From the scars of the civil rights struggle in the United States to the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there are even more stories than there are people passing each other every day on the crowded streets of any major city. Only some of these stories survive to become history. Adam Zignelik, an almost 40-year-old untenured academic historian at New York's Columbia University, is the son of a prominent American civil rights lawyer and an Australian mother. One of his late father's closest friends had been the African American civil rights activist, William McCray. Since the death of Adam's parents it is the McCray family - William, his son Charles (Chair of History at Columbia) and Charles' wife - that has become Adam's adopted family. With Adam's career and his relationship with his long-time girlfriend in crisis, he gets a suggestion for a promising research topic from William McCray, who is a World War II veteran, that just might save him professionally and even personally. Entirely fortuitously, Charles McCray's wife's cousin, Lamont, recently released from prison and working as a hospital janitor, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient, an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor and former member of the Sonderkommando (those prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi extermination camps). Two very different paths - Adam's and Lamont's - lead to one greater story as The Street Sweeper, in dealing with memory, racism, genocide and the human capacity for guilt, resilience, astonishing heroism and unexpected kindness, spans the 20th century to the present and the globe from New York to Melbourne, Chicago, Warsaw, Berlin and Auschwitz.

About the Author

Elliot Perlman is the author of the award-winning novel Three Dollars, The Reasons I Won't Be Coming (a collection of award-winning stories), and the novel Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Reviews

It s been eight years since Elliot Perlmans last novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity, was released. Unlike renowned American literary critic Harold Bloom, I was unimpressed by that book, thinking that it failed, with its tricky structure and rather mundane plot, to capitalise on the great promise shown by Perlmans first book--the enticing Three Dollars. But Perlmans latest, The Street Sweeper, restores my faith in his work. It is, I think, a fine novel written by an author comfortable in his capacity to tell stories that seek to inform as well as entertain. Set in New York City, the book follows two characters in crisis as they try to move through lives riven with events beyond their control. Lamont Williams has been recently released from prison after serving six years for a crime in which he played an incidental, if not unintentional role. He is starting a job as a probationary janitor at a cancer hospital in New York. He wants to get his life back on track: keep his job; find a place to live; try to find his estranged daughter. Adam Zignelik is an expatriate Australian historian, whose career at the prestigious Columbia University is about to be terminated due to underperformance. This lack of momentum in his life causes him to break up with his long-term partner, Diane, in a misguided attempt to save her, and any potential offspring, from his lacklustre life. From these beginnings, Perlmans narrative spins wider and wider, encompassing greater and greater themes with profound moral and social import. In this, I think Perlman is an old-fashioned kind of writer. He seeks to both entertain and to teach, with long passages on the civil rights movement, the law, the Holocaust and (surely a nod to Kevin Rudd) Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this book, Perlman has also taken a risk. The novel is very much set in New York and follows a great tradition of novels set in and about that city. His knowledge about, not only the city, but the broad sweep of American history may, dare I say, put some native American authors to shame. This is just one of his tricks, however. Stylistically, the novel is intricate and engaging. The narrative constantly cycles through events, times, character traits- building each moment on top of the last, before revisiting it only to expand further outward. This is a compelling novel, filled with detail, for sure, but very serious in its purpose to make us think about the world a little more fully, a little more deeply. Look out for it in awards lists, both here and overseas. (See interview, page 28.) Shane Strange is an ex bookseller and writer who teaches writing at the University of Canberra

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. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Perlman (Seven Types of Ambiguity) delivers a potent novel about the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of two characters in contemporary New York City. Lamont Williams, a young black man just released from prison, works in maintenance at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. While helping Mandelbrot, a patient with terminal cancer, he learns the old man was in Auschwitz. This is unfamiliar history to Lamont, but Mandelbrot feels a certain sympathy for him and tells him about the camp in harrowing detail. Meanwhile, Adam Zignelik, a history professor at Columbia University, discovers recordings of conversations with camp survivors made directly after the war. Before dying, Mandelbrot presents Lamont with a menorah, but Lamont is accused of stealing it and loses his job. Eventually, the stories converge as Lamont seeks to clear his name with Adam's help. VERDICT This is not a flawless work, as its very size and complexity can diffuse the power of its message. It is nonetheless important-so ambitious that its contents can only be hinted at in a summary. Perlman has done a valuable service by updating our understanding of history and making it resonate in a work of fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/5/11.]-Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.