The Pawnbroker: A Novel
(Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

Edward Lewis Wallant. (2015). The Pawnbroker: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press.

Edward Lewis Wallant. 2015. The Pawnbroker: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press.

Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press, 2015.

Edward Lewis Wallant. The Pawnbroker: A Novel. Mandel Vilar Press, 2015.

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The Pawnbroker

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2015-11-10T00:00:00Z

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title

The Pawnbroker

fullDescription

For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called “survivors" could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer.
At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. Nazerman's dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. (Dramatizations of these scenes in Sidney Lumet's 1964 film version are famous for being the first time the extermination camps were depicted in a Hollywood movie.)
Remarkable for its attempts to dramatize the aftereffects of the Holocaust, The Pawnbroker is likewise valuable as an exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups. That this novel, a National Book Award finalist, remains so powerful today makes it all the more tragic that its talented author died, at age 36, the year after its publication. The book sold more than 500,000 copies soon after it was published.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Dave Eggers
   • content:

     “In the short time [Wallant] was writing - about three years wherein he considered himself and was considered a serious writer - he was counted as part of a brilliant group of postwar Jewish American writers - Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth among them. That Wallant died so young, unable to travel on with these writers, is criminal, especially given how prolific he was. But the novels he finished in his short life are all miniature masterpieces."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Thomas Lask, The New York Times
   • content: “[R]eminiscent of Dostoevski....on every count [The Pawnbroker] deserves the attention of every serious reader."
3. • premium: False
   • source: R. D. Spector, New York Herald Tribune
   • content: “Wallant has...written an honest and moving book about human experience at its most dismal."
4. • premium: False
   • source: David Boroff, Saturday Review
   • content: “Edward Lewis Wallant is a gifted writer who probes with a kind of troubled tenderness into pools of human darkness."
5. • premium: False
   • source: TIME magazine
   • content: “Sol Nazerman, the erudite Shylock of Harlem, is a creature of fasicnating complexity....he is that literary rarity--the character whose sorrows seem as real as the reader's own."
6. • premium: False
   • source: George Adelman, Library Journal
   • content: “Well written and painfully memorable."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "[T]he book gains energy from its plot, which involves a mobster and a planned robbery that puts Sol in an awful position that Wallant thoughtfully interrogates throughout: how do you trustfully navigate the world when you've experienced the worst that people are capable of?"
8. • premium: False
   • source: Charles Alva Hoyt
   • content: “No contemporary novelist was more gifted in the sheer grace of constructing a novel...."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Robert W. Lewis
   • content: “an American naturalist in the tradition of Dreiser and Norris...."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Eileen Pollack, author of In the Mouth and Breaking and Entering
    • content: We don't need to imagine how shocking The Pawnbroker must have been to readers in the early 1960s because it is still that shocking to us. Without a trace of sentimentality, Edward Lewis Wallant wrote the Great American Novel of Redemption. Before anyone else, he showed us that only by recognizing in others the face of human suffering could the individual survivor--whether male or female, Jewish, black, or Puerto Rican--transcend his or her inheritance of trauma and pain."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and Elijah Visible
    • content: "Post-Holocaust novel par excellence. Timeless and well ahead of its time. Lose yourself in Wallant's lyrically imbued world of traumatic memories and its collision with contemporary life."
12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      September 1, 2015
      A New York pawnbroker reckons with the loss of his family in the Holocaust in one of the first American novels to confront the atrocity. First published in 1961 and a finalist for the National Book Award, the second novel by Wallant (1926-1962) is a close cousin to Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, another book in which a small shop becomes a flashpoint for violence and a window into Jewish suffering. Sol Nazerman runs his Harlem store with dour aloofness-contempt for negotiation, distrust toward his sole employee, and exasperation with the youth-center fundraiser trying to crack his defenses. "Friendliness rolled off that man like water off porcelain," as Wallant elegantly puts it. But though Sol is somewhat one-note and doesn't match the creations of Malamud, Bellow, Henry Roth, and other Jewish-American writers Wallant was associated with during his brief career, Sol's still waters do run deep. He's most prominently affected by the Holocaust: Sol is plagued with harrowing memories of the cattle car that took him to the camps, of murdered fellow detainees, and of his wife's forced prostitution. His fragile sources of stability are the shop, the family he lives with and whose financial crises he manages, and the woman with whom he has a sexual relationship that's shot through with "desperation and mutual anguish." For all that gloom, though, Wallant's goal isn't to explore Sol's inner despair so much as to reveal the complexities of the larger world by having Sol abrade against it. Much of the book's force and flashes of humor derive from Sol's interactions with the motley souls entering the shop; despite some awkward ethnic slang, there's a sharp, photorealistic quality to those minor characters. And the book gains energy from its plot, which involves a mobster and a planned robbery that puts Sol in an awful position that Wallant thoughtfully interrogates throughout: how do you trustfully navigate the world when you've experienced the worst that people are capable of? A worthy exploration of a subject that remains underrepresented in fiction.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity

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For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called “survivors" could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer.
At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. Nazerman's dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. (Dramatizations of these scenes in Sidney Lumet's 1964 film version are famous for being the first time the extermination camps were depicted in a Hollywood movie.)
Remarkable for its attempts to dramatize the aftereffects of the Holocaust, The Pawnbroker is likewise valuable as an exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups. That this novel, a National Book...

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