The Street Sweeper in Retro Chapter Chicks

Sep 27, 2020 Candi rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, book-i-own, chunksters, ww-2

“… 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 “… 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.” ...more

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