The Pawnbroker. Edward Lewis Wallant

The Pawnbroker - Edward Lewis Wallant


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      PRAISE FOR EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT

      “In the short time [Wallant] was writing - about three years wherein he considered himself and was considered a serious writer - he was counted as part of a brilliant group of postwar Jewish American writers - Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth among them. That Wallant died so young, unable to travel on with these writers, is criminal, especially given how prolific he was. But the novels he finished in his short life are all miniature masterpieces.”

      —DAVE EGGERS

      “[R]eminiscent of Dostoevski. . . . on every count [The Pawnbroker] deserves the attention of every serious reader.”

      —THOMAS LASK, The New York Times

      “Edward Lewis Wallant is a gifted writer who probes with a kind of troubled tenderness into pools of human darkness.”

      —DAVID BOROFF, Saturday Review

      “No contemporary novelist was more gifted in the sheer grace of constructing a novel. . . .”

      —CHARLES ALVA HOYT

      “[A]n American naturalist in the tradition of Dreiser and Norris. . . .”

      —ROBERT W. LEWIS

       BY EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT

       The Children at the Gate

       The Human Season

       The Pawnbroker

       The Tenants of Moonbloom

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

      Copyright © 1961 by Edward Lewis Wallant

      Copyright renewed 1989 by Joyce Malkin, Leslie A. Wallant, Kim Wallant

      Pereira and Scott Wallant

      Published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

      Publishing Company

      All rights reserved.

      Published in the United States by Fig Tree Books LLC, Bedford, New York

       www.FigTreeBooks.net

      Jacket design by Christine Van Bree

      Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

      ISBN 978-1-941493-15-1

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      First edition

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

       For Joyce, Scott, Leslie, and Kim

      CONTENTS

       CHAPTER FOUR

       CHAPTER FIVE

       CHAPTER SIX

       CHAPTER SEVEN

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       CHAPTER NINE

       CHAPTER TEN

       CHAPTER ELEVEN

       CHAPTER TWELVE

       CHAPTER THIRTEEN

       CHAPTER FOURTEEN

       CHAPTER FIFTEEN

       CHAPTER SIXTEEN

       CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

       CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

       CHAPTER NINETEEN

       CHAPTER TWENTY

       CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

       CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

       CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

       CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

       CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

       CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

       CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

       CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

      by Dara Horn

      How many lousy Holocaust novels have you read?

      If you read much, or really any, contemporary American fiction, the genre of lousy Holocaust novels is surprisingly difficult to avoid. The telltale signs of a lousy Holocaust novel are many, and in most respects they resemble those of all other lousy novels: one-dimensional characters, cardboard backdrops, implausible plot twists, unambiguous conflicts—and most of all, the absence of any challenge to the reader, whose expectations are gleefully enforced at every turn. Adorable child? Check. Hardhearted villain? Check. Feisty heroine? Check. Dramatic setting? Check. Conflict where we know who to root for? Check. Uplifting ending? In most American Holocaust novels, check!

      I have nothing against lousy novels. (Without them, how would producers get ideas for lousy movies?) But lousy Holocaust novels are something else: the exploitation of an utterly unredemptive historical catastrophe for the sake of yet another love story or coming-of-age tale or journey of self-discovery, with all the hard work of developing conflict and creating a moral universe done by the historical backdrop alone. I fault The Pawnbroker for unleashing over fifty years of lousy Holocaust novels on the American reading public. It accomplished this, of course, the only way it could: by being an absolute masterpiece.

      Why do we read Holocaust novels? To remember, the pious secularists will intone. But what does that mean? If it means remembering the lives of the victims, their individual and collective passions and commitments, then such novels in English have done a particularly poor job. 80% of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, for instance, yet most American readers who could name four concentration camps couldn’t name four Yiddish writers, or even identify Yiddish as a language rather than a dialect. Moreover, most of these novels—the present volume included—don’t even attempt to present any meaningful semblance of prewar European Jewish life, focusing instead on the details of its destruction. This raises a question: Why should we care how these people died, if we don’t care how these people lived?

      If our sanctified remembering has nothing to do with remembering people’s lives, then the next logical assumption would be that we are meant to remember their revolting deaths—and that exposing ourselves to the degradation these people suffered will somehow sensitize us to such suffering in the future. But while required readings of Holocaust literature


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