Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper is an extraordinary book. It is not perfect — it is repetitive, opinionated and long — but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Perlman unites the Holocaust and the civil rights movement as themes in a narrative that runs from rural Lithuania in the early ‘30s to modern day New York. Calls are made at Auschwitz, Little Rock and downtown Chicago along the way, as chance meetings connect a barely literate black street sweeper in Manhattan with the last of Sonderkommando (the handful Jews who were coerced into assisting the Nazis deliver the Final Solution, and clean up afterwards). They are both victims, Perlman says in the dedication, of ‘the same disease’.
The Street Sweeper is a novel about history rather than a historical novel. It is largely based on real events and people. Perlman and I met under the eaves of Faber&Faber, and he said that he researched the book ‘with all the vigour of a historian’. There is an extensive bibliography, and he conducted interviews with those who witnessed these enormities, an experience that he found ‘exhilarating and terrifying’. Perlman is a softly spoken and self-deprecating Australian, plainly in awe of those he met.
‘The most startling thing was the interview with Mr Mandelbaum (who was the last surviving Sonderkommando), the basis for the wartime character of Henry Mandelbrot. To shake that hand, and to look at that hand, and to know — even before we’d spoken — of the things he’d done and seen. I could not permit myself the luxury of trembling or quaking beneath the weight of it all.’
His emotions were similarly strong when he met the heroes of the civil rights movement.
It is impossible to maintain complete critical distance, but the book does not suffer for that. On the contrary, Perlman’s emotions jump-start a story that is slow to begin. The plot fires when William, an old civil rights campaigner, learns of the US Supreme Court’s reversal, in 2007, of the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education judgment, the case which decided that segregation was unconstitutional. In 2007, the court held that judges are not social engineers, that Brown did not intend to integrate schools, and that it was illegal to discriminate positively in favour of one race. Therefore, education boards could not move people from poor neighbourhoods (blacks) to schools in more prosperous (white) post-codes. William howls into the night at the news. Did Perlman, who trained and practiced as a barrister, have a similar reaction?
‘I did. Essentially, the judgment makes it legal to segregate schools in the United States on the basis of race…The mendacity of it…I could not believe it.’
Being British, I see the judgment as making it legal to segregate schools in the United States on the basis of class. Perlman implied that I was drawing a distinction without a difference: the poor and the blacks are one and the same. He said that the original judgment in Brown had ‘permitted integration [positive racial discrimination]’ in public schools, so the 2007 Supreme Court was engaging in ‘conservative judicial activism’.
It was a thought-provoking moment. In Britain, ‘judicial activism’ is a term exclusively associated with the left. Indeed, our political discourse is so warped that when some circuit judges exceeded sentencing guidelines after last summer’s riots, they were described as having exercised common-sense judging not conservative judicial activism.
Perlman was at his most animated when talking of this. He welcomes judicial activism generally. ‘You can’t stop it. Judges need to have the power they do. I can see problems with it, especially with accountability. But this is ultimately about cheques and balances, and you do need people to be above the political system.’ It’s just that he believes the Supreme Court was wrong in 2007.
Perlman’s point, and the reason he wrote The Street Sweeper, is that the evils of racism and anti-Semitism still exist and must be addressed by society and its institutions. The book is full of astonishing stories about Swastikas being painted outside the rooms of Jewish students at Columbia University and of nooses being left on the doors of black professors. The progress made in the last century is not yet secure.
The book’s ambitious structure depends on drawing equivalence between civil rights and the Holocaust. They are not obvious bedfellows, and I ask if any of Perlman’s eyewitnesses spoke of the same parallel. ’No,’ he replies, which is surprising. It’s odd that a book, rooted in testimony, imposes logic retrospectively.
Perlman’s fictionalisation of real people and events has attracted criticism, particularly his fictionalisation of two Eastern European Jews, Roza Robota (who was murdered after the uprising in Auschwitz in October 1944) and David Boder (who emigrated to America in the ‘30s, where he became a master in experimental oral psychology). The most vociferous complaint came from Olivia Laing in last week’s New Statesman, who wrote:
‘Rosa is a saccharine version of the extraordinary Roza Robota, who was — though you wouldn’t know it from this account — a committed activist before the war. Border is based on David Boder, the oral history pioneer, who wrote I Did Not Interview the Dead, based on his work in displaced persons camps. They weren’t married, don’t seem to have known each other personally and weren’t motivated, or in Boder’s case compromised, by the romantic entanglements presented here.’
Perlman rejects Laing. ‘I’m not saying that David Boder married Roza Robota, I can’t see the problem.’ That said, he still felt the need to explain himself further. ‘This is sort of an attempt to pay huge deference to history, not to play fast and loose with it. But it might be a philosophical misconception on my part, but I don’t currently think it is.’
Perlman is precise in his language, so the word ‘currently’ seemed conspicuous in that caveat. He continued, ‘You show greater respect by trying to show what the history was and how it’s done without saying, “This is what Napoleon thought”. I can’t know what Napoleon thought, so I’ve invented a character based on as much as we know.’ This is problematic. While we don’t know what Napoleon thought, we do know what Mr Mandelbaum et al thought.
Perlman’s approach is dotted with small intellectual inconsistencies, but to contest these is to the miss the point. The Street Sweeper is a novel about how the terrible past festers in the prejudices of the present, and he gets the history dead right — distasteful pun intended. It is a social book that urges us not to forget. Perlman’s point, it seems to me, is that the experience of a people is more telling than the experience of a person. His Rosa goes to her death in Auschwitz screaming, ‘Tell everyone what happened here’, not, ‘Tell everyone what happened to me’.
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