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Summary
Summary
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 one another every day on the bustling streets of every crowded city. Only some stories 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 was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
A few blocks uptown, historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging from 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 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 Chicago to Auschwitz.
Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.
Author Notes
Elliot Perlman is the author of The Reasons I Won't Be Coming and Seven Types of Ambiguity . He also cowrote the award-winning screenplay for a film version of Three Dollars , his first novel. He lives in Australia.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the heart of Perlman's long, labyrinthine, but rewarding novel are two narratives: a Polish Jew tells the tale of his ordeal in a Nazi death camp to a black American ex-con while evidence of black American soldiers liberating a concentration camp is unearthed by an Australian-Jewish history professor. That these stories cleverly mirror one another is one of the many strengths of Perlman's (Seven Types of Ambiguity) latest saga. Lamont Williams, just out of prison and working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, befriends Henryk Mandelbrot, a patient and Holocaust survivor who recounts his experiences as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland and later working the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Adam Zignelik, in fear of losing his teaching job at Columbia and depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend, discovers early voice recordings of Jewish prisoners, which he scours for testimony that African-American soldiers may have been involved in the liberation of Dachau. Other related characters weave in and out, the coincidences of their intersections fraught with tantalizing meaning. Perlman deftly navigates these complicated waters, moving back and forth in time without having to take narrative responsibility for the course of history. In so doing, he brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and crafts a moving and literate page-turner. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Acclaimed Australian writer Perlman (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2004) is a master at meshing his characters' streams of consciousness with social tsunamis of hate and violence. In his intently detailed, worlds-within-worlds third novel, this discerning and unflinching investigator of moral dilemmas great and small takes on the monstrous horrors of racism in America and the Holocaust. This swiftly flowing, multifaceted tale begins with two present-day New Yorkers. Newly released from prison, sensitive and determined Lamont, the African American street sweeper of the title, works diligently as a janitor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center while trying to locate his young daughter. History professor Adam Zignelik, of Polish Jewish and Australian Jewish heritage, knows he won't get tenure even though he is friends with the department's first African American chair, Charles McCray. Their fathers were good friends during the civil rights movement, and Charles' dad is the catalyst for Adam's discovery of the forgotten work of Henry Border, a Polish Jewish psychology professor based in Chicago, who recorded the tales of death-camp survivors. Unexpected connections proliferate: Charles' wife is Lamont's cousin. Lamont befriends a patient whose gruesome, heartrending tale of heroic resistance at Auschwitz intersects with Border's life, which generates provocative story lines involving racial and labor strife in Chicago. Perlman's compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A sense of history links the characters in Elliot Perlman's novel. ANY beginning writer could find both instruction and inspiration in Elliot Perlman's new novel, "The Street Sweeper." If it were tricked out with commentary in the margins - in fact, now that I've finished marking it up, anyone's welcome to take my copy - it could serve as a textbook on how not to write fiction. At the same time, it gives the lie to those killjoy teachers who tell you that no reputable publisher will touch your work if you don't learn your craft. This 600-plus-page epic turns out to have only a novella's worth of story and substance: the rest is repetition, over and over, of basic information about who the characters are, where they are and what's going on, long expository and hortatory speeches that no real person would ever deliver and the padded, ping-ponging dialogue beloved of amateur writers. "'And your family?' 'My family?'" "'I've always felt kind of ... fraudulent.' 'Fraudulent?'" The laudatory reviews of Perlman's previous novel, "Seven Types of Ambiguity," compared him to the great Victorian novelists, and the title of his current book may remind old-school readers of Jo, the down-and-out, never-had-a-chance crossing sweeper in "Bleak House." Perlman shares Dickens's sympathy for the put-upon and the disenfranchised, and his fondness for intricate multiplotting - as well as his tendentious planting of improbable hidden connections among his people, giving us to understand that the lowly and the high and mighty are inextricably interdependent. "How tantalizingly small the world was," Perlman makes one of his characters reflect, as if we needed a reminder of the web of coincidence he's contrived. His street sweeper is a black ex-con, who's taken a job with the John Doe Fund ("Ready, Willing and Able") after being unjustly discharged from his janitorial position at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; he was fired by Sloan-Kettering's head of human resources, who just happens to have been a childhood friend. Ah, but the sweeper's cousin (follow me closely here) just happens to be married to the head of the history department at Columbia, where Perlman's other main character, a Jewish academic about to be denied tenure, just happens to work. But wait - there's more. The academic about to be denied tenure just happens to need information from the grandfather of an oncologist at Sloan-Kettering, who just happens to be treating an elderly Holocaust survivor - are you still with me? - who just happens to have struck up a deathbed friendship with the ex-con janitor, whom he's somehow or other compelled to memorize his life history. (At a crucial moment, the janitor is later able to regurgitate it all, for an hour and a half, complete with names, dates and places in Poland, which he pronounces flawlessly.) "'My parents,' Mr. Mandelbrot sighed, 'my parents were probably by that time already sent to where I was going.' 'Where were you going?' 'To Auschwitz.' 'What is Owswich, I mean, exactly?' 'Auschwitz.' 'Owswitz.' 'Auschwitz.' Ausch-vitz.' Mr. Mandelbrot slowly nodded once with his eyes half closed to convey assent to his student. 'What exactly is Ausch-vitz?' Lamont asked quietly." And so on. At this rate of progress, and with so conveniently uninformed an interlocutor - not to mention such needless explanations as "to convey assent" - it's a wonder this subplot doesn't go on for 600 pages all by itself. The novel ends with a laboriously engineered tableau of racial, ethnic and class unity: "On the western side of York Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets a young African-American oncologist and a white Jewish historian stood smiling and talking to a skinny black street sweeper in a bright blue uniform." Random onlookers are said to be "uplifted" at the sight; readers who believe that effects should be earned and achieved, rather than simply asserted, may feel left out of the general rejoicing. It seems meanspirited to fault so morally and politically righteous a novel for merely literary sins. Its most explicit theme is the necessity of remembering and retelling the stories of the oppressed, the persecuted, the murdered: principally the Jews before and during the Holocaust and African-Americans before and during the civil rights movement. No decent person could argue against this necessity; on the other hand, no decent writer should have to repeat variants of the line "Tell everyone what happened here" 12 times in two pages of a scene at Auschwitz; it takes on the robotic affect of the People's Microphone at an Occupy rally, and it loses force with each use. The Auschwitz scenes, based on the testimony of real-life survivors, will break the stoniest heart - how could they not? - but even here Perlman can't let ill enough alone. Two women about to be hanged for resisting the Nazis are described as "wingless sparrows," as if the genuine pathos needed to be amped up with a sentimental image. Near the beginning of the novel, Perlman can't resist framing the nightmarish murder of Emmett Till, and of the four black girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, as a literal bad dream, experienced by his untenured Columbia historian. The well-read Perlman may have had in mind Stephen Dedalus's line in "Ulysses" about history's being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, but will any reader find this dream plausible rather than just thematically convenient? That putatively uplifting moment on York Avenue suggests what's really at the core of this novel: an idealized bonding of history's victims. Of course, this isn't merely Perlman's utopian fantasy: it happened during the civil rights movement, when Jews (like our historian's father) and blacks (like his department chairman's father) made common cause. It happened earlier, too - though fewer people remember this - when some African-American servicemen helped liberate the Nazi camps. Our historian spends much of the book trying to document their participation, mostly as a favor to a black friend, and his selfless quest leads him to a trove of previously unheard recordings of interviews with Holocaust survivors. (It's the academic equivalent of a fairy-tale hero being kind to a dwarf and ending up with the princess and the pot of gold.) Like all the main characters, our historian is a fundamentally nice person - no superficially charming monsters of selfishness here, or figures of genteel menace, like Skimpole and Tulkinghorn in "Bleak House." Evil resides only in the not-nice people: Nazis and Klansmen. Neither our historian nor his creator seems creeped out, even for a second, by his rebuilding his career on these accounts of pain and horror, and, unlike in "Bleak House," nobody ends up suffering as a result of his bringing to light long-kept secrets. His is an uncomplicatedly moral enterprise. So is Perlman's. BUT the writing of fiction has its own forms of morality. Its code takes a hard line against such silly devices as the historian's inner conversations with the girlfriend he abjured: "'Adam, ... you're trying to turn your fear of the future, your panic about parenthood and professional failure into something noble that you've done for me. I never bought it.' 'Diana, it's possible at the one time both to be afraid and to act nobly for another person.'" It evenhandedly forbids kitschy generic ingénues - "With dark eyes for falling into and jet-black hair, she could be both serious and funny, often at the same time" - and ciphers like "a charming, delightful woman in her 80s." It demands that the writer clean up toxic spills of syntax: "A single guest at weddings, couples would admire her appearance almost excessively and, in so doing, embarrass her, never for a moment dreaming she might know loneliness every bit as well, every bit as sharp, as they ever had." It calls for the renunciation of verbal pomp: "He was overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing, panic and a sense of loss that, in staccato bursts, flushed the air from his lungs till the moisture in his sleep-starved eyes formed a vitreous glaze that mercifully blurred his reflection in the mirror." As the Book of John puts it, Jesus wept. All these passages suggest a writer who, whether through inattention or inability, hasn't engaged effectively with his characters or his language, who won't or can't take the work of fiction seriously. However earnest "The Street Sweeper" may be about its material - I've seldom read a more humorless book - as a novel it's deadly frivolous. David Gates's most recent book is "The Wonders of the Invisible World," a collection of stories.
Bookseller Publisher Review
It s been eight years since Elliot Perlmans last novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was released. Unlike renowned American literary critic Harold Bloom, I was unimpressed by that book, thinking that it failed, with its tricky structure and rather mundane plot, to capitalise on the great promise shown by Perlmans first book--the enticing Three Dollars. But Perlmans latest, The Street Sweeper, restores my faith in his work. It is, I think, a fine novel written by an author comfortable in his capacity to tell stories that seek to inform as well as entertain. Set in New York City, the book follows two characters in crisis as they try to move through lives riven with events beyond their control. Lamont Williams has been recently released from prison after serving six years for a crime in which he played an incidental, if not unintentional role. He is starting a job as a probationary janitor at a cancer hospital in New York. He wants to get his life back on track: keep his job; find a place to live; try to find his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is an expatriate Australian historian, whose career at the prestigious Columbia University is about to be terminated due to underperformance. This lack of momentum in his life causes him to break up with his long-term partner, Diane, in a misguided attempt to save her, and any potential offspring, from his lacklustre life. From these beginnings, Perlmans narrative spins wider and wider, encompassing greater and greater themes with profound moral and social import. In this, I think Perlman is an old-fashioned kind of writer. He seeks to both entertain and to teach, with long passages on the civil rights movement, the law, the Holocaust and (surely a nod to Kevin Rudd) Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this book, Perlman has also taken a risk. The novel is very much set in New York and follows a great tradition of novels set in and about that city. His knowledge about, not only the city, but the broad sweep of American history may, dare I say, put some native American authors to shame. This is just one of his tricks, however. Stylistically, the novel is intricate and engaging. The narrative constantly cycles through events, times, character traits- building each moment on top of the last, before revisiting it only to expand further outward. This is a compelling novel, filled with detail, for sure, but very serious in its purpose to make us think about the world a little more fully, a little more deeply. Look out for it in awards lists, both here and overseas. (See interview, page 28.) Shane Strange is an ex bookseller and writer who teaches writing at the University of Canberra
Guardian Review
Epic is a word that one must use carefully, but this is an epic, in scope and moral seriousness. The story spans half a century, with scenes in New York, Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz. Perlman introduces Lamont Williams, an African-American man in his 30s and a former convict who has lost touch with his daughter, whom he hasn't seen in six years. He is living with his grandmother in the Bronx, trying to restart his life as he works as a janitor at a New York cancer hospital. He's beautifully drawn, and his empathic powers are on display when he meets Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor. Mandelbrot speaks with a sense of urgency, and Williams learns a great deal about Polish history, Nazi cruelty, the Jews and what happened in the extermination camps. The reader learns right along with him as Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, and on storytelling as an act of healing. The epigraph by Anna Akhmatova makes sense at the end: "Mountains bow down to this grief / But hope keeps singing from afar - Jay Parini Epic is a word that one must use carefully, but this is an epic, in scope and moral seriousness. The story spans half a century, with scenes in New York, Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw and Auschwitz. - Jay Parini.
Kirkus Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Perlman (Seven Types of Ambiguity) delivers a potent novel about the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of two characters in contemporary New York City. Lamont Williams, a young black man just released from prison, works in maintenance at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. While helping Mandelbrot, a patient with terminal cancer, he learns the old man was in Auschwitz. This is unfamiliar history to Lamont, but Mandelbrot feels a certain sympathy for him and tells him about the camp in harrowing detail. Meanwhile, Adam Zignelik, a history professor at Columbia University, discovers recordings of conversations with camp survivors made directly after the war. Before dying, Mandelbrot presents Lamont with a menorah, but Lamont is accused of stealing it and loses his job. Eventually, the stories converge as Lamont seeks to clear his name with Adam's help. VERDICT This is not a flawless work, as its very size and complexity can diffuse the power of its message. It is nonetheless important-so ambitious that its contents can only be hinted at in a summary. Perlman has done a valuable service by updating our understanding of history and making it resonate in a work of fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/5/11.]-Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Seneca, the first frozen apple juice, enriched with vitamin C. Rich, delicious Seneca . . . 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 its own that you can never know. It can capture you, corner you or liberate you. It can leave you howling and it can make you smile. Rich, delicious Seneca, sweetened naturally. '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,' he was told. But even at the time, it struck Lamont that a lot of the people who had been locked up with him did not 'hate themselves' quite enough. He remembers a lot of the people being fairly forgiving towards themselves. Some, positively brimming with forgiveness for themselves, could not understand it when others were not so forgiving of them. This dissociation from who you were, where you were, could even be funny. One night alone at lockdown, he found himself smiling about it, and implicit in the smile was a sense of being different from all the other men in all the other cells. It was not simply innocence Lamont felt that night but something additional that made him feel as though he was only visiting his present circumstances, as though he was only a guest there. He thought of himself then as being like a man who had mistakenly got on the wrong train or the wrong bus and for the moment was unable to get off. He had to live with it for a while, a temporary inconvenience. It could have happened to anybody. He went to sleep with this feeling, comforted by it. But in the morning the smile had gone and so had the sense of being different from all the other men. By the time he too was shuffling in a long hot line of incarcerated men waiting for breakfast, the grievances of the other men didn't seem funny at all and it was impossible for him to understand how they ever had been. He remembers wanting that feeling back. He still wants it back, even now. Sometimes the memory of the feeling is almost enough. It's funny what you remember. There's no controlling it. There was one prisoner in there -- they called him Numbers -- a little guy. He would make you smile. Numbers would say anything that occurred to him, anything that found its way into his head, and try to sell it as though it were a fact, a fact that God himself had just sweetly whispered in his ear. Numbers once told Lamont that seventy-two months was the national average of time served for robbery. Numbers was sure of it. Even as Lamont heard it, he knew Numbers was making it up. Even if he was right , Numbers was making it up. What did it mean? Did this cover all states? What about federal cases? Did it include armed robbery? What about cases with more than one charge, where only one of the charges was robbery? What if you had no prior convictions? Lamont had had no prior convictions. He had been charged a couple of times, but just as a juvenile and nothing had stuck. One hot night a friend of his had asked him if he would drive the friend and some other much younger man from the neighbourhood to the liquor store on their way to get some pizza before a night of videos and television. Lamont stayed double-parked in the van, listening to the radio while the other two went into the liquor store. The first time Lamont knew what they had really had in mind was when they ran out of the store screaming for him to drive away as fast as he could. The much younger man, still a teenager really, the one Lamont barely knew, had had a gun. Lamont Williams had not met this man more than three times in his life. The other, the older one, had been Lamont's friend since they were in grade school. Seventy-two months was the national average for armed robbery, Numbers had said. First it had been the average for robbery, then it was the average for armed robbery. He was making it up as he went along, just as he always did. But what if you hadn't known anything about it beforehand? What if some kid had taken you for a ride and let you do the driving? Well, these were all factors, Numbers agreed. What if you never wanted any trouble? What if you lived alone with your grandmother? What if the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood was your cousin, your best friend and your confidante? What if she was smart and said she saw something in you ? What if she had trusted you not to get into trouble any more? Michelle was never in any trouble. She was going places. She said Lamont could come with her. What is the average number of years you would serve if you were someone like that? What if the other two testified on oath that you hadn't known anything about it? 'That could be a factor,' Numbers conceded. Numbers was an idiot. He hadn't always been an idiot, but by the time Lamont met him, the combined effects of drugs and the beatings he had received in prison had left him overly fond of statistics. But when asked what the chances were that the defence of a black man from the Bronx would be believed, when the two co-accused black men were pleading guilty to armed robbery, Numbers' eyes seemed suddenly to brim with sentience. They welled up with a momentary understanding. 'You in trouble, Lamont.' Now out of prison, Lamont was in his thirties and back living with his grandmother again in Co-op City, the Bronx. Standing in the elevator going down, he smiled to himself. 'The trick is not to hate yourself,' they had told him in one of the counselling sessions. No it wasn't. He had never hated himself and that was not the trick. The trick was to stay calm, and to avoid or outlast the problem. That was how he had survived prison. It was how he had finally found a job and how he would keep that job. It was how he would save for an apartment of his own and it was how he would become some kind of father for his daughter again. 'Good morning, Mrs Martinez.' She'd been a neighbour for as long as he could remember. The express bus to Manhattan was scheduled to come twice an hour, once on the half-hour and then again on the hour. Lamont was there at twenty past, and so was ten minutes early. He stood near Dreiser Loop opposite the shopping centre in Section 1. It was the first stop for people going to Manhattan and the last stop for those coming home. An empty bus with only the driver in it was already on the street a hundred yards behind the bus stop. Its doors were closed while it waited to leave on time. A few women -- most, but not all of them, older than Lamont -- waited there too. One Hispanic man in a suit paced up and down as he waited. He seemed to be about Lamont's age. Lamont wondered if he knew him, but was careful not to stare. The man had his back towards Lamont and, anyway, wasn't keeping still long enough for Lamont to see properly. Lamont looked around the street. On the other side, a group of teenagers were making a noise. There was a paint store there and a ninety-nine cent store where there used to be an Amalgamated Bank. Lamont's grandmother said that it had moved to Section 4, but she couldn't remember exactly when. There was no particular reason she should remember that but then, Lamont wondered, what does reason have to do with memory? Excerpted from The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
