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The Pawnbroker Edward Lewis Wallant

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The Pawnbroker

Edward Lewis Wallant

The Pawnbroker Edward Lewis Wallant 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 ’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, manages to be both funny and weighty, 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.

The Pawnbroker Details

Date : Published November 10th 2015 by Fig Tree Books (first published 1961) ISBN : 9781941493144 Author : Edward Lewis Wallant Format : Paperback 279 pages Fiction, World War II, Holocaust, Novels, Literature, Jewish, Historical, Historical Fiction, War, Genre : 20th Century, Realistic Fiction

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From Reader Review The Pawnbroker for online ebook

Melinda says

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Sol Nazerman is a victim of the Holocaust, as you become familiar with Sol you understand he is far from the label of survivor. He's best described as a dead man walking, an automaton of trauma. Broken from all he has endured and lost, impacting his life greatly, the mental and emotional damage unrepairable. An affecting story of tremendous loss, family, sacrifice. A story of picking up the pieces when every thing has been stolen from you. Well written, a harsh glimpse into the lasting effects of those enduring the unthinkable of the Holocaust.

I enjoyed the story, the portrayal of Sol is well done. I'm not sure how I felt about the ending, one big allegory leaving me ambiguous. The ending was predictable to a degree yet it caught me somewhat off guard. I found it interesting, halting, yet completely unsure on my final verdict.

Great story, lovely writing perfect counterbalance of fiction and literature.

Lorilin says

Sol Nazerman runs a pawn shop in a low-income neighborhood. His business is mostly legitimate--sure, he pays money for the random trinkets brought in by his destitute neighbors--but the business isn't profitable. And he's only able to stay afloat through the patronage of a local criminal who is using Sol's business as a vessel to launder his money.

Sol lives an isolated and sad existence. As the story advances, we see why. Sol is a Holocaust survivor--the only one of his nuclear family to make it. His wife and two children were all not only killed, but also suffered horribly beforehand. (His flashbacks about his wife were awful, nearly unbearable to read.) While many see the numbers etched into Sol's forearm, few seem to make the connection that he is a survivor. Or maybe they just don't care.

This book reads about as drearily as the plot sounds. At first, I didn't know if I was going to make it through. I've heard a bunch of people say this book reminds them of Dostoevsky's works, but I have to disagree. At least Dostoevsky injected some mania in with his depression; The Pawnbroker, on the other hand, is straight melancholy, through and through.

However, when I made it past the first 50+ pages, when I started knowing more about Sol's backstory and started seeing his more significant relationships unfold, I found myself hooked. I was absolutely enthralled and invested. And though I really don't want to sound cliche here, the flashbacks to his experiences as a prisoner broke my heart. I'm not going to lie: I cried...a lot. I have to give Wallant credit for creating a deep, thoughtful, multidimensional story and cast of characters. I don't think that I ever really liked anyone in this book, but I definitely felt for all of them.

Ultimately, The Pawnbroker is not a book to read if you want to feel warm fuzzies. It's deeply--just OPPRESSIVELY--sad. But it is also thought-provoking and honest. (And I would add that it ended on a surprisingly optimistic note; I actually wasn't expecting that.) Before reading this book, I had no idea that Edward Lewis Wallant was a Jewish-American author lumped in with the likes of , Norman

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Mailer, and Bernard Malamud. But after reading this book, I can definitely see that his talent more than qualifies him for the company of those gifted authors. This was a heavy read, but also a very, very good one.

Elyse Walters says

This story is primarily about Sol Nazerman, a victim Holocaust Survivor, and his present day life as a Pawnbroker.

This was first written in the 60's. There is a movie - which I haven't seen.

Sol, 45 years old, survived Bergen-Belsen, but his wife and children did not. The flashback scenes -haunting dreams - are gruesome graphic scenes of Sol's past Nazi imprisonment - including horrific memories of his wife being forced into prostitution and equally horrific suffering his children endured before their deaths.

Sol tries to deal with the pawn shop - daily business needs - in East Harlem...while constantly plagued with nightmares and headaches from the wartime traumas. Nazerman is a completely shut down man.... essentially a walking dead man! He sees everybody who comes into his shop as 'scum'. Sol not only cares nothing for himself - he doesn't feel any compassion for the community around him. No matter if they are poor, lonely, hurting or desperate....Sol doesn't feel anything for them.

This story not only deals with the after effects from the concentration camp experience- ( PTSD), but it explores the relationships between Jews and other minority groups....other residents of Harlem.... who are also suffering.

The pawn shop itself - is mostly a front for Mafia money....which Nazerman uses to support his sister, and her two kids. Sol also supports a 2nd family: his best friend Tessie and her dying father. Later in the book -he will help his nephew out of trouble, too. If I needed to borrow $10...I might consider borrowing from Sol Nazerman myself. --- but don't think you can offer a helping hand 'free-of-charge' to Sol. He would insist that he was "scrupulous about money matters". A sad man - but a proud man!

The powerful forward written by Dara Horn is a beautiful tribute to Edward Lewis Wallant who died at age 36 of an aneurysm. Wallant was compared with his contemporary Saul Bellow. It's sad that such a talented author died so young. It's all sad: the book is a sad subject- yet beautifully written. The author dying shortly after its release, is also sad. I'm glad this book made a new recent release. Absolutely one of the best Holocaust 'NOVELS' I've read. I usually shy away from 'fiction' Holocaust stories -- but this book has an important message... and is done well!

This novel brought up thoughts for me about my father, Max, who also owned a Pawn Shop in Oakland. My father died young, too -- also of an aneurysm-- at age 34. I still remember- going to the shop with my dad -playing on the adding machine. After he died - I spent time in my uncle Abe's store and my grandparents store. They each own pawn shops too - on the same street. I guess it was a common Jewish business back in the 50's and 60's.

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VERY SPECIAL THANKS to "Fig Tree Books"...... for this powerful book. I can't tell you how glad I am to have learned more about Edward Lewis Wallant. A very gifted writer.

Graham P says

They don't write novels like this anymore. There is such an inherent ugliness in 'The Pawnbroker', and rarely does it ever let up. Heavy-handed, morose, darkly humorous, and at times, gloriously overwritten. This is as much a book about the Holocaust as it is about poverty in New York City--everybody is ruined in more ways than one. Rarely have such unlikable characters been so lovingly treated by their author. Edward Lewis Wallant had that rare touch of hammering the reader with the grotesque and pitiful, and then on the next page, plucking the right heart strings and embracing the characters with a strange, soulful empathy.

An important American novel.

A beautiful passage:

'And the pawnbroker stared just as yearningly as a freezing man stares at the last ember of a fire and suddenly sees how lovely the color of light can be.'

Marla says

This was a life-changing book for me when I was 12. I'm trying to find some record of what I said about it back then. I'll be rereading it as well.

Kasa Cotugno says

I tried to read this book over 50 years ago, when the memory of the movie was still seared into my mind. Full disclosure, it was so evocative that I had to put it aside and never picked it up again. Now, at a remove of this amount of time, its power has not diminished. But this time, it held me for its entire length.

At that time I didn't know the tragedy of Edward Lewis Wallant, its author, dead at the age of 36 from an aneurysm. Had he lived longer, he would have definitely enjoyed a reputation equal to his peers -- Roth, Bellow, Hertzog. This portrait of the holocaust as exemplified by a single life, its horrors and repercussions, would be enough to elevate this book into the canon as a masterpiece. But his choice of setting, a pawnshop on 125th Street in Harlem, provides an unending source of characters and opportunity unequaled in other holocaust novels. I cannot praise this novel too highly or mourn the premature loss of its author too strongly.

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Corey says

Moving and powerful, even more than the fine film made from it.

Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont says

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes that when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. The Pawnbroker, a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, is about a man who has stared long into the abyss, though through no choice of his own. The abyss has made a home in his heart, the difference being this is a conscious choice on his part.

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front begins with a memorable observation;

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

I’m not quite sure why, but this came to mind when I was reading The Pawnbroker, different as different can be. I suppose there are odd subliminal similarities. It’s not a novel about a generation; it’s about an individual. It’s a story of survival and death in survival. It’s about a man who survived the Holocaust while all that he loved, all that was most precious to him, did not. He, too, was destroyed; he did not die though nothing of life remained.

The Pawnbroker was originally published in 1961, one of the first fictional works to touch on the Holocaust by an American Jewish novelist who had no direct experience of the event, writing at a time when historical understanding was still at a relatively early stage of development. It was a bold move, almost foolhardy, one would have thought, but Wallant carries it off reasonably well. There is one simple reason for this: it’s not about the Holocaust at all; it’s about a man washed up on a distant shore after the shipwreck of his life. And that distant shore is Harlem in New York, a subject the author clearly has experience in abundance.

It is there that Sol Nazerman runs a pawnshop. He is a shell of a man, emotionally disengaged, suffering from what would be referred to in current fashion as post-traumatic stress disorder. His trauma is beyond comprehension; beyond the comprehension of his mercenary sister and her family, with whom he lives, and supports, in the fashionable Mount Vernon district; beyond the comprehension of Marilyn Birchfield, the well-meaning social activist who attempts to reach out to him.

Nazerman, a former professor at Krakow University in Poland, is the walking dead. Behind him are the shadows - a young son who drowned in excrement in a cattle truck on the way to a death camp; an infant daughter that he himself consigned to the ovens; a wife forced into camp prostitution, something he was compelled to witness, who subsequently died in some unspecified fashion, or the fashion that was specified for all.

But he survived with the guilt of survival. There are flashbacks to the past, but Wallant’s real focus is on the present. Nazerman, feeling nothing in himself, feels nothing at all for the suffering he witnesses every day, for the desperation of those who come to his store; desperate in poverty, desperate in simple loneliness. Ironically he despises them all in much the same way as the Nazis despised the Jews. His clients are nothing;

PDF File: The Pawnbroker... 6 Read and Download Ebook The Pawnbroker... they are scum, to use his own word. “Haven’t you got a heart?”, one customer asks. “No”, he responds, “No heart.”

But he does have a heart; it’s just locked in permafrost. Circumstances combine to raise the temperature. The anniversary of his family’s death approaches, a difficult enough time. The business itself is no more than a front for a racketeer, who uses it for money-laundering. Indifferent to everything else, Nazerman is also indifferent to where his money comes from...until he finds out that it comes from prostitution.

Then there is young assistant, Jesus Ortiz, full of enthusiasm, only to be alienated by his employer’s callous indifference to all around him, to the scum swept into the shop by the tides of Harlem. He agrees to take part with others in robbing the store, but when one of the gang produces a gun – contrary to previous agreement – he steps in to shield Nazerman from death, himself killed in the process. It’s the great cathartic moment of the novel;

“And then the dry retching sound of weeping, growing louder and louder and louder, filling the Pawnbroker’s ears, flooding him, drowning him, dragging him back to that sea of tears he had thought to have escaped. And he sat hunched against the abrasive roar, his body becoming worn down under the flood of it, washed down to the one polished stone of grief, of grief.”

“And his aesthetic numbness left him. He became terrified of the touch of air on the raw wounds. What was this great agonizing sensitivity and what was it for? Good God, what was all this? Love? Could it be love?...Oh, no not love! For whom? All these dark, dirty creatures? They turn my stomach, they sicken me. Oh, this din, this pain and thrashing.”

Sadly the author died when he was still in his thirties. I mentioned above that he was an American Jewish writer - and here the stress has to be on Jewish -, for which his particular contribution was recognised. But for this the ending is just too, too obvious, the symbolism palpable – Nazerman is saved by Jesus. He is reborn in the process, a message I doubt that many Jews or Holocaust survivors would accept. Was this his intention? Was this the message? Surely a name like Jesus could not have been used by accident, even if it is common enough among those of Hispanic origin?

There are no answers here, though it makes the ending, at least for me, a little weaker than a think Wallant intended. Or is this really what he intended? I simply don’t know. It’s is a powerful book with a stark message about humanity lost and found. It’s well-written for the most part, wholly convincing in plot and characterisation. But the ending, oh, the ending; depending on your point of view it’s a spiritual high or a perplexing narrative low. Am I making too much of this? After all, what’s in a name? Well, in Jesus, quite a lot. I suppose at least the outcast has at last learned to mourn.

The Pawnbroker is a book for its time and, for its time - and I do stress for its time – it’s a commendable piece of work.

Erika Dreifus says

Immensely honored to be part of the team at Fig Tree Books that will be re-publishing this classic novel in the fall. Our edition features a new foreword by Dara Horn.

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Roger Brunyate says

Past That by a Million Years

Dara Horn's impassioned introduction to this reprint of Wallant's 1961 novel hails it as a masterpiece, putting what she calls a flood of later bad Holocaust novels into the shade, and placing the author in what would have been the same league as Saul Bellow and , had he not died of an aneurysm at the age of 36, a year after this novel was published. Is such praise an overstatement? I found it a tough, uncompromising book, grim and difficult to read, but with undoubted integrity. I was surprised to find how little of a Holocaust novel it is, focusing on the trauma of a Holocaust survivor rather than the story of the camps or the gradual process of attrition that lead there, although the comparatively few flashbacks are certainly graphic enough. And I have to say that I found the novel too monochromatic, too limited in scope, to compete with the vast imaginative worlds of either Bellow or Roth, or for that matter Dara Horn herself.

Sol Nazerman, a former university lecturer, has survived Bergen-Belsen and now runs a pawnshop in Harlem, earning a living from the sad reversals of his mostly black neighbors. A better living, actually, than the store itself might be expected to produce, as he has accepted one of those unrefusable offers to run the store as a money-laundering front for a Mafia boss. But he continues his job, doggedly denying his clients the money they think their goods are worth, but lending them something nonetheless. He works with a young dark-skinned Latino called Jesus Ortiz, who believes that he will teach him the Jewish secret to success in business. What the young man does not realize, in his zest for life, is that this is a job that can be endured only by the already-dead, someone who has seen humanity at its worst, and now refuses to acknowledge any deeper feelings.

Over the course of the book, nonetheless, chinks begin to appear in Sol's defenses. He comes to distrust the source of the money he is laundering. A group of men in league with Ortiz seem to be casing the premises for a heist. And Sol himself finds himself drawn to a social worker, Marilyn Birchfield, who offers him friendship. Yet he runs a mile from any suggestion of romance. When Marilyn hopes to wean him off his understandable bitterness, he replies "Bitterness? I am past that by a million years." He does enjoy a couple of outings with her, but his rejection is even stronger: he tells her that in loving him, "you would be guilty of necrophilia. It is obscene to love the dead." And when the woman he does see from time to time worries about her dying father, he tells her: "Imagine yourself a cow in a fenced place with a dozen other cows. Don't think, don't feel. Soon enough will come the ax."

Dara Horn warns us against looking for much humanity, let alone uplift or redemption. But I disagree; there was just a glimmer. And that glimmer was the only thing that made it possible to read through to the end. [3.5 stars, rounded up]

Greta says

“The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom ; no one can sound its depths.” ? Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?

Sol Nazerman runs a pawnshop in a neglected, low-income, black neighbourhood in 1960s East-Harlem. Every day, miserable people appear in the shop, trying to trade in their cherished possessions for small loans they need to keep going. Nazerman responds to their desperation with apathy and disdain.

We slowly learn Nazerman is a holocaust survivor who was dehumanized in the camps, and who lost

PDF File: The Pawnbroker... 8 Read and Download Ebook The Pawnbroker... everything he ever cared about. Nazerman has cut himself off from his emotions as a means of survival, and is moving comatose through life. He is catatonic, “like a creature embedded in a plastic block".

But august was his bad month. Every year, on the 28th of August, it was his anniversary, the anniversary of his family's death, HIS death. On this day "his heart had atrophied; like the mammoth, he had been preserved in ice. What did he fear then? If the ice finally melts, the meat of the great entombed creature merely rots. One could only die once. He had been extinct for a long time, and only the carcass remained to be disposed of".

The Pawnbroker is a bleak, unsentimental and forbidding book. Nazerman is bitter, asocial and trusts no one ; he's a complete misanthrope who only sees ugliness in everything and everyone. This makes for some uncomfortable reading. At the same time, the book is deeply melancholic as it slowly reveals the depth of suffering of Nazerman who is struggling to maintain his emotional detachment, in order to be able to function in life. Is there still hope for someone who experienced the worst that humans are capable off?

7/10

Zek says

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Ffiamma says sopravvivere, a volte, è peggio che morire. un uomo senza cuore e senza più radici ritrova un minimo di umanità, pian piano, impercettibilmente. libro crudele, a tratti insostenibile per quello che racconta- ma alla fine, un grande romanzo ebraicoamericano.

Charles Weinblatt says

The Pawnbroker is a haunting, powerful book about the vast gamut of human behavior, including some of the darkest moments in human history. But it’s not a book about the Holocaust.

It’s about the cognitive destruction of a Holocaust survivor. It’s the haunting story of a man named Sol, so embittered by life experiences that he has become immune to any form of human sympathy, compassion, or love. He lives in constant desperation, unable to find a release from horrific dreams and equally powerless to form a singular bond of tenderness with another person. He lives in bitterness.

Before the Holocaust, Sol Nazerman is a university professor in Poland. He survives the Holocaust; but his wife, daughter, and son are murdered in Nazi camps. His mind, having been decimated by loss, brutality, and cruelty, tilts upon the verge of collapse. Sol settles in New York and becomes a pawnbroker in Harlem. Here

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Day after day, the wretched poor of Harlem flow in and out of Sol’s shop, begging for a few dollars from the depressed and broken pawnbroker for owned and stolen artifacts. Already severely depressed, Nazerman falls into even greater despair from the wretched display of broken lives that flow into his pawnshop.

Wallant is an extremely gifted writer, producing a taught, flowing story replete with unforgettable characters and personalities. Had Wallant lived more than his brief 36 years, he certainly would have become the equal of other great American Jewish authors, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, and Phillip Roth.

The Pawnbroker is an honest, serious work of art about the human experience, with fascinating complexity and haunting sorrow. Wallant proffers an amazing exhibition of human power, weakness, tenderness, and grace in the characters he writes about.

Deep within the thematic brilliance of The Pawnbroker the reader feels life through the eyes of each troubled character. Wallant proffers an amazing display of vision and clarity in describing the insurmountable suffering of this aspect of the human experience. Although the time period in this novel is 1960s America, the characters’ situations, personalities, and travails ring true today.

Charles S. Weinblatt was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1952. He is a retired university administrator. Mr. Weinblatt is the author of published fiction and nonfiction. His biography appears in the Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Education, and Wikipedia. jordan says

Like reading early Bellow. Makes me wonder when writers decided that stories involving the Holocaust had to either be morality plays or drenched in shmaltz.

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