Book Review: The Street Sweeper

The Street Sweeper: A Novel by Elliot Perlman (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012. 640 pp)

Born to second-generation Jewish Australians of East European descent, Elliot Perlman studied at Monash University. While working as a judge’s associate, Perlman submitted a short story that eventually won The Age Short Story Award. Upon becoming a full-time writer, Perlman’s debut novel, Three Dollars, won The Age Book of the Year and the Betty Trask Prize. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

History as the Spoils of War 

History is written by the victor. When peace arrives and diktats emerge, the narrative that develops often becomes one sided. For this reason, we can never conclusively know history because our narratives carry bias. I vividly remember surprise upon hearing my high school physics teacher—born and raised in the southern region of the United States—indicating unease regarding Abraham Lincoln. Although my teacher affirmed the goodness of liberating slaves from the South, he rejected the notion that Lincoln was a great president.

In The Street Sweeper, Elliot Perlman somewhat unsuccessfully seeks to tell the story of the marginalized.

The Street Sweeper 

Centering on two heterogeneous characters, The Street Sweeper explores both the holocaust and the civil rights movement. On one end, Perlman ponders the difficulties facing Lamont Williams, a poor, black ex-convict sweeping streets and taking out the trash at a Manhattan cancer center through a correctional pilot program. If Lamont lasts six months, he will earn full-time employment and the opportunity to focus his resources on finding his daughter, a metaphorical casualty of spending years in the joint. Would you want an infant to remain relationally connected with a prisoner?

Early during his probationary period, Lamont encounters a cancer-ridden holocaust survivor named Henryk Mandelbrot. Striking up a friendship, Henryk shares with Lamont the harrowing story of Auschwitz and his involvement in the Sonderkommando, a slave labor unit forced to work the gas chambers in the death camps.

At his core, Lamont is an innocent man. He earned six years in prison for a crime his friends committed. Having agreed to give a ride, Lamont’s life took a turn for the worst when his friends, unbeknownst to him, held up a convenience store. Describing Lamont’s obliviousness as a personality trait consistent from childhood, Perlman writes,

“Lamont liked to read the magazines but Michael had always been more interested in the candy. Michael was the first to steal and it had been candy, Now and Laters and Hershey bars, he’d stolen. Lamont had his head buried in a magazine and hadn’t known what Michael was doing until they’d left the store” (67).

The Historian

On the other end of the character spectrum, Perlman contemplates the civil rights movement and the holocaust through the lens of a Columbia historian named Adam Zignelik. The son of a prominent Jewish lawyer who contributed to the legislation that paved the way for the civil rights movement, Adam gained scholarly acclaim for a book praising the role of lawyers in civil rights.

“But worrying if [Adam] would ever have another sufficiently good idea was now a luxury he could no longer afford because it wasn’t enough to have a good idea one day. It probably wasn’t enough to have one even now. He really needed to have had one before now because, having spent five years at Columbia with only one book to show for it, an untenured academic seeking tenure was in very big trouble” (52).

Desperately in need of an idea and with his job on the line, Adam inspects a lead from a close friend regarding the potential link between black World War II soldiers and the liberation of concentration camps. If the link exists, it’s possible that World War II could function as a harbinger that provided the necessary strength for returning African-American troops to stand up for civil rights.

During Adam’s search, he uncovers original wire recordings of displaced persons—the title before holocaust survivor—created by a Chicago psychologist, Henry Border. With the wire recordings unveiling potentially the earliest historical record of the holocaust, Adam’s research begins to shift toward these stories. In learning more about the psychologist that traveled to Europe in the summer of 1946, Adam draws nearer to Henryk Mandelbrot and Lamont Williams.

Overt Racism 

For the most part, Perlman’s prose is engaging and at times masterful. Especially in the early stages of The Street Sweeper, I marveled at Perlman’s ability to link stories and to write poetic sentences. But as the novel developed, I found certain holes difficult to overcome.

First and most worrisome, Perlman sets the current events in this novel in a somewhat parallel state where Columbia University is willing to host Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and race relations are tense.

“The day before, someone had left a noose hanging on the door of a black professor from Columbia University’s Teachers College. The professor, a woman who hailed from a disadvantaged southern background, now a professor of psychology and education, was known for her particular interest in the psychological effects of racism on victims. Now she was a victim of it herself” (411).

Lithograph by holocaust survivor Leo Haas

Yet descriptions such as this one refuse to probe deeper, existing as a hanging thread. Despite heartbreaking explanations of the holocaust and the civil rights movements, Perlman refuses to expand on these imagined current issues. To a certain extent, Perlman’s densely packed narrative provides little space to expand on these complicated parallel issues. In my mind, the novel would have been better served without complicated current events.

Additionally, Perlman’s race discussion teeters between relevant and dangerous. A white Australian of Jewish descent, Perlman’s depictions of the African-American condition could easily be mistranslated. Interestingly, Perlman admits the danger in the acknowledgement section of the novel confessing that any description of another race inherits risk although he intends not to offend.

What Is Life if We Can’t Remember? 

Nevertheless, The Street Sweeper portrays some compelling characters. The reader wants Lamont and Adam to find success in their endeavors and such a position is the first order business of a good story. The Street Sweeper asks us to remember people when we consider history. Certainly, events exist on an institutional level, but we should always remember that history happens to people.

“Lamont Williams was desperate for people to remember other people. If they didn’t, what did anything mean, what had anything been for” (553)?

Despite certain reservations, The Street Sweeper is an entertaining and enveloping read. If you are interested in historical fiction and willing to read about heartbreaking topics, The Street Sweeper is for you.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5

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Posted by: Donovan Richards

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Film Review: Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds directed by Quentin Tarantino (Universal Pictures, Weinstein Company, A Band Apart, R, 153 minutes)

Starring Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth, Mélanie Laurent, and Christoph Waltz.

Dual Duels

Set in France during World War II, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds tells the story of two separately planned attempts to assassinate the leaders of the Nazi party.

In one storyline, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) – nicknamed “The Jew Hunter” for his ability to locate Jews in hiding – interrogates a dairy farmer learning that he is harboring a Jewish family under the floorboards. While Landa’s men shoot through the floor, teenage daughter Shosanna Dreyfus escapes the carnage.

Three years later, Shosanna hides in plain sight as a cinema owner in Paris under the identity, Emmanuelle Mimieux. While changing the marquee, she meets Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a decorated German sniper and star in an upcoming German propaganda film. Smitten, Zoller convinces Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to move the premier of the film to Shosanna’s cinema.

Understanding that this premiere will provide an occasion for all of Germany’s high ranking officers to be in the same room, Shosanna realizes that she has an opportunity for revenge.

Killing Nazis

In the second storyline, 1^st Special Service Force First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) assembles a team of Jewish-American servicemen to go undercover in France with the sole mission of inflicting terror on the Nazis.

A sadistic killer, Raine insists that his soldiers kill Nazis and scalp them as proof. In fact, he requires each soldier to personally give him 100 scalps. Through the information provided from a double agent, the Allied Forces learn that the Nazi leaders will all attend the premier of a propaganda film in Paris. With the help of the informant, Raine and some of his men gain entry to the event with the sole intention of wreaking havoc. Of course, none of this actually happened in real life. But Inglourious Basterds is a film that ponders the “what-if”.

In the Midst of Bloody Carnage, We See Compelling Characters

At its core, Inglourious Basterds is about the characters.

Waltz, playing Colonel Landa, is brilliant and deserving of every award bestowed on him for the performance. Landa is complex; ruthless on one hand, he possesses a sinister intelligence with no loyalties on the other. In every scene, he hovers over the rest of the characters as if he knows the whole plot and is only playfully toying with the other characters.

Pitt, playing Lieutenant Raine, represents the opposite of Landa. His sense of retribution trumps all other human emotions. For Raine, if a person wears the Nazi uniform, he deserves death and/or public humiliation. Although the Allied Forces are the film’s protagonists, their actions are more violent and less forgiving.

If Everyone Dies, Who Is the Protagonist?

Ultimately, the bloodshed in the film portrays the senselessness of war on both sides. As with every Tarantino film, everyone dies. But in this instance, death shows us how retribution can be, in itself, deadly. The Nazis killed millions of Jews and Inglourious Basterds allows us to watch them suffer for their crimes once more.

Yet, our desire for retribution can create psychopaths no different than the Nazis. Inglourious Basterds reminds us to be careful what we wish for.

The film represents another signpost in the Quentin Tarantino canon. Stylistically, it is everything one comes to expect from Tarantino films. However, the acting of Christoph Waltz and the juxtaposition of Nazis and retributive psychopaths makes for an excellent movie.

Verdict:  4 of 5.

Book Review: Sepharad

Sepharad: A Novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2003. 400 pp)

Antonio Muñoz Molina is a Spanish writer and member of the Royal Spanish Academy. He studied art history at the University of Granada. While working as a journalist in Madrid, Molina published a collection of his articles for his first book. As an author, he has won Spain’s National Narrative Prize twice and the Planeta Prize once. Molina currently lives in New York City.

Margaret Sayers Peden is an American translator and professor who received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. Currently a Professor Emeritus, she teaches classes on Spanish, Spanish American literature, Translation, and Interpretation. Her English-language translation of Molina’s Sepharad won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2004. She resides in Columbia, Missouri.

Origins

Since as early as the 2^nd century, Spanish Jews have labeled the Iberian Peninsula – the land mass of Portugal and Spain – as “Sepharad.” To this day, Modern Hebrew still refers to Spain as “Sepharad.” For many, “Sepharad” is a word that signifies the culture of Spanish Jews.

Photo by Daniel R. Blume

In Antonio Muñoz Molina’s work, Sepharad, the author details the consequences of World War II on this population. Put simply, the holocaust acted not only as a heinous genocide, but also as a divider. In the horror of a fascist-occupied Europe, Sephardi Jews dispersed throughout the world.

The Diaspora

While “novel” hardly conveys the experience of reading Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina utilizes beautiful prose while telling the stories of the Sephardi diaspora.

In other words, each chapter in this tome provides an unconnected look at the life of the Sephardi. Whether depicted during the war, in its aftermath, or in current times, each chapter poetically narrates the story of this broken community.

Speaking on the dispersal of community, Molina writes of the unspeakable connection between the Sephardi,

“You go away and forget the habits and figures of that little enclave in the heart of Madrid, and years later remember, for no reason, a place, a face, a fragment of a story with no beginning or end, a novel we each carry but never tell anyone” (228).

While the Spanish Jews maintain this fragmentary connection, their new communities certainly change them:

“You are not an isolated person and do not have an isolated story, and neither your face no your profession nor the other circumstances of your past or present life are cast in stone. The past shifts and reforms, and mirrors are unpredictable. Every morning you wake up thinking you are the same person you were the night before, recognizing an identical face in the mirror, but sometimes in your sleep you’ve been disoriented by cruel shards of sadness or ancient passions that cast a muddy, somber light on the dawn, and the face is different, changed by time, like a seashell ground by the sand and the pounding and salt of the sea” (288).

The Horrors of World War II

Photo by Za Rodinu

Alongside this sense of connection between the Sephardi, Molina discusses World War II in brutal detail. With stories detailing the holocaust, Russian communists, and interactions between Jews and Nazi sympathizers after the war, Sapharad explores the depths of hatred, violence, and war.

In one poetic passage, Molina writes

“The war was filled with coincidences like that, with chains of random events that dragged you away or saved you; your life could depend not on your heroism or caution or cleverness but on whether you bent down to tighten a boot one second before a bullet or shard of shrapnel passed through the place where your head would have been, whether a comrade took your turn in a scouting patrol from which no one came back” (303).

More Memoir, Less Novel

As I hinted with my quotations earlier, Sapharad is not your common form of a novel. Molina explores many true stories in the book including the love letters of Franz Kafka and many personal interviews with the Sephardi.

At one point, Molina in a memoir-voice mentions,

“On one internet page I found, in white letters on a black background, a list of Sephardim the Germans deported from the Island of Rhodes to Auschwitz. You would have to read them one by one, aloud, as if reciting a strict and impossible prayer, to understand that not one of these names can be reduced to a number in an atrocious statistic. Each had a life unlike any other, just as each face, each voice was unique, and the horror of each death was unrepeatable even though it happened amid so many millions of similar deaths. How, when there are so many lives that deserve to be told, can one attempt to invent a novel for each, in a vast network of interlinking novels and lives” (365)?

Few Adventures in Life Tie Up All the Loose Strings

Ultimately, Sepharad is a difficult read with little narrative direction. For those looking for a story, Seapharad will leave them disappointed. In fact, Molina contends,

“People always want to know how stories end; whether well or badly, they want the resolution to be as neat as the beginning, they want sense and symmetry. But few adventures in life tie up all the loose strings, unless fate steps in, or death, and some stories never develop, they come to nothing or are interrupted just as they are beginning” (285).

But, the people of Sepharad have a long and complicated history worth documenting. In the wake of the holocaust, the Sephardi diaspora have many unique stories, and yet, remain connected through cultural lineage.

Antonio Muñoz Molina writes some beautiful prose and Margaret Sayers Peden deserves recognition for a masterful translation. While I am glad to have read this book, I am unsure if I am able to recommend it. Sepharad is a laborious read that requires every ounce of a reader’s attention. If you can’t handle that, don’t read the book.