Layers of history
“YOU are on your own, there is no drum roll, no string section, no fanfare. It’s like any other time you’ve been in that moment by yourself for years and suddenly, you put the full stop to that last sentence and think, ‘I think it’s finished’.”
This is how novelist Elliot Perlman felt after he finished writing his latest book, The Street Sweeper, which is being released next month.
Well before his earlier works – the best selling, internationally acclaimed Seven Types of Ambiguity, Three Dollars and The Reasons I Won’t be Coming – Perlman was plotting The Street Sweeper, if only in the abstract.
“I always knew, sooner or later that I would be writing about these things, particularly about the Holocaust because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know about it,” he explained in an interview last week in a Melbourne cafe.
A descendent of Eastern European grandparents who fled to Australia before the war, Perlman has always felt “intensely Jewish”, both historically and culturally.
“Within the one river of Jewishness, there are little tributaries here and there that flow off the main river. And one of those tributaries, which is a strong one and one I’m very proud of, is this desire to make the world a better place,” he said.
This philosophy preludes The Street Sweeper, a diverse narrative centering on themes of memory, history and the inalienable value of every individual, regardless of appearances, ethnicity, sex and political leanings.
Reflecting on the title The Street Sweeper, Perlman begins to encapsulate the novel’s vision: “We never think about a person with that job, we don’t want to read about him, see a movie about him and be him … but we want him to sweep the street.”
The novel follows the lives of two disparate characters. Lamont, the street sweeper, is an African-American janitor on probation, who enters an unlikely friendship with cheeky cancer patient Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor, and Australian-born Jewish history professor Adam Zignelik whose dwindling future – both professionally and romantically – belie a deeper propensity to unearth history’s tale.
Perlman was living in New York, which he describes as the “centre of the universe”, when the initial concept for The Street Sweeper struck.
At the time, the author was living opposite one of the biggest hospitals in the country, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, which became a central location for his novel. Observing the people outside the hospital while waiting for the bus, Perlman wondered: “What if an unlikely friendship were to blossom between two people who never should have met.”
Perlman uses his parallel characters and their nexus of relationships to unravel an epic story, spanning Poland before and during World War II, African-American oppression in 20th century America, 21st century New York and even the Emmy Monash Aged Care facility in Caulfield North.
As the novel snakes through time and character, moving back and forward, from East to West, the reader watches history transpire and observes the encompassing effects.
Perlman offers a tangible face and a gripping backstory to frame historical facts, as fictional characters in The Street Sweeper breathe life into deadened truths.
“I wanted to do this in a way that would get younger people, Jewish and non-Jewish, and gently say, ‘Come with me, I’ve got something to tell you’, and when they finish the book, hopefully they will they know a whole lot more about what happened to us, but without feeling like they have been lectured, or done a whole course in Holocaust history.”
Instead, Perlman did the hard yards and he did it with scrupulous precision. He interviewed African-American
janitors in New York, he read furiously and made six trips to Poland. There he was led by a Yad Vashem trained Polish guide who ladled him honey-flavoured vodka and latkes when he came down with the flu.
For the most part however, the author was in Poland alone. He recalled descending into Krakow, gazing from the airplane window onto the European landscape with an amalgam of awe and panic.
These moments offered Perlman the artistic privilege to transmute his emotion into an authentic story.
“I needed the emotional state to write, and write in a way that would affect the reader, not in a dispassionate way like writers of non-fiction,” he said.
“For many writers, language doesn’t have the power to give you the experience of being there and in a sense, you can say thank God it doesn’t, but I wanted to take the reader as close as I am able to.”
The hard work certainly paid off. Perlman’s representation of the Holocaust transcends bleak images of cadaverous figures and despaired souls. His humanist spirit allowed for a story that encompassed both the sheer heroism and shaking horror of Auschwitz.
The Street Sweeper is not centered on the Holocaust exclusively. The novel incorporates Chicago’s union movement of the 1940s, the legal battle for civil rights in the 1950s and present-day racism.
Perlman’s imagination of one of the protagonists, Lamont, deliberately defies stereotypical imagery to reveal the essence of the street sweeper.
“So often in pop culture, there are roles for certain people. The black guy is going to be tough or violent, or super cool -– absolutely no self-doubt and that’s just unrealistic. Everyone has self doubts and so would my guy.”
There are moments when Lamont’s situation is reminiscent of Joseph K in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, wherein the law and social mores exclude the minor few.
With due respect to the separate narratives of racism and anti-Semitism, Perlman sensitively places them under the overarching problem of prejudice.
“Our species is capable of tremendous cruelty and brutality and it all starts with this seemingly insatiable desire to categorise each other into groups and then put a distance between the groups and allow certain groups to be treated in a way that you don’t want your group to be treated.”
Perlman expects to be categorised in a similar fashion. “I’m a white Jewish Australian and we’ll see what happens to me when the book comes out in the US, but so far so good,” he said.
The Street Sweeper is Perlman’s most Jewish and personal work to date, driven to preserve the multi-dimensional layers of history. It focuses on memory as the golden residue of the past; a source that is both life affirming and soul destroying.
With its heart-warming mix of innocent charm and indelible integrity, one may draw parallels between The Street Sweeper and Harper Lee’s 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird.
And Perlman has received acclaim from many quarters. The New York Times has applauded Perlman for bearing “traces of Dickens’ range and of George Eliot’s generous humanist spirit”. France’s Lire describes Perlman as “one of 50 most important writers in the world”.
The Street Sweeper will be launched by Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally at a private function next month.
The Street Sweeper is published by Random House Australia. $32.95 (rrp).
REPORT by Timna Jacks
PHOTO of Elliot Perlman by Peter Haskin
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