The Street Sweeper
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interviews
Henryk Mandelbaum, Robert Nowak, M. Ellen Mitchell, Nina Kliger, Mira Unreich, Paul Bruce, Sarah T. Phillips, Evan Haefeli, Eric Foner, Tobie Meyer-Fong, Amy Harfeld, Pablo ‘Paulie’ Santos, Charles ‘Arch’ Pounian, Audrey Uhre Mivelaz, Allen Howard, Yale Reisner, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center employees who chose to remain anonymous.
acknowledgements
For the friendship and support that have sustained me through the gestation of this novel I wish to th
ank Robert Chazan, Nikki Christer, Rick Goldberg, Carmen Gurner, Deborah Gurner, Diego Gurner, Fred Gurner, Jack Gurner, Deborah Gutman, George Halasz, Ken Jacobsen, Matthias Jendis, Jennifer Keyte, Hootan Khatami, Greg Levin, Sharon Lewin, Brendan Miller, Robert Milstein, Robert Nowak, Corrie Perkin, Suzie Sharp, Mira Unreich, Rachelle Unreich, Larissa Vetrova, Gabrielle Williams and Ted Woodward.
My thanks to those for whom this acknowledgement is superfluous and therefore all the more necessary, Lena Martin and Ross Martin, Harry Perlman and Dorothy Kovacs, and, not least, Janine Perlman, Toby Handfield and Liv Perlman Handfield.
For their role in bringing this book to publication, for their advice with respect to my writing career and for their friendship I wish to thank Jin Auh, Tracy Bohan, Angus Cargill, Sarah Chalfant, Nikki Christer, Britta Claus, Cathryn Game, Jo Jarrah, Geoff Kloske, Marion Kohler, Stephen Page, Brandon VanOver, Katja Scholtz, Stephanie Sorensen and Andrew Wylie.
I wish to acknowledge and to thank the following for their help with the gathering of the background material for this book: Henryk Mandelbaum, who was the inspiration for the character of Henryk Mandelbrot, Nina Kliger, Mira Unreich, Audrey Uhre Mivelaz, Charles ‘Arch’ Pounian, Allen Howard, Robert Yufit, Pablo ‘Paulie’ Santos, Wanda Nogeura-Irizarry of New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Ira Glass and Carl Marziali from the WBZ Chicago radio program, This American Life (whose segment ‘Mr Boder Vanishes’ alerted me to the work of David Boder, whose professional life inspired the character Henry Border), Sarah T. Phillips and Evan Haefeli and Eric Foner for the hospitality of the History Department at Columbia University, Barry Campbell and Amy Harfeld from the Fortune Society of New York, M. Ellen Mitchell (who discovered the transcripts of David Boder) and Olivia Anderson and Catherine Bruck and Christopher Stewart and Kristin Standaert and Sohair Elbaz for the hospitality of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Yale Reisner from the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Dena Everett from the United States Army Center of Military History, Rebecca Erbelding from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bethany Fleming from the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois and Tobie Meyer-Fong of the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University, and Rich Cohen.
Special mention should be made of Robert Nowak whom I met through his work as a guide at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. In the course of our work together over six visits he went from being a trusted guide and expert in the history of the camp to a dear friend and confidant. I doubt if I could have endured the hours there necessary to write the book without the benefit of his encouragement, linguistic skills, intellect, knowledge, grace, humour and his insistence that this story had to be told. A fine son of Poland, he is living proof that his home town of Oswiecim is not Auschwitz.
Harry Perlman deserves to be singled out for the critical attention he lavished on the many incarnations of this book over the many years of its creation. For not the first time, his close reading and thoughtful advice proved invaluable and cannot be repaid in words alone.
Praise for
Seven Types of Ambiguity
‘Compulsively readable.’
— The New Yorker
‘Bustling, kaleidoscopic … There are traces of Dickens’s range in Perlman and of George Eliot’s generous humanist spirit … This is an exciting gamble of a novel, one willing to lose its shirt in its bid to hold you … Stay with it for the long haul. It’s worth it.’
—The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of the Year
‘This is a love story in the 19th century tradition, the kind that makes the real world seem a bit dim … George Eliot down under.’
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘Nuanced, dynamic storytelling, layered with essential digressions on everything from psychiatry to the stockmarket.’
—The Washington Post
‘Dazzling … a page turner, a psychological thriller that is, in short, dangerous, beguiling fun.’
—Newsweek
‘Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is an exemplary novel in the tradition of Thomas Hardy and the earlier D. H. Lawrence. Perlman’s power is in conveying the strife between personality and character in each of his protagonists. His prose, like his story itself, is vivid, humane, and finally optimistic in a manner that strengthens the reader’s perceptiveness.’
—Harold Bloom
‘Motives are tangled, perceptions unreliable, and outcomes unexpected … [Perlman] has created a novel with just the right amount of meaning, intelligence, and beauty.’
—The Boston Globe
‘Perlman writes with such convincing simplicity – his sentences read like whiskey-fueled confessions … We can’t trust ourselves because Perlman makes us care too much.’
—Esquire
‘A sophisticated psychodrama.’
—The Wall Street Journal
‘A brilliant book, written in the unadorned style of Raymond Carver, but with the wild metaphysical vision of a Thomas Pynchon. It is that most unusual thing – a novel that is both intellectually fun and spiritually harrowing.’
—The Baltimore Sun
‘Worthy of Dickens or Doctorow … almost impossible to put down.’
—BookPage
‘Fast-moving, relentless but suspenseful … Perlman succeeds in illuminating the ambiguity inherent in lust, personal relationships, psychiatry and the law … Smart and edgy.’
—Booklist, starred review
‘An all-too-rare literary page turner.’
—Library Journal
‘Brilliant, absorbing … The scope of the novel is breathtaking but so intimately involving and densely plotted that it becomes that anomaly of a literate and urgent page-turner.’
—The New York Post
‘One of the best novels of recent years, a complete success.’
—Le Monde (France)
‘The scope of [Perlman’s] ambition and the strength of his achievement in portraying the psychological state of the developed world is unrivalled … We feel ourselves spiralling closer to a truth that we could not have reached through other means … from a voice in the wilderness burdened with seeing the truth.’
—The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
‘A colossal achievement, a complicated, driven marathon of a book … The opening section is a tour de force … At the end, in a comprehensive, an almost Shakespearian way, Perlman picks up every loose thread and knots it.’
—The Observer (UK)
‘My novel of the year … Captures the Zeitgeist of contemporary Australia every bit as powerfully as The Corrections anatomised that of America.’
—Jonathan Bate, The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
‘One of those rare works of art that makes you realise the world is both a simpler and a more complex place.’
—London Evening Standard, a Book of the Year (UK)
‘A complex and perfectly nuanced study of idealised love turned sour.’
—Daily Mail (UK)
‘This book’s true size is in its scope, its ambition, its emotional richness … Certainly, no novel has made this reviewer feel quite so sane in a long time.’
—Glasgow Herald (UK)
‘Thoroughly involving and often surprising … A triumph of the suspenseful withholding of information, and a note-perfect final page … A wise and generous book, a kind of less showy and more deeply humane version of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.’
—The Guardian (UK)
‘Remarkable … Perlman builds up an unsettling, often sympathetic but always memorable picture of [his characters’] emotional lives, and of the coldly mercenary world they inhabit.’
—The Sunday Times (UK)
‘An impressive, iridescent, all-encompassing view of feeling.’
—Der Spiegel (Germany)
‘Has the virtues of the great modern European novel.’
—Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany)
‘A literary sensation.’
&nb
sp; —Deutschlandradio (Germany)
‘This is a deeply thoughtful, engaging, moving, exciting and utterly compelling book … It’s seven types of wonderful.’
—The Sunday Telegraph
‘Where, critics have asked, is Australia’s equivalent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, or Philip Roth’s American Pastoral? Now, with Perlman’s achingly humane, richly layered and seamlessly constructed masterpiece, it seems that we have it.’
—The Canberra Times
‘Read it … A tour de force.’
—The Age
‘It is a pleasure to read a book that is so intelligently engaged with our time … and [whose] characters are so convincing.’
—Australian Bookseller & Publisher
‘An elegantly constructed, wise and compassionate fable for our times, full of twists and turns and insights into the corners of human desire.’
—The Sunday Age
‘This is a novel that can make you feel you are entering the lives of the people sitting either side of you in the morning traffic … It does what novels once did but rarely can nowadays: It brings the news.’
— The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Perlman sees with painful clarity. Insights from a writer of this calibre are worth sharing.’
—The Australian
‘Seven Types of Ambiguity makes much Australian fiction of the past decade look wan and unambitious.’
—Herald Sun
Praise for
The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming
‘Stunning … by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.’
—The Baltimore Sun
‘Invigorating stories … enlivened by Perlman’s intelligence, verbal energy, and mischievous wit.’
—Entertainment Weekly
‘Unashamedly various without being feeble, a series of exercises in voice, perspective and style, it deals in violence, exile and much else besides … Deftly switching perspectives is his most impressive technique … yet Perlman’s work isn’t all juggling tricks: at times, he manages to pack whole lives into a few paragraphs … Perlman’s plots seem effortless, which makes his surprises all the more affecting.’