed me to wear a short-sleeved shirt when I knew it would be frigid inside? Not sure what was going to come out of my mouth, I started to speak:
"This novel is an enigma. It is a harrowing first-hand account of the death camps at Auchwitz, a devastating indictment of America's ongoing racism, an uplifting paean to acceptance and renewal in contemporary NYC and an analysis of the benefits and limitations of history as a force for social change. It is also a clunky love story and a mishmash of underdeveloped characters who appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. Why didn't a competent book editor take this accomplished author's oftentimes brilliant manuscript and shape it into a coherent novel? The prose is filled with sound and fury: it is impossible not to wince when Perlman forces us to confront our collective capacity for barbarism. He captures the personal horrors of America's civil rights struggles and connects them to European anti-Semitism. The last chapter brings everything together in a manner that reminded me of Agatha Christe's Miss Marple as she strings together seemingly disparate events as deftly as she weilds her knitting needles. But with Miss Marple, I'm always tantalized into wanting more. Perlman left me with an appetite for nothing except lunch."
I'm happy to say that lunch was great. I had two brisket sliders: thin-sliced beef atop potato latkes and fried onions piled high on a sesame bun with a side of french fries, preceded by chicken soup with matzo balls. I got such a stomach ache...
Addendum: The "persnickety ladies" just decided to skip reading Far from the Madding Crowd and stream the movie instead! My only consolation is that we will order pizza while we are watching.
"This novel is an enigma. It is a harrowing first-hand account of the death camps at Auchwitz, a devastating indictment of America's ongoing racism, an uplifting paean to acceptance and renewal in contemporary NYC and an analysis of the benefits and limitations of history as a force for social change. It is also a clunky love story and a mishmash of underdeveloped characters who appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. Why didn't a competent book editor take this accomplished author's oftentimes brilliant manuscript and shape it into a coherent novel? The prose is filled with sound and fury: it is impossible not to wince when Perlman forces us to confront our collective capacity for barbarism. He captures the personal horrors of America's civil rights struggles and connects them to European anti-Semitism. The last chapter brings everything together in a manner that reminded me of Agatha Christe's Miss Marple as she strings together seemingly disparate events as deftly as she weilds her knitting needles. But with Miss Marple, I'm always tantalized into wanting more. Perlman left me with an appetite for nothing except lunch."
I'm happy to say that lunch was great. I had two brisket sliders: thin-sliced beef atop potato latkes and fried onions piled high on a sesame bun with a side of french fries, preceded by chicken soup with matzo balls. I got such a stomach ache...
Addendum: The "persnickety ladies" just decided to skip reading Far from the Madding Crowd and stream the movie instead! My only consolation is that we will order pizza while we are watching.
November 8, 2012
I won't try to capture the story, as so many reviews here have already done. This is not a perfect novel but is deserving of five stars for the intensity of the writing. Perlman is able to keep the reader enthralled over 600 or so pages which is quite a feat. I felt a great fondness for each of the characters and cared about what would happen to them.
He includes some incredible coincidences when the lives of the characters intersect in unbelievable ways which did make me step outside the narrative and imagine Perlman carefully plotting it all out. However, his treatment of the holocaust and the life of an unfortunate African American man are dealt with without over sentimentality or resorting to cliche.
After not really enjoying Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity he has redeemed himself with this one and I will seek out his other work.
He includes some incredible coincidences when the lives of the characters intersect in unbelievable ways which did make me step outside the narrative and imagine Perlman carefully plotting it all out. However, his treatment of the holocaust and the life of an unfortunate African American man are dealt with without over sentimentality or resorting to cliche.
After not really enjoying Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity he has redeemed himself with this one and I will seek out his other work.
February 25, 2015
I just finished The Street Sweeper by Elliott Perlman and all I can say is WOW!! This book begins in New York City where we meet a black man who has just been released from jail. The book then introduces us to a Professor of History at Columbia, who was raised in Australia, and learns he won't be receiving tenure. Along the way we meet an elderly man who has survived the Holocaust and tells his story to an orderly at Sloan Kettering Hospital, And then another man from the 40's who interviewed many survivors in an attempt to find out how language plays a part in their future choice of words and finally a man from the 1940's who interviews Holocaust survivors in an attempt to see how language played a part in their future communications. Of course there are many other characters in this book and the narrative switches from the present to WWII to Chicago in the 60's when the civil rights movement was in full force.
This is a long book but one which moves swiftly. Fundamentally, as the book states is "what is memory?" How does coincidence play a role in our lives? What part of our memories are better left forgotten?
Although this book shifts from the young black man to the white Professor, one leaves the portions asking for more. For those who enjoy, if we can use the word enjoy, books about the Holocaust and the battered life of a young black man, this is a must read.
This is a long book but one which moves swiftly. Fundamentally, as the book states is "what is memory?" How does coincidence play a role in our lives? What part of our memories are better left forgotten?
Although this book shifts from the young black man to the white Professor, one leaves the portions asking for more. For those who enjoy, if we can use the word enjoy, books about the Holocaust and the battered life of a young black man, this is a must read.
May 6, 2016
I hate abandoning books, but I've read 12%, and I'm getting more and more irritated with the writing. Why, oh why, oh why does Perlman keep repeating himself? I enjoy books that challenge my mind, make me think a little. I'm not afraid of lengthy novels or unique writing styles, but it's such a chore to read this. Reading shouldn't feel like work. I've connected with the main character, Lamont Williams, but I'm drowning. I wanted to like this book too. Disappointed.
November 3, 2011
On a busy New York City corner, four people, a street sweeper, an oncologist, a history professor and a little girl are clustered in a small group. From those who pass them on that busy corner, few if any have any idea as to what has led the group here. Yet these seemingly unrelated individuals from different walks of life are bound by a common history of struggle, bravery, and unexpected kindness of those who have come before them.
Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams is an African American janitor working on probation in an Manhattan hospital and seeking to locate the daughter he has not seen for the past few years. By chance on one of his shifts, Lamont befriends an elderly patient, Henryk Mendelbrot, a Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau prison camp.
Whilst Henryk recalls the horrors of those dark days in Poland from his hospital bed, a few kilometers uptown, the historian Adam Zignelik, a history professor at Columbia University and the son of a civil rights lawyer, is on the cusp of a professional and personal crisis. Desperate for something to save him, he uncovers the remarkable story of a man who was determined to record the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors.
As the two men struggle to survive in the early 21st-century New York, their different paths converge in ways neither could have foreseen. Their stories span the 20th century, sweeping across continents and touching on pivotal historical moments, to finally bring us to the present. In the hands of a less skillful author, The Street Sweeper could have ended up a sentimental Holocaust or a preaching civil rights story. But Perlman's fresh approach and skill breathed new life into these well-visited chapters of our history
Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams is an African American janitor working on probation in an Manhattan hospital and seeking to locate the daughter he has not seen for the past few years. By chance on one of his shifts, Lamont befriends an elderly patient, Henryk Mendelbrot, a Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau prison camp.
Whilst Henryk recalls the horrors of those dark days in Poland from his hospital bed, a few kilometers uptown, the historian Adam Zignelik, a history professor at Columbia University and the son of a civil rights lawyer, is on the cusp of a professional and personal crisis. Desperate for something to save him, he uncovers the remarkable story of a man who was determined to record the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors.
As the two men struggle to survive in the early 21st-century New York, their different paths converge in ways neither could have foreseen. Their stories span the 20th century, sweeping across continents and touching on pivotal historical moments, to finally bring us to the present. In the hands of a less skillful author, The Street Sweeper could have ended up a sentimental Holocaust or a preaching civil rights story. But Perlman's fresh approach and skill breathed new life into these well-visited chapters of our history
November 5, 2012
Oh, my goodness I disliked this novel. I hadn't planned to give Perlman another go after Three Dollars which I found clichéd and trite, and I should have stuck with my original intention. In the hands of another author I could see myself enjoying a novel set up the way The Street Sweeper is. I'm interested in all the historical moments it touches on, World War Two, Gandhi's satyagraha against the British in India, the Civil Rights era in the US. I could see myself engaging with the story of a history professor trying to salvage his career and his long-term romantic relationship. I suspect Perlman and I see pretty much eye to eye politically.
But Perlman's writing just made me more and more irritated the more I read.
I couldn't bear the cardboard cutout characters who basically do nothing more than converse. The vast slabs of historically didactic “dialogue” – everybody's always either lecturing someone or being lectured to. There's no relief from the tedious and too correct civil rights politics – racism is bad, genocide bad, legal injustice also, um, bad. The main romantic plot seemed pointless and unbelievable – Perlman couldn't convince me to understand (or care) why the main characters broke up, let alone care about whether they get back together or not. The prose is stodgy & bloodless, although the occasional undigestible metaphor or simile like “being kissed by typhoid and having the marriage consumated on the street”* has pretty much the same effect on your mind as having a faeces-encrusted ice-pick applied directly to the pleasure centres of your brain.
For most of the time I really just wanted for it to end. I should have stopped. But I was in the grip of my own stubbornness; having handed Amazon ten of my perfectly good Australian dollars for the privilege I was going to finish that sucker no matter what. There was also a little of that car-crash fascination where I found myself unable to look away, wondering if it really was as bad as it looked.
Yes. Yes it was. Oh, God... The number of dialogues that went something like:
Repeat and hope that everyone mistakes tedious lecturing for profundity.
* The dialogue is not actual Perlman dialogue, but it might as well be. Sad to say, though, the simile is pure Perlman.
But Perlman's writing just made me more and more irritated the more I read.
I couldn't bear the cardboard cutout characters who basically do nothing more than converse. The vast slabs of historically didactic “dialogue” – everybody's always either lecturing someone or being lectured to. There's no relief from the tedious and too correct civil rights politics – racism is bad, genocide bad, legal injustice also, um, bad. The main romantic plot seemed pointless and unbelievable – Perlman couldn't convince me to understand (or care) why the main characters broke up, let alone care about whether they get back together or not. The prose is stodgy & bloodless, although the occasional undigestible metaphor or simile like “being kissed by typhoid and having the marriage consumated on the street”* has pretty much the same effect on your mind as having a faeces-encrusted ice-pick applied directly to the pleasure centres of your brain.
For most of the time I really just wanted for it to end. I should have stopped. But I was in the grip of my own stubbornness; having handed Amazon ten of my perfectly good Australian dollars for the privilege I was going to finish that sucker no matter what. There was also a little of that car-crash fascination where I found myself unable to look away, wondering if it really was as bad as it looked.
Yes. Yes it was. Oh, God... The number of dialogues that went something like:
- Something something she was an orphan.
- She was an orphan?
- Yes. Her parents had both been killed something something something. This was just near the butcher’s shop.
- The Jewish butcher?
- Yes, the Jewish butcher. Something something something. But he gave it to his horse.
- Why did he give it to his horse?
- In the ghetto your horse was more important than your socks. Something something something.*
Repeat and hope that everyone mistakes tedious lecturing for profundity.
* The dialogue is not actual Perlman dialogue, but it might as well be. Sad to say, though, the simile is pure Perlman.
May 11, 2018
I "hope" to write a more specific review at a later date. I can't quite figure out how to write a review that does the book justice and captures the essence of the book and its topics and the author.
This is the first book I have ever read by Elliot Perlman. He is a very talented writer and a master of his craft. This book is a combination of historical fiction, mystery, suspense, character development, love and relationship, families, guilt, hope - you name it. It is very well researched - the Holocaust and death camps, the Civil Rights movement and inherent racism in American institutions, Universities publish or perish practice etc.
The book weaves together the stories of strangers (both living and dead). Their personal relationships are a large part of the book and the basis for much of the character development. In addition, their life experiences are an integral part of the research and fact sharing in the book. Perlman's sharing is not a cold, objective listing of facts but rather sharing the "truth" in such a way that it made a huge emotional impact on me as a reader. His descriptions of the Jewish prisoners executed in death camps always included personal characteristics of the individual - I think to remind us of the humanity of the victims, lest we try to toughen up our emotions when reading about the horrors and just objectify them as numbers.
From what I've read about Perlman's other works, I think he likes to weave stories. In this book, for me anyway, I think the weaving was a great idea and essential for him to tell the entire story as he wanted. Reading about the atrocities in the death camps all at once would probably have overwhelmed me but by reading it for a while, then moving on to another story and later back to it, I was able to internalize and process the information at a rate I could handle.
I also thought the weaving of stories really illustrated the six points of separation theory and that we are all connected
The book is so well written and the shared information so important, that it is really a must read; not in spite of but because of, the graphic details. Stay with it. It is worth it.
There is lyrical prose, lots of dialogue (outer and inside one's head), historical facts, you name it.
This book has it all. ENGROSSING is an appropriate term I think.
Perlman made me think, made me feel, made me learn, made me question. You can't ask for much more out of a book. I look forward to reading more of his works (those currently published) and the future ones to come.
This is the first book I have ever read by Elliot Perlman. He is a very talented writer and a master of his craft. This book is a combination of historical fiction, mystery, suspense, character development, love and relationship, families, guilt, hope - you name it. It is very well researched - the Holocaust and death camps, the Civil Rights movement and inherent racism in American institutions, Universities publish or perish practice etc.
The book weaves together the stories of strangers (both living and dead). Their personal relationships are a large part of the book and the basis for much of the character development. In addition, their life experiences are an integral part of the research and fact sharing in the book. Perlman's sharing is not a cold, objective listing of facts but rather sharing the "truth" in such a way that it made a huge emotional impact on me as a reader. His descriptions of the Jewish prisoners executed in death camps always included personal characteristics of the individual - I think to remind us of the humanity of the victims, lest we try to toughen up our emotions when reading about the horrors and just objectify them as numbers.
From what I've read about Perlman's other works, I think he likes to weave stories. In this book, for me anyway, I think the weaving was a great idea and essential for him to tell the entire story as he wanted. Reading about the atrocities in the death camps all at once would probably have overwhelmed me but by reading it for a while, then moving on to another story and later back to it, I was able to internalize and process the information at a rate I could handle.
I also thought the weaving of stories really illustrated the six points of separation theory and that we are all connected
The book is so well written and the shared information so important, that it is really a must read; not in spite of but because of, the graphic details. Stay with it. It is worth it.
There is lyrical prose, lots of dialogue (outer and inside one's head), historical facts, you name it.
This book has it all. ENGROSSING is an appropriate term I think.
Perlman made me think, made me feel, made me learn, made me question. You can't ask for much more out of a book. I look forward to reading more of his works (those currently published) and the future ones to come.
May 3, 2015
This novel, historical fiction, swept me away until the last bits of the characters' lives were neatly placed in the bin. Lamont, Noah and Mr Manndelbrot are haunted men living In the 21st century, but tortured by the Holocaust, and race wars. Eliot Perlman, the author, not only masterfully tells stories of these awful times in modern history, but breathes life into them by igniting the past with details so intricate that not only did the characters shudder, but so did this reader.
I recommend this to readers who are willing to be rocked by the bombing of the church in Birmington, Alabama; pelted at the Integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas ; chased at in the New York City race riots which were precipitated by the draft for the Civil War; humiliated by the the segregation of Goldfarbs lunch counter in Chicago and imprisoned by the trials for poor black men in the present, nationwide. Perlman added characters to some of the events, but they were so real, I thought of Googling them.
I was also captivated by the story of the Polish Jews in the 30's and 40"s. Perlman was able to tell more than Anne Frank had because he had access to the survivors of the Concentration Camps. He told their story in such detail so that some of those 6 million could live again. In his hand they respired and inspired. Lastly, he told the story of overworked, under appreciated Gen Xers who are struggling with difficult personal lives and harsh economic times as well as racism, the age old problem of living up to parents's expectations, and lastly, but importantly, the issue of old age.
The construct of the story is very involved and not that believable unless you believe in Six Degrees of Separation. Yet, knowing Co-Op City, New York Hospital and Great Neck as well as I do, I bought the connections until the end. I was moved and think it was well worth my time .
I recommend this to readers who are willing to be rocked by the bombing of the church in Birmington, Alabama; pelted at the Integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas ; chased at in the New York City race riots which were precipitated by the draft for the Civil War; humiliated by the the segregation of Goldfarbs lunch counter in Chicago and imprisoned by the trials for poor black men in the present, nationwide. Perlman added characters to some of the events, but they were so real, I thought of Googling them.
I was also captivated by the story of the Polish Jews in the 30's and 40"s. Perlman was able to tell more than Anne Frank had because he had access to the survivors of the Concentration Camps. He told their story in such detail so that some of those 6 million could live again. In his hand they respired and inspired. Lastly, he told the story of overworked, under appreciated Gen Xers who are struggling with difficult personal lives and harsh economic times as well as racism, the age old problem of living up to parents's expectations, and lastly, but importantly, the issue of old age.
The construct of the story is very involved and not that believable unless you believe in Six Degrees of Separation. Yet, knowing Co-Op City, New York Hospital and Great Neck as well as I do, I bought the connections until the end. I was moved and think it was well worth my time .
April 18, 2012
I got to the point of no return last night ... I just had to finish the last 100 pages, and thus are feeling the effects today. Great book, which is a mirage of peoples lives and periods of time. Not too sure about the final paragraph and was expecting a little bit more Ver good though. It is a bit harrowing with the descriptions of the death camps and it is near impossble to imagine the savagery required to manage and work these areas.
February 5, 2012
I am not really enjoying The Street Sweeper: one character is crazy because he's just gotten out of jail, and the other is crazy because he keeps replaying mentally all the liberal gobbledy gook his father taught him when he was a little boy. When they're not acting crazy, the characters are unutterably didactic. I can't figure out why to finish this drivel.
January 5, 2012
The Street Sweeper by Australian historian Elliot Perlman is a fictional book which deals with the American struggle for civil rights and the Holocaust. The book beautifully ties together the idea that we are all human and touch each other’s lives.
Lamont Williams, an ex-con African American, is trying to return to normal life after being at the wrong time in the wrong place. Lamont gets a job at a hospital where he works as a janitor and befriends a cancer patient who is also a World War II survivor. Lamont learns about Poland, the Jews, extermination camps, gas chambers and the Sonderkommando.
Adam Zignelik is an untenured Columbia historian whose career and relationships are falling apart. Adam pursues a research topic about African Americans being part of liberating concentration camps and finds a discovery of a lifetime.
he Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman is storytelling at its best. The book manages to bring complex ideas to the forefront of the reader’s attention such as what is history, how do we record it or pass it along as well as the importance of firsthand accounts.
A well written and sweeping book which touches many subjects and ties them all together in a humane sense rather than the meticulous books we read about history. However, the main point of the book, for me, was the importance of remembering history, not as dry dates and figures but from the point of view of people who are real people, fathers, mothers, daughters, brothers and sisters.
The book interweaves two main stories, an ex-con named Lamont Williams and the historian Adam Zignelik. The book has its own unique rhythm which is intricate and involved.
While remembering is certainly a point which is hammered throughout the book, some themes also include love, lost and that basically we are all human beings and we must always remember that despite the unbelievable outrageous numbers (like 6 million) which any person cannot even fathom.
Mr. Perlman wrote a risky novel, one that is intricate, detailed yet cycles through events at almost breakneck speed only to stop, reflect and expend upon what we, the human kind, have been capable to do to one another.
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
Lamont Williams, an ex-con African American, is trying to return to normal life after being at the wrong time in the wrong place. Lamont gets a job at a hospital where he works as a janitor and befriends a cancer patient who is also a World War II survivor. Lamont learns about Poland, the Jews, extermination camps, gas chambers and the Sonderkommando.
Adam Zignelik is an untenured Columbia historian whose career and relationships are falling apart. Adam pursues a research topic about African Americans being part of liberating concentration camps and finds a discovery of a lifetime.
he Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman is storytelling at its best. The book manages to bring complex ideas to the forefront of the reader’s attention such as what is history, how do we record it or pass it along as well as the importance of firsthand accounts.
A well written and sweeping book which touches many subjects and ties them all together in a humane sense rather than the meticulous books we read about history. However, the main point of the book, for me, was the importance of remembering history, not as dry dates and figures but from the point of view of people who are real people, fathers, mothers, daughters, brothers and sisters.
The book interweaves two main stories, an ex-con named Lamont Williams and the historian Adam Zignelik. The book has its own unique rhythm which is intricate and involved.
While remembering is certainly a point which is hammered throughout the book, some themes also include love, lost and that basically we are all human beings and we must always remember that despite the unbelievable outrageous numbers (like 6 million) which any person cannot even fathom.
Mr. Perlman wrote a risky novel, one that is intricate, detailed yet cycles through events at almost breakneck speed only to stop, reflect and expend upon what we, the human kind, have been capable to do to one another.
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com
December 24, 2011
Lamont Williams is an African American ex-con who is trying to make the transition back to a normal life. He lives with his beloved grandmother, has a probationary job at the Sloan Kettering Medical Centre and is searching for his daughter. While at his job, he meets and befriends an elderly Jewish patient who is a Holocaust survivor. This man tells Lamont about his experiences in a Nazi extermination camp in Poland. He makes Lamont repeat the story over and over until he can repeat it in all of its details because, as he says, someone must remember.
Adam Zignelik is an untenured history professor at Columbia University whose career and relationship are crashing down around him. A friend of his father's recommends a research topic for him - prove that African American troops took part in the liberation of Nazi extermination camps. While conducting his research, Adam stumbles upon the find of any historian's lifetime - recorded first hand accounts of Holocaust survivors made just months after their liberation.
The Street Sweeper is a beautifully written and meticulously researched novel about the horrors that mankind is capable of but it is also about the resilience of the human spirit and its ability to perform huge acts of bravery and kindness in the most horrific of times. It is also about the importance of remembering history not just as dry facts but from first hand accounts by the people it happens to in their own voices and with their true emotions.
This is historical fiction the way it should be. The story is both sweeping in its scope and intimate in its portrayal of the lives of its characters. It stretches from Poland in the 1930s to the United States and Australia in the 1950s and up to the 1970s. It encompasses the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement as well as the day-to-day lives of the main characters and their families and friends. It never flinches in its portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust yet it maintains its sense of humanity throughout. This is the kind of story that grips the reader with the first sentence and which will resonate with him long after he finishes the last page.
Adam Zignelik is an untenured history professor at Columbia University whose career and relationship are crashing down around him. A friend of his father's recommends a research topic for him - prove that African American troops took part in the liberation of Nazi extermination camps. While conducting his research, Adam stumbles upon the find of any historian's lifetime - recorded first hand accounts of Holocaust survivors made just months after their liberation.
The Street Sweeper is a beautifully written and meticulously researched novel about the horrors that mankind is capable of but it is also about the resilience of the human spirit and its ability to perform huge acts of bravery and kindness in the most horrific of times. It is also about the importance of remembering history not just as dry facts but from first hand accounts by the people it happens to in their own voices and with their true emotions.
This is historical fiction the way it should be. The story is both sweeping in its scope and intimate in its portrayal of the lives of its characters. It stretches from Poland in the 1930s to the United States and Australia in the 1950s and up to the 1970s. It encompasses the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement as well as the day-to-day lives of the main characters and their families and friends. It never flinches in its portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust yet it maintains its sense of humanity throughout. This is the kind of story that grips the reader with the first sentence and which will resonate with him long after he finishes the last page.
March 15, 2012
In The Street Sweeper, Elliot Perlman weaves a number of narratives together against the backdrops of the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement in America. Perlman has the gift for telling a story you think you already know but making you feel it as though you are hearing it for the first time.
The Street Sweeper begins with the story of Lamont Williams, a young African American man, and Adam Zelegnik, a history professor from Colombia University whose lives are seemingly worlds apart. The stories of these two men are underpinned in surprising ways by the stories of two men who lived decades before: Henryk Mandelbrot, a holocaust survivor, and Henry Border, a psychologist who recorded the experiences of Jews liberated from death camps after the Second World War.
The connections between the four stories emerge gradually and with great suspense. Despite the many plot strands and continual movement between past and present in the action of the novel, Perlman handles the shifts of chronology and point of view with such dexterity that the reader is never left behind.
The novel draws subtle parallels between the racism against African Americans in the USA in the mid-century, and the racism against the Jews in Europe which eventually led to what is now known as the Holocaust. There are some harrowing scenes in the novel, of both clashes between black and whites in America and of the Nazi death camps. The novel sheds light on the fact that in the years immediately after World War Two, most people did not want to know about the atrocities suffered by European Jews, while to the survivors, nothing could have been more important than for people to understand the indescribable horror of what they had experienced.
Perlman obviously did an enormous amount of research to write this book and displays great skill at using real historical events to create a riveting and deeply emotional narrative. The Street Sweeper is an incredibly achievement for Perlman and the questions it asks about history, about humanity are as relevant today as they have ever been. I cannot praise this book highly enough.
The Street Sweeper begins with the story of Lamont Williams, a young African American man, and Adam Zelegnik, a history professor from Colombia University whose lives are seemingly worlds apart. The stories of these two men are underpinned in surprising ways by the stories of two men who lived decades before: Henryk Mandelbrot, a holocaust survivor, and Henry Border, a psychologist who recorded the experiences of Jews liberated from death camps after the Second World War.
The connections between the four stories emerge gradually and with great suspense. Despite the many plot strands and continual movement between past and present in the action of the novel, Perlman handles the shifts of chronology and point of view with such dexterity that the reader is never left behind.
The novel draws subtle parallels between the racism against African Americans in the USA in the mid-century, and the racism against the Jews in Europe which eventually led to what is now known as the Holocaust. There are some harrowing scenes in the novel, of both clashes between black and whites in America and of the Nazi death camps. The novel sheds light on the fact that in the years immediately after World War Two, most people did not want to know about the atrocities suffered by European Jews, while to the survivors, nothing could have been more important than for people to understand the indescribable horror of what they had experienced.
Perlman obviously did an enormous amount of research to write this book and displays great skill at using real historical events to create a riveting and deeply emotional narrative. The Street Sweeper is an incredibly achievement for Perlman and the questions it asks about history, about humanity are as relevant today as they have ever been. I cannot praise this book highly enough.
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