Occasionally you come across a book that rips your insides into ribbons or makes you feel like you are underwater and in danger of having your lungs burst. When you do, you find you have to stop, lay the book aside, and come up for air. I felt that way a number of times while reading The Street Sweeper. The horror of what men will do to one another, have done and still do, is somehow overwhelming, no matter how many times you have encountered it before.

Perlman achieves a perfect balance between the past and the present in this novel, and he explores some of the hardest issues we face as human beings, our prejudices against one another, our ability to see the “other” as less human than ourselves, the complete suspension of compassion in some, and the horrid evil that lurks in others. It is subject matter that has been explored before, particularly with regard to the Holocaust, but Perlman does it so well that it feels freshly horrendous, sickening and unspeakable.

From his characters Lamont Williams, a man who has spent six years of his life incarcerated for a crime he did not commit; Adam Zignelik, a history professor who is facing the collapse of his career and personal life; William McCray, an early civil rights lawyer who wants his son and others who have benefited from the struggle to recognize that it is on-going; Dr. Border, who attempts to record the history of those who have survived the attempted annihilation of their race, and Henryk Mandelbrot, a man who endured the unthinkable in Auschwitz and wants no one to forget what happened there, Perlman squeezes every drop of emotion and injustice and hope that can be salvaged.

History can provide comfort in difficult or even turbulent and traumatic times. It shows us what our species has been through before and that we survived. It can help to know we’ve made it through more than one dark age. And history is vitally important because perhaps as much as, if not more than, biology, the past owns us and however much we think we can, we cannot escape it. If you only knew how close you are to people who seem so far from you...it would astonish you.

Indeed, that is the reason for history and also the reason we need to read books like this one and have writers like Elliot Perlman who are willing to face the atrocities of both the past and the present, pull them into the light, and ask us if we cannot be better than this going forward.

There were no towers with armed guards surrounding the Mecca, the malnutrition that the children tearing around the foyer screaming at one another suffered was subtle, and no one was being shipped off to be exterminated, but this was unequivocally a ghetto. It was the ghetto one got in a country pretending to be at peace with itself. Where did you put your slaves when you were no longer allowed to keep them? Henry Border knew a ghetto when he saw one.

This book is well researched and all too real. It cannot fail to make you stop and think about your own life, to look a bit more closely at the lives of those around you, and, if you are a praying man, it will force you to your knees.
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What a wonderful and life-affirming book! ( )