The Street Sweeper

Elliot Perlman’s literary novel The Street Sweeper (2011) moves between eras from the Holocaust to the present day, weaving interconnected narrative threads to tell a story about race, history, and memory. Perlman, an Australian writer and lawyer, is the author of several novels, including Three Dollars and Seven Types of Ambiguity.

Lamont Williams, an African-American janitor, works in a hospital for cancer patients in Manhattan. Lamont has recently been released from prison on probation and hopes to reconnect with his young daughter, Chantal, who is now eight. The girl’s mother had stopped visiting him in prison, and he has lost touch with them.

Lamont strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient and Holocaust survivor, Henryk Mandelbrot, who is under the care of African-American oncologist Dr. Ayesha Washington. Mandelbrot is dying, and soon his history will die with him. He chooses to tell Lamont his story.



Mandelbrot was once at Auschwitz, a sonderkommando, a Jew forced to assist the SS in lining up his own people for the gas chamber and in disposing of their bodies afterward. He speaks of the Sonderkommando Rebellion near the end of the war, shortly before Auschwitz was liberated. Two rebels, Rosa Rabinowicz and her lover, Noah Lewental, were hanged. Just before Rosa was executed, she cried out, “Tell everyone what happened here!”

Mandelbrot also mentions their backstory: Rosa and Noah were sent to a concentration camp; their affair broke up her marriage to her husband, Chaim Border, who left her and went to America with their daughter, Elise.

Meanwhile, another character, Jewish American Australian history professor Adam Zignelik is experiencing a crisis. He is an assistant professor at Columbia, but his career is stagnant. He is out of ideas, and he is about to be denied tenure. He ends his relationship with his girlfriend, Diana, because she wants a child, and he doesn’t believe he’ll be able to support one. He finds solace only in his good friend Charles McCray. Charles is the African-American head of the history department, the son of civil rights lawyer William McCray. McCray senior happens to be friends with Adam’s own father, Jake Zignelik, who was also once an important figure in the civil rights movement. Charles’s wife, Michelle, is Lamont’s cousin; the two have not seen each other in many years.



William McCray offers Adam the inspiration he needs: Adam decides to find out whether African-American soldiers were among those who liberated Dachau. He travels to Chicago for research and stumbles upon the work of Dr. Henry Border, who collected a number of interviews with Holocaust survivors shortly after the war’s end. Border published a book of eight interviews, but Adam finds the transcripts for fifty and the original recordings. His research also suggests a connection between Border and Mandelbrot’s story: Border has a daughter named Elise, and one recording suggests a connection between himself and a woman named Rosa at Auschwitz.

Knowing he is close to death, Mandelbrot offers Lamont a gift: a silver menorah his children once gave him. Lamont is grateful, but when the younger Mandelbrots discover the menorah is in his possession, they accuse him of stealing it. Lamont loses his job over the accusation and is forced to become a street sweeper instead. One day, he sees Dr. Washington and asks her to tell the hospital of his friendship with Mandelbrot, hoping to set the record straight and get his job back. But Dr. Washington claims not to remember him.

Adam discovers an interview with a survivor who remembers an African-American soldier at the liberation of her camp. His last name was Washington. Adam frantically tracks down the soldier and discovers he has a granddaughter in Manhattan: Ayesha Washington. He contacts Dr. Washington and arranges to interview her grandfather, who is frail but still living.



Dr. Washington’s memory stirs after arranging the meeting. She thinks of Lamont’s claim of friendship with a Holocaust survivor and arranges another meeting: this one between Adam, herself, and Lamont. They quiz him about Mandelbrot’s history, and realize the two must have been friends: Lamont knows and is able to relate little-known details about the sonderkommandos at Auschwitz. Lamont also tells Adam that Mandelbrot left a written account of his story as well.

Everything comes together for Adam: his research is going well, and he will be able to publish something for the first time in years. He reconciles with Diana. As for Lamont, he is given his job and the menorah back with Dr. Washington’s help.

Throughout the novel, small mentions are made of a young African-American girl who seems to resemble Lamont’s daughter, riding the subway. At the end, Lamont, Dr. Washington, and Adam are standing together on a street corner, smiling and laughing. The little girl suddenly appears and runs to Dr. Washington, addressing her as “Mom.”



The Street Sweeper received mixed reviews. The Globe and Mail described the book as a “superb multistrand epic” and wrote that Perlman depicts history in a way that “won’t be forgotten.” The New York Times was less impressed, calling it “a textbook on how not to write fiction.” The review blasted repetitive dialogue and contrived coincidences throughout. Nevertheless, the novel was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and received the Australian Independent Booksellers Indie Book Award for Fiction.