Book Review: The Street Sweeper

When it is my turn to nominate a book, I foist an old favourite on the Blokes.

There is the joy of sharing a joy. The side benefit is possibly more important. There is none of that obligation to stay up reading all Friday night to make sure the book is finished on time. One avoids the ignominy of recommending a book that even I think is dreadful. And the worse ignominy of not having finished reading one’s own nomination by the time Book Club night comes around.

David prefers the risky life. Talk to spouse and friends. Obtain a recommendation. And share it with the Blokes. On one occasion, his recommendation was so bad that David withdrew it and nominated a substitute by the time he got to page 50 and before any of the rest of us had even bought the book.

Elliott Perlman went to Monash. He was admitted to the Bar in Victoria in 1997. It was that lazy life of a judge’s associate that allowed him to write his first short story that led him on his path to success as a writer. The success is phenomenal. It includes best sellers in the US, France and Germany and a description in one French newspaper as “Australia’s Zola” and in another as “one of the top 50 writers in the world”. I guess David was not taking a huge risk.

The Street Sweeper is a book of grand and important themes. At least in one sense, it is set in New York in 2007.

A young Afro-American man, Lamont Williams, is serving six years for an armed robbery of a pizza store which his two mates carried out with him as the driver and without telling him of their intentions. Lamont’s experiences after his release from prison bring him to work at a cancer treatment hospital in New York where he does a favour for an old Jewish man, Henryk Mandelbrot, who happens to be one of those who survived not only Auschwitz but working in the Sonder Kommando, the special unit of Jewish prisoners forced to assist in the large scale killing and disposal of bodies. He becomes the listener (who is told he must remember) of a man who must tell his horrific story, one more time, before his cancer claims him.

Working at Columbia University is Adam Zignelik, the Australian son of a Jewish American lawyer. Adam’s father worked in the Legal Defence and Education Fund of the National Association of Coloured People (“the LDF”) with Thurgood Marshall, in the years before Justice Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court. The LDF, commencing in the thirties, had conducted the litigation that broke the legal system of segregation in the United States. Among the LDF’s (and Thurgood Marshall’s) great successes was Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, the 1954 case, which overruled the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson and thereby brought to an end legal segregation in education in the United States.

Adam’s life is in disarray. His highly successful history of the LDF and civil rights by strategic litigation is fading into the past and he has no new ideas. Tenure (and even continued teaching) at Columbia is a fading dream. He has little confidence for the future. He brings his long term relationship with Diana to an end for what he thinks is the good of Diana.

Through Lamont and Adam and their life struggles and those of their friends and relations around them, The Street Sweeper explores the great themes.

The reader learns some detail of the history of the holocaust and some of the all too anonymous heroes of the resistance to that event. These include the members of the Sonder Kommando who died in a grand revolt in 1944. They include the four women who smuggled gun powder and made the revolt possible. These women, Roza Robota, Ester Wajcblum, Ella Gärtner, and Regina Safirsztain were heroes, not just because they made the revolt possible but also because they withstood months of torture, betrayed no one and went to their deaths by hanging on 6 January 1945 with courage in their hearts and on their lips.

The novel also recounts the almost unknown story of a Jewish émigré psychologist working and teaching at Illinois Institute of Technology, David P Boder, who went to the displaced persons’ camps in Europe as soon as he could get permission after the War and conducted recorded interviews of as many Holocaust sufferers, Jewish and non-Jewish, as he could and published their interviews in a book called I Did Not Interview the Dead.

Although many of the characters are based on historic figures who lived and acted in the middle years of the twentieth century, The Street Sweeper retains its status as a novel as opposed to documentary writing. All the characters display a remarkable inner life and we share their hopes and fears, joys and sadness, whether they are seeking love or burning the gassed bodies of their co-religionists who they have, albeit with little choice, helped to kill.

The lives of the lawyers whose skills and dedication unwound the system of segregation and disadvantage for Afro-Americans that the Supreme Court and spineless politicians had allowed to develop are told through their sons, Adam and his friend and mentor, Charlie. Charlie is the first Afro-American chair of the History Department at Columbia and son of Adam’s father’s great friend and colleague from the LDF struggles.

Lamont is the street sweeper of the title, a job he assumes after he has, wrongly and unfairly, lost his job at the cancer hospital. It is the characters of 2007, Lamont, Adam and his estranged girlfriend, Diana, Charlie and his wife, Michelle, about whom the narrative of The Street Sweeper revolves. It is through their relationship with these modern characters that the people of history are perceived and their lives told. And it is the pursuit of happiness by Lamont and his contemporaries that consumes the reader. The characters take wrong turns. They receive second chances. And it is their success or failure that concerns the reader, greatly.

The Street Sweeper is a novel about historians and the practice of history. It is about the events of history, the ordinary people who make it and the ordinary people who are affected by it. Sometimes, they are the same people.

A running theme through the Auschwitz events of the novel is the cry: “Tell what happened here”. “Tell what happened here” is also the predominant ethic of historians. It is also the theme of the novel.

The Street Sweeper manages to tell what happened here in respect of two of important aspects of our history. In doing so, it tells the personal and unremembered stories that are even more important than the grand sweeps with which we content ourselves. And it does so with a sense that we are forgetting the lessons of those aspects of our history, lessons that we need badly to remember.

And it does so by engaging the reader in the lives of its characters. Neither the importance of the topic nor the grand nature of the themes detracts from The Street Sweeper’s entertainment value. Indeed, each is enhanced.

The Blokes Book Club meeting took place over fine platters of Greek food at the Club of the same name in South Brisbane. It was one of those nights where the subtropical storm struck at evening peak hour and made traffic a nightmare. The Blokes trickled in one by one from their struggles on the roads to be cheered by the food and drink on offer.

The Blokes’ verdict was mixed. Perhaps, half the Blokes agreed with the French newspapers’ assessment of Mr. Perlman’s writing on the evidence of The Street Sweeper. The other half were less convinced. I was unreservedly with the French.

Stephen Keim

Maroochydore

6 April 2013