The Street Sweeper [Hardcover]

Elliot Perlman (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 5, 2012

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper

 

“[I]t seems somehow fitting that the author of The Street Sweeper, a wonderfully rich, engaging and multilayered new novel about blacks and Jews in Chicago and New York, would hail from Australia. I’ve been a fan of Elliot Perlman’s work since his 1998 novel Three Dollars. That book and his massive Seven Types of Ambiguity (2004) revealed him to be an author of rare erudition and compassion. But The Street Sweeper is his boldest work yet…” –  The Washington Post

“The Street Sweeper is an impressive literary achievement, complex in its organization, meticulous in its plotting and deeply satisfying in its emotional payoffs.” – The Wall Street Journal


“In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside — subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned — and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next… A towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.” – Entertainment Weekly


“As characters interact and fates intertwine, Perlman tells an engaging multi-generational saga witnessing personal histories that heroically endure and survive brutal and horrific racism to become what we know as the history of the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement. At his best, Perlman accomplishes this literary feat by evoking remarkable depth and meaning in otherwise commonplace events and characters…. [W]hat is most memorable about this richly woven tale is the lessons about the importance of memory and remembering, and the novel’s underlying compassion and sense of history.” – USA Today


“An epic tale that spans decades and bridges generations while chronicling the predominant chapters of racial persecution perpetrated in the darkest hours of the 20th century… Perlman is a consummate storyteller… This stunning novel works, and matters, because of the expert way Perlman has recorded both the agonized howl of the past and the plaintive echoes of the present.” – San Francisco Chronicle


“The Street Sweeper connects up its large cast of characters, telling a grim but buoyant story, full of humanity and brave acts. Reading it provides that uncommon thrill in fiction: a philosophical page-turner.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer


“The Street Sweeper is a big novel in every sense… It’s filled with color and characters whose unlikely connection tells the stories of contemporary New York, 1930s Warsaw and 1950s Chicago.” – The Forward


“Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing.” – The Guardian (UK)


“An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America--and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.” – Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)


“Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement.... A moving and literate page-turner.” – Publishers Weekly (STARRED)


“Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.” – Booklist (STARRED)

About the Author

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition edition (January 5, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594488479
• ISBN-13: 978-1594488474
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #245,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Tell Everyone What Happened Here." January 5, 2012

By Bonnie Brody TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"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.

50 of 60 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Badgering has no role in a novel January 20, 2012

By Curious

Format:Hardcover

Mr Perlman has created another ambitious and epic length novel. I have read all of his outputs, including Three Dollars, Seven Types and Reasons he won't be coming (short stories). I am actually a fan. So this review is not a flippant dismissal.

The novel is a mammoth project, taking 5 years to write and spans 3 continents. Other reviewers have covered the plot and themes of the book comprehensively, so I won't duplicate all that good work. There is absolutely no disagreement with the importance of the subject matter, nor of the creative mind at work. The sentiment and the political persuasion that proudly underpin the book are actually completely aligned with mine. Mr Perlman, in his interviews, has talked about the painstaking research and visits to Europe to interview witnesses and people who survived the monstrous events. So why do I only give it 2 stars?

Fundamentally, I felt talked to, reading the book. The fervor and emotional tensions of the story was not weaved into building the characters or setting the foundations for the reader to participate in the journey. It was articulated in long, laborious sermons that sounded like it has come straight out of the pulpit of Mr Perlman. The complexity of the story and creativity of the plot was not match by the quality of the writing in this instance. The irreverent humor of Three Dollars or the subtle short scenes of Seven Types was absent. The endless repetition of the same message, filled in by long rambling sentences that did not go anywhere new or exciting, just made reading this novel hard work. I did not feel Lamont, Adam or Diana are real people, they were just pawns in the story to make you believe the story. The were manipulated, rather than built, as characters in a story.

I am not a novelist. But I am an extensive reader. So what I don't enjoy is being preached to, whatever the subject. Mr Perlman could have made his point, and created a far better novel with exactly the same complex plot with a third of the words he used. He has not mastered the epic novel. A serious and aggressive editor should have been allowed to slash the novel to a third of it's current length, and the readers would have been rewarded with a clear, sharp, hugely moving and fabulous novel. Just compare it with Michael Ondatjee and the English Patient, or more recently Anna Funder and All the I Am. Some things only need to be said once, if it is said well.

If you have never read a Perlman book, it is unlikely to move you to read others. If you have never read a book on the horrors of the Holocaust or other racial conflicts around the world, it may appeal, as it certainly will remind you and repeat the messsages so that you can't ever forget. If you are a relatively informed reader who would like to be discerning and choose to spend your precious hours of reading finding the 'gold' amongst the 'dust', then I suggest you give this a miss. That's why it's only 2 stars, for me.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Impor­tance of Remembering January 5, 2012

By Man of La Book

Format:Hardcover

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.