The Street Sweeper

Feb 16, 2012 Jillwilson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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.(less)

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Jan 05, 2012 Denise rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: first-read, historical-fiction, read-in-2012, world-war-ii

I am having trouble finding the words to describe this novel and my feelings about it. Throughout this novel I was brought to tears and it gave me the chills. This book felt so profound to me that I took my time reading it. I felt that I needed to soak it in.

I loved the way that the characters and plot lines became intertwined. I was surprised to find out that some of the characters were actually based off of real people. That made the novel even better to me. The one thing that really stuck in...more

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Jan 11, 2012 Fiona rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 p...more 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. (less)

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Jan 31, 2013 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ozzie-gems, top-rating-books

Elliot Perlman latest book The Street Sweeper is a complex and compelling story with the main theme being the importance of history. The story centres on two men both trying to get there lives back together in different circumstances. The first and the one menchined in the books title is Lamont Williams a man recently out of prison and trying the best to go well in his new job at a hospital while thinking of how to find his 8 year old daughter. While at work Lamont will meet a Jewish pacient Hen...more Elliot Perlman latest book The Street Sweeper is a complex and compelling story with the main theme being the importance of history. The story centres on two men both trying to get there lives back together in different circumstances. The first and the one menchined in the books title is Lamont Williams a man recently out of prison and trying the best to go well in his new job at a hospital while thinking of how to find his 8 year old daughter. While at work Lamont will meet a Jewish pacient Henryk Mandelbrot who has a story that he tells him over many visits. Henryk will describe his time in Poland in the Ghettos at the start of World War 2 before being taken to Auschwitz were he will describe unspeakable horrors and his role wich would effect any person hearing thousands of people screams before the die and his remarkabe survival after a audacious uprising attempt.

The other person at the centre of the story is a Columbia university historian whos job is hanging by a thread Adam Zignelik . When he separates from his wife it seems his hopes for work and life are at a stand still until the father of one of his work mates William McCay who worked with Adams father in the civil rights movement in the 60's give him an idea that might save his career. William is convinced that black American troops were part of the ones who liberated the Dachau concentration camp a fact not menchined in records. While researching this Adam will stumble on the work of Jewish American psychologist Henry Border who went to Europe at the end of the second world war and conducted pioneereing interviews with survivors. Adams research will see him go half way around the world and will soon find out the tragic secret wich seen Henry stop his research.

The most sobering thing for me reading this was the similarities between the fate of Black people in America and the Jewish people of Europe in the mid 20th century with old predudices resulting in terrible miscarriges if justice. The question to be asked is why write a story like this describing the past. With this book the answer is obvious' to tell eveyone what happened and to not let significant events no mater how unpalatable be lost from history. The book itself explicitly say this with many victims of Auschwitz saying them very words before they die in the hope that there would be survivors to tell the truth. The story is not perfect with a number of parts particularly with the discovery of Borders research seemingly being found by chance and the book does border on being morally excessive. But despite these minor niggles The Street Sweeper grabbed me from the very first page and never let go and that for me makes the best type of read.

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Feb 01, 2012 Abby rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“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 his...more “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 than 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, compulsively readable 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. It isn't great literature but it is absorbing storytelling rooted in the importance of history and memory. Perlman takes us back and forth in time and in and out of many lives, using 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 Perlman tries to do too much -- working in too many historical examples of man's inhumanity to man and clumsily integrating the history -- but the story of the Sonderkommandos, those inmates assigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, is brutal and gripping and one that hasn't often been told in this detail.

Perlman did prodigious research for the novel, perhaps to a fault. There are five pages of bibliography, hardly typical for a work of fiction. But there is the sense that he felt the need to make use of every bit of it and the story often feels like an excuse for the history. Nevertheless, as the threads of narrative are (predictably) brought together you can't help but be moved. “Tell everyone what happened here.”
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Jun 09, 2012 Mandy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Two chapters in and a great start, will be interesting to compare with Anna Funder's 'All that I am'.

Excellent, harrowing, very clever marriage of 21st century life with an extraordinary piece of WWII history. Had no idea of the Sonderkommando uprising at Auschwitz, or, in fact, that Auschwitz was a death camp only (always it was a concentration camp). Very powerfully written, some descriptions of the events in the camp left me breathless but also very touching and sympathetic with the relations...more

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Feb 05, 2012 Susan rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

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.

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Jun 24, 2012 Rod rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For someone who has probably read one too many books about the holocaust. I loved this book. I love the way Perlman constructs his stories. The way so many lives are connected and the visual imagery his words provoke. I believe him to be a great modern writer...

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Dec 29, 2012 Nancy Oakes rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: australian-fiction

actually, I'm handing this one a 3.75 rounded up. For a longer discussion about this book click through to here.

After having heard from a number of people that they consider Perlman's The Street Sweeper to be one of their all-time favorite novels, I started this book yesterday; with only a few breaks for eating, taking my puppies out, and answering the phone, the day became a marathon reading session that ended at 1 am this morning. It was an epic reading day for an epic novel. Even though the...more actually, I'm handing this one a 3.75 rounded up. For a longer discussion about this book click through to here.

After having heard from a number of people that they consider Perlman's The Street Sweeper to be one of their all-time favorite novels, I started this book yesterday; with only a few breaks for eating, taking my puppies out, and answering the phone, the day became a marathon reading session that ended at 1 am this morning. It was an epic reading day for an epic novel. Even though there are several problems with this novel, overall I couldn't help but find myself extremely moved by it.

The Street Sweeper examines, among many other things, why it is important to understand that history is not just a study of past events, but that there were real people involved who should also be remembered. As one of the characters notes about the importance of history,

"... it's a way of honoring those who came before us. We can tell their stories. Wouldn't you want someone to tell your story? Ultimately it's the best proof there is that we mattered."

And later, while at a funeral, another thinks along those very same lines, as he was

“desperate for people to remember other people. If they didn’t, what did anything mean, what had anything been for?”

The author draws our attention to the " connections between things, people, places, ideas," and also spends time drawing parallels between African-American struggles against extreme forms of racism and those of European Jews. As just one example, did you know that African-American workers in Chicago slaughterhouses had black stars on their time cards making it easier for them to be identified when the layoffs came around?

Although this is one of the more powerful books I've picked up in a while, The Street Sweeper is not without its faults. To mention a few, first it does take some time to figure out exactly where the author is going; it really wasn't until Lamont meets the elderly cancer patient that things started to pick up for me. Also, in trying to make the point about connections the author has relied on a contrived, systematic series of coincidences that you can't help but notice. There's also a lot that could have been weeded out of this novel such as the ongoing, in-Adam's-head discussions with his girlfriend Diana throughout the story, a number of storyline starts that aren't always finished, and some strange-sounding prose here and there (migrainous?). But while these sorts of things and others tend to set my teeth on edge, they can be somewhat forgiven because of the author's overall focus on people not just as players or victims caught up in historical events, but people as human beings with lives to be remembered and stories to be told.

I feel this need to pace my reading about the Holocaust because of the emotional toll, and while you can't help but be moved by the powerful scenes that occur in the camps in this novel, there's a great deal more to this book that will keep you reading. As one of the characters notes, memory "can capture you, corner you or liberate you," and this idea is perhaps one of the strongest ideas that runs through this book when all is said and done -- that and the force behind oral history that keeps the past alive. The people may be gone, but the stories live on and need listeners, no matter if they're sad or inspiring. Aside from my issues mentioned above, I couldn't help but be very moved by this novel -- I was so utterly engrossed in it that all outside stimuli disappeared to the point where it was just me and the book for hours on end. I most definitely and highly recommend it. (less)

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Dec 16, 2012 Samantha rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This great, big book about the evils of racial hatred and the ties that bind perhaps suffers just a bit from its aim for completeness. It's primarily about Adam Zigelnik, a professor of history (and son of a prominent civil rights lawyer) whose career is in serious jeopardy due to his failure to publish any new work, and Lamont Williams, a black man recently released from prison, his crime having been mostly one of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The two men are fewer degrees of sepa...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Ben Thurley rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 hi...more 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:

- 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.(less)

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Sep 01, 2012 Paul Culloty rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There's little doubt that Perlman had worthy aims while writing "The Street Sweeper", but while the message that the world should never forget the Holocaust is well-delivered, the various fictional strands of the novel are somewhat clunkily bolted together. Lamont is clearly meant to be our hero, and you are drawn into his life-story after his release from prison, as he serves probation in hospital and strikes up an unlikely friendship with Mandlebrot, an Auschwitz survivor. Still, the idea that...more

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Aug 18, 2012 theresa Younce rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book. It is the story of a young black man from Harlem who spent time in jail for something he did not do, an elderly Jewish man dying of cancer in a New York hospital, a Jewish history professor at Columbia whose mostly absent father was a famous civil rights lawyer who prepared much of the Brown vs Board of... case, an elderly black man who worked with the above lawyer and whose son is the Chair of the history department under whom the Jewish professor works. How do they...more

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Jul 12, 2012 Libsue rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman is the story of three very different men. Lamont Williams an African-American man just released from prison who was convicted of a crime that he shouldn’t have been who’s trying to get back the one thing in life that means anything; Henryk Mandelbrot, a man who survived the atrocities of Auschwitz who desperately wants someone to remember; and Adam Zignelik, a history professor who’s on the verge of losing everything.

Lamont is a bystander in his own life, who...more The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman is the story of three very different men. Lamont Williams an African-American man just released from prison who was convicted of a crime that he shouldn’t have been who’s trying to get back the one thing in life that means anything; Henryk Mandelbrot, a man who survived the atrocities of Auschwitz who desperately wants someone to remember; and Adam Zignelik, a history professor who’s on the verge of losing everything.

Lamont is a bystander in his own life, who truly just wants to stay out of trouble and find the daughter he hasn’t seen in nearly six years, and keep his job. Mr. Mandelbrot strikes up an unlikely friendship, on the street just outside of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, with Lamont by making a not so simple request that could potentially cost Lamont his job. With a beckoning finger and a request to lean in Henryk Mandelbrot suggests “To hell with the rules.”

Adam, the son of a civil rights activist, has broken up with his long time girlfriend and lost sight of his once promising career at Columbia. Nontenured and untethered Adam is given a request by William McCray, the father of a good friend (chairman of the History Department at Columbia) and former colleague of Adam’s father, to look into the role of African-American soldiers during World War II. This request will either save Adam or break him.

The first chapter was enough to hook me. This is a book that once you pick up you just can’t put down. My only complaint is that Perlman got bogged down in the story of Dr. Border( a psychologist that did some vital research after WWII I won’t say more – I don’t want to ruin this part for you.) His story while heart breaking, could have been shortened. So much of the book revolved around his story, but surprisingly the characters within this sub-plot were left hanging at the end. Don’t get me wrong Border’s story was gripping, but it honestly deserved its own book. I wanted more of Lamont and Henryk. I wanted to hear Lamont’s voice. I wanted to understand why Adam did what he did, or didn’t do what he should have. I wanted to know why he loved Diana (the girlfriend he summarily dumped) and why he needed to let her go.

Having said all of this – I politely request that you pick up The Street Sweeper flaws and all. It’s still a great book. “The trick is not to hate yourself. It’s funny what you remember.”(less)

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Jun 16, 2012 Lara Silkoff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It took me a good 150 pages or so to love this book. To be honest, I really only persisted because I have loved Perlman's previous works. I am glad I did because it's a book for all its contirved plot and dialogue, makes you think about long and deep about the need for us he to respect and protect memory and stories, the basis of human history.
The beginning of the novel dives into African American civil rights history, in addition to introducing (andswtiching between) and whole host of intercon...more

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May 03, 2012 Sharon Speevak rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What did the author want to say in this book? Where did he hpe the book's path would take the reader? I wonder these things, without answers. Yes, this is a book about one man's experience of a death camp. It is brutal & compelling & unlike other accounts I have read. It seems geared, in large measure, to answering two questions: why didn't Jews revolt and why didn't Jews give up. The latter answer, to live to tell everyone what happened, is a predominant theme in the book. And yes, this...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Marge rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book consumed me – all 619 pages – I read every word, even the difficult parts. A little wordy at times, even literally repeating thoughts/lines in places but I still read every word. A Jewish history professor whose life is falling apart because he has done no research/writing and is losing his job and a black man just released from prison who just wants to get his life back on track and find the daughter he has lost during his time in prison and what they each learn about the Holocaust fr...more

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Feb 28, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Tell everyone what happened here" is the mantra of Elliot Perlman's new novel, The Street Sweeper. Perlman has an uncanny and unique way of connecting people, history, psychology and contemporary events as he writes his tome of a novel. It is a history of the holocaust as well as the story of two men who are connected through time and events.

Lamont Williams is a poor black man who is relatively unsophisticated. He has just got out of jail after serving six years for a crime he did not commit. H...more "Tell everyone what happened here" is the mantra of Elliot Perlman's new novel, The Street Sweeper. Perlman has an uncanny and unique way of connecting people, history, psychology and contemporary events as he writes his tome of a novel. It is a history of the holocaust as well as the story of two men who are connected through time and events.

Lamont Williams is a poor black man who is relatively unsophisticated. He has just got out of jail after serving six years for a crime he did not commit. He has one main objective - to locate the daughter he lost touch with while he was incarcerated. Lamont lives with his grandmother in Coop City in the Bronx. He was very close to his cousin Michelle while growing up but she grew apart from him while he was in jail. Lamont manages to secure a job in building services at the Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital through a back-to-work program for ex-cons. While at Sloan Kettering he is anxiously awaiting his six month probation to be over so he can be a regular employee with benefits.

During his time at Sloan Kettering, Lamont befriends an elderly holocaust survivor named Henryk Mandelbrot. After hours, Lamont visits Mr. Mandelbrot and is told his story of life in Auschwitz. Lamont learns the difference between concentration camps and death camps, of the inside uprisings at Auschwitz and Mr. Mandelbrot's intimate and detailed history as a Jew during World War II. Mr. Mandelbrot tells Lamont that he must remember everything that he is told by him. Lamont takes this at face value and studies the particulars of the story every night.

Meanwhile, at Columbia University, Adam Zignelik is an untenured professor of history who has not had a new idea in years. He knows he will not get tenure. His girlfriend of eight years, Diana, wants a child and Adam is unwilling to bring a child into the world. He can barely see his way through a class without fear of falling apart during a lecture. He is good friends with the chair of the history department but even that can't save him from his fate of losing his job shortly.

A friend of Adam's father (and the father of the chair of the history department) gives Adam an idea for research - to see if black troops were involved in the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. This idea blooms into full-scale research for Adam, leading him to Chicago, Australia, and Sloan Kettering. For the first time in years Adam has hope but he has lost Diana. What he has instead is her comb that she left behind in their apartment when he told her to leave. He talks to her as if she was still there and holds on to her comb as an artifact of their love.

Since this is a tale by Perlman, if the reader is at all familiar with `7 Types of Ambiguity', we know that there will be surprising connections found and formed. That is Mr. Perlman's style. He does this brilliantly in this book. However, it is hard to say that this book is a novel. It is as much a history book about the holocaust as it is anything else. Mr. Perlman tells the story well but it is very repetitive. There are also many, many facts to digest. Perhaps that is why he feels the need to tell and retell them. He wants the reader to remember and the novel deals a lot about memory and its place in human behavior and intent. He says of memory that "it can capture you, corner you or liberate you".

With this book, Mr. Perlman wants memory to liberate the reader. By telling the story it may even have liberated him. It is the telling, the active intent of utilizing memory, that is the gist of this 639 page novel that contains 5 pages of footnotes. I have to admit that at times I felt like I had to slog through the pages and at other times I was mesmerized, not able to put the book down. The novel either grabs the reader or drags him with it. It is a novel to read with reverence and respect. It also requires patience and fortitude. Having said that, I recommend this book to anyone who ever had questions of how the holocaust affected people personally, then and today. It tells this story in an exemplary fashion. It feels as if you are there and that is an amazing act of writing.
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Feb 23, 2012 Barbara Burd rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This novel is an ambitious undertaking and, in many respects, the author does quite well in bringing together the various characters and the multiple intertwining plots. Perlman develops two story lines: the one concerning an African American ex-con who was unjustly imprisoned and now fighting to keep his job as a housekeeper at the cancer center. Here he enters into an unlikely friendship with a Holocaust survivor, who, knowing that death is near, feels compelled to tell his story. The intertwi...more

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Jan 27, 2012 Felice rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the simplest terms possible, The Street Sweeper is a literary buddy story. In the big picture outlook author Elliot Perlman uses a developing relationship between two men who have suffered at the hands of government to write about big events and big ideas. Within this basic framework The Street Sweeper becomes an ambitious book about some of the worst racial persecution the twentieth century had to offer.

Lamont Williams feels lucky to have a job. As an African American newly out of prison he...more In the simplest terms possible, The Street Sweeper is a literary buddy story. In the big picture outlook author Elliot Perlman uses a developing relationship between two men who have suffered at the hands of government to write about big events and big ideas. Within this basic framework The Street Sweeper becomes an ambitious book about some of the worst racial persecution the twentieth century had to offer.

Lamont Williams feels lucky to have a job. As an African American newly out of prison he knows all too well that the odds are not in his favor. He had the good fortune to get placed in a job training program and now works at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a job and environment that he likes. He is sharing an apartment with the Grandmother who raised him and is saving to get his own place. His ultimate goal is to find the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was two.

While at work Lamont meets Henryk Mandelbrot, an elderly patient at the Cancer Center. Henryk has a past as troubled at Lamont’s. Henryk is a Holocaust survivor. He tells Lamont about his life as a Jew in Poland and his experience in Auschwitz. The commonalities of racism, a distrust of authority and their innocence of the crimes for which they were accused bond the two in friendship.

A world away in the archives of a Midwestern university, Adam Zignelik makes a life altering discovery. He has found a forgotten trove of first person oral testimonies from Holocaust survivors. The timing of his find couldn’t be better. His career is at a dead end. His chances for tenure at Columbia University where he teaches are over and his personal life has been just as successful.

Perlman uses coincidence and shadowy connections to bring these three individuals together amidst a cast of if not thousands then certainly hundreds. His writing works when he uses it for good as in storytelling. Poetic description and the ability to make the necessary (?) historical back story not read like Cliff Notes are not his strengths.

However, those admittedly not tiny faults aside (Where was his editor?) I did enjoy The Street Sweeper. As I’ve said Elliot Perlman can tell a story. It’s disappointing that every element in the novel doesn’t come together to make The Street Sweeper better than it is but within the books’ sprawl there is passion and a commitment to honesty that resonates. (less)

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Jan 05, 2012 Zohar - ManOfLaBook.com rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

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 al...more 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 (less)

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Dec 23, 2011 Maxine McLister rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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. (less)

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Nov 02, 2011 Banafsheh Serov rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 Ame...more

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Nov 02, 2012 Paul Lunger rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Elliot Perlman's "The Street Sweeper" is a novel that runs parallel plotlines that when they intersect will surprise you in a way you never thought possible & provides insights into an era of history at times forgotten. Plot #1 involves Lamont Williams an ex-con who ends up befriending a patient at a local cancer hospital & learns more about the Holocaust than he ever bargained for. Plot #2 is that of professor Adam Zignelik a history professor at Columbia University who starts doing res...more

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Feb 29, 2012 Clare Cannon rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adults

A very long book that had important things to say but took a little too long to say them. Three stories of different people are developed, two more so than the other one, and at the very end they converge for a climax that is more an emotional focus for the reader than a significant progression of the storyline.

Several human rights issues are addressed in the stories, the first is the integration of African Americans with white Americans in schools in the late 1950s and the social unrest that su...more

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Jun 25, 2012 Kiwiflora rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A story, a real story, that moves effortlessly from the present to the recent past, from New York to Chicago and back again, then to Poland, to Auschwitz, to Melbourne, from the American civil rights movement to Nazi camps to academia. The scope of the story, where it takes the reader, the vision of the author in successfully combining all these disparate elements is really quite awesome. The diversity and richness of characters, in fact they are more than characters, to the reader they become r...more A story, a real story, that moves effortlessly from the present to the recent past, from New York to Chicago and back again, then to Poland, to Auschwitz, to Melbourne, from the American civil rights movement to Nazi camps to academia. The scope of the story, where it takes the reader, the vision of the author in successfully combining all these disparate elements is really quite awesome. The diversity and richness of characters, in fact they are more than characters, to the reader they become real people, is just as awesome. I can't commend this book enough. The story is gripping, the characters life-like and the message it leaves at the end will stay a long time, and should stay forever: tell everyone what happened here.

Now such a book with so much in it is not going to be short - 544 pages plus another 10 of notes, references, acknowledgements etc! But well worth every page.

The street sweeper is a young black man, Lamont Williams, who has recently been released from prison. He is on a 6 month probation term at a cancer hospital in New York, lives with his grandmother in the Bronx and is trying to locate his young daughter somewhere in the city. By chance he meets one of the patients, Henryk Mandelbrot, an elderly Jewish man who tells Lamont of his life prior to and during the war, ensuring Lamont commits everything he is told to memory. In another part of New York, at Columbia University, Adam Zignelik, an untenured history professor is finding himself without a job and living alone. His Jewish American father was closely involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and as a result Adam too has close friends who are also black. Through one of his father's old friends, William, Adam finds himself on a research project that will change his life and unite all these people and places that we are slowly introduced to in the story.

The whole crux of the book rests on Adam's discovery of a set of recordings made by a psychology professor in 1946. Henry Border went to Europe after the war to make recordings of the war experiences of displaced persons - DPs - mainly as it happens, Jewish survivors of the camps, principally the death camp Auschwitz. So now you know a lot of the story does not make pretty reading. But it needs to be told. Adam realises this too, and over the course of the following weeks he peels away the mystery of Henry Border, his family and the stories of some of the people in the tapes. And then like an intricate spider web the events and people of the past are brought together with Lamont, Henryk, William, Charles, Michelle and Sonia on a street corner in New York city.

Marvellous writing, marvellous story.
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Jan 13, 2012 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

During the course of this book, a history professor at Columbia University delivers a lecture to his students with the intent of demonstrating how history is about so much more than memorizing dates and statistics and locations. He wants his students to realize that some of the most compelling historical stories are about the moments when ordinary people are caught up within extraordinary circumstances.

As "The Street Sweeper" unfolds, the reader is taken along an extraordinary journey with some...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Flo rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I waited a long time to read this book and was so sure it would be really good. Not only am I not enjoying it, I totally dislike it. First the writing is BAD. Too many coincidences, too many plot lines, too many agendas. Perlman repeats himself and repeats himself--no wonder it's over 500 pages. He tries to load so much meaning into extraordinary occurrences, and includes so many of these occurrences, that in themselves need no embellishment...the history of Afro-Americans, emancipation, white h...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Jonathan Scobie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As a number of critics have noted, Perlman writes in the great 19th C. tradition of the novel exemplified by George Eliot and Charles Dickens. His masterful interweaving of believable characters and their trajectories upon the larger canvas of History, always for the illumination of both and never at the expense of either, exemplifies E. M. Forster's exhortation in "Howards End": 'Only connect'. As a contemporary attempt to return social conscience to the novelistic art (something the Creative W...more

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Mar 14, 2012 Annabel Smith rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Literally everyone should read this

Recommended to Annabel by: Gayle

Shelves: australian, 5-star-rated, faves, 2012-faves

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 stor...more 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.
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