The Street Sweeper

Starred review from November 7, 2011
At the heart of Perlman’s long, labyrinthine, but rewarding novel are two narratives: a Polish Jew tells the tale of his ordeal in a Nazi death camp to a black American ex-con while evidence of black American soldiers liberating a concentration camp is unearthed by an Australian-Jewish history professor. That these stories cleverly mirror one another is one of the many strengths of Perlman’s (Seven Types of Ambiguity) latest saga. Lamont Williams, just out of prison and working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, befriends Henryk Mandelbrot, a patient and Holocaust survivor who recounts his experiences as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland and later working the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Adam Zignelik, in fear of losing his teaching job at Columbia and depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend, discovers early voice recordings of Jewish prisoners, which he scours for testimony that African-American soldiers may have been involved in the liberation of Dachau. Other related characters weave in and out, the coincidences of their intersections fraught with tantalizing meaning. Perlman deftly navigates these complicated waters, moving back and forth in time without having to take narrative responsibility for the course of history. In so doing, he brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement, and crafts a moving and literate page-turner.

Starred review from January 15, 2012
An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America--and of the terrible events left behind in the old country. Australian novelist Perlman (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2004, etc.) seems perfectly at home in the streets of New York, with all their raucous diversity. Some of his characters are less at home; the story opens with an ugly clash between a Jamaican bus driver and a rider from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, each steadily refusing to understand the other. Perlman's premise--that a Holocaust survivor might find common cause with a person suffering discrimination in this country--isn't entirely original, but no matter; he spins a fine story. Lamont, supposedly rehabilitated after time in jail, has lost everything, but thanks to a trial program, he's found a job as a janitor at a hospital. "He liked being able to ask someone from another department a question by simply picking up the internal phone, dialing the other person's extension and beginning with, 'This is Lamont Williams from Building Services, ' " writes Perlman matter-of-factly. It is perhaps not to Lamont's advantage, being on probation and so fresh out of the pokey, to meet an old patient who urges him, "To hell with the rules." The old man has reason to suspect notions of law and order, as Lamont gradually learns; he's nursing powerful secrets. Such stuff is the stock in trade of an untenured history professor who is looking at the role of African-American soldiers in the liberation of the Nazi death camps. A step ahead of being fired himself, he finds a lifetime's worth of study in what he learns. Perlman's long tale, spanning decades, is suspenseful and perfectly told in many voices, without a false note. It deals with big issues of memory, race, human fallibilities and the will to survive against the odds. A keeper: a story that speaks to the simple longing for freedom and peace, and to all the things that get in the way.

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August 1, 2011

Paroled felon Lamont Williams, who works as a street sweeper while looking for his lost daughter, befriends a dying man who survived the Holocaust. Meanwhile, foundering professor Adam Zignelik discovers a cache of recordings that recall a horrific past and hopes that bringing it to light will bring him acclaim. Their stories meld, even as current forces--e.g., the Civil Rights Movement--inevitably shape their fate. Australian writer Perlman has been on my radar since his multivalenced Seven Types of Ambiguity; his latest will be sought out by serious readers everywhere.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2011
Acclaimed Australian writer Perlman (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2004) is a master at meshing his characters' streams of consciousness with social tsunamis of hate and violence. In his intently detailed, worlds-within-worlds third novel, this discerning and unflinching investigator of moral dilemmas great and small takes on the monstrous horrors of racism in America and the Holocaust. This swiftly flowing, multifaceted tale begins with two present-day New Yorkers. Newly released from prison, sensitive and determined Lamont, the African American street sweeper of the title, works diligently as a janitor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center while trying to locate his young daughter. History professor Adam Zignelik, of Polish Jewish and Australian Jewish heritage, knows he won't get tenure even though he is friends with the department's first African American chair, Charles McCray. Their fathers were good friends during the civil rights movement, and Charles' dad is the catalyst for Adam's discovery of the forgotten work of Henry Border, a Polish Jewish psychology professor based in Chicago, who recorded the tales of death-camp survivors. Unexpected connections proliferate: Charles' wife is Lamont's cousin. Lamont befriends a patient whose gruesome, heartrending tale of heroic resistance at Auschwitz intersects with Border's life, which generates provocative story lines involving racial and labor strife in Chicago. Perlman's compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)