For most people, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who are known as “survivors” could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, the protagonist of The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer. At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen concentration camp—although his wife and children did not—runs a Harlem pawnshop. Nazerman’s dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. The novel is likewise a valuable exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups.
The Pawnbroker
Edward Lewis Wallant was a most promising Jewish writer but unfortunately, he died in December 1962 at the age of 36, a year after the publication of The Pawnbroker. The book sold more than 500,000 copies soon after it was published. In 1960 Wallant published another award-winning novel, The Human Season which won the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award for the best novel on a Jewish theme. Two additional novels—The Children at the Gate and Moonbloom were published posthumously. The Daroff Award was subsequently renamed The Edward Lewis Wallant Award presented annually at the University of Hartford. Dara Horn who wrote the Foreword for this latest edition of The Pawnbroker is an award-winning author of six books including In the Image, The World to Come, A Guide for the Perplexed and People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a haunted Present.
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and one of the first novels to depict the lingering trauma of the Holocaust is newly reprinted with an introduction by best-selling author, Dara Horn “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.” - Kirkus “Arguably one of the greatest fiction treatments of Holocaust survivors ever written” - Nat Bernstein, Jewish Book Council “We don’t need to imagine how shocking The Pawnbroker must have been to readers I in the early 1960s because it is still shocking to us.” - Eileen Pollack, author of In the Mouth and Breaking and Entering “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.” - Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke and Elijah Visible