many triumphs. Like Sol’s, their dignity is often crushed by circumstances far beyond their control, but we see their choices in responding to those circumstances and respect them enough to judge them. Each is like a portrait by Vermeer, dark and luminous and more believable than life.
Here, for instance, is George Smith, the would-be scholar who schedules his pawnshop visits solely for the fleeting opportunity to talk philosophy with Sol, the neighborhood’s rare educated man—an intrusion Sol deeply resents. But George is no innocent victim of poverty. “George Smith had the face of an old Venetian doge,” Wallant writes, “the features drawn with a silvery-fine pencil, the excesses reproduced in the shallowest, most subtle of creases.” For another writer this would be flowery description, but for Wallant, every phrase counts—though only later do we learn why. “At one time,” Wallant explains in what seems like a throwaway line, “he had attended a Negro college in the South, but too many twistings and turnings had been engraved in him and he had been expelled from there after a discreetly hushed outrage.” Wallant builds our sympathy for George in his repeated encounters with Sol, who no longer has patience for the world of ideas or for anyone at all, and we feel George’s suffering as Sol dismisses him. It is only then that Wallant carefully and privately reveals George’s complication: he is a pedophile who fights his own predatory urges by self-medicating through books and fantasy. Our feelings about this character, brilliantly manipulated, challenge every expectation we have as readers about where our sympathies belong. Those challenges further magnify our experience of Sol, the Holocaust victim and survivor, forcing us to examine once more the interplay of free will and circumstance and to consider what makes us who we are. Did I mention that George Smith only appears on five pages of this book?
The real foil for Sol’s emotional detachment is his assistant Jesus Ortiz, a young man whose very body responds to the world exactly as Sol’s doesn’t. While Sol stands forever still, doing his best to move and be moved as little as possible, Jesus is constantly “moving with that leopard-like fluidity that made it hard to say where bone gave way to fine muscle.” He is young but far from innocent, immersed circumstantially and through his own choices in an urban underworld defined by crime. “But there had always been a deep-rooted nervousness in him,” Wallant writes, “a feeling of fragility and terror. He had never wanted to account for this feeling, because that would have been like succumbing to it.” This inexpressible inner dread, which he senses in Sol, draws him to his employer. His dream of learning a respectable business from Sol is deeply connected to Sol’s Jewishness: “Once there, in the presence of the big, inscrutable Jew, he had become even more obsessed with the magic potential of ‘business,’ for there had seemed to be some great mystery about the Pawnbroker, some secret which, if he could learn it, would enrich Jesus Ortiz immeasurably.” Jesus’s obsession with the Pawnbroker begins almost as an anti-Semitic caricature, but soon transcends it and ultimately vaults into tragedy—a true classical tragedy, with the protagonists bringing misfortune upon themselves.
In Wallant’s hands, even the caricature is rich with meaning. Sol taunts Jesus’s obsession with him (their names are hardly accidental), “explaining” to Jesus how to become a pawnbroker:
“You begin with several thousand years during which you have nothing except a great, bearded legend, nothing else. You have no land to grow food on, no land on which to hunt, not enough time in one place to have a geography or an army or a land-myth. Only you have a little brain in your head, and this bearded legend to sustain you and convince you that there is something special about you, even in your poverty. But this little brain, that is the real key. With it you obtain a small piece of cloth...You take this cloth and cut it in two and sell the two pieces for a penny more than you paid for the one. With this money, you buy a slightly larger piece of cloth...You repeat this process over and over for approximately twenty centuries. And then, voila, you have a mercantile heritage, you are known as a merchant, a man with secret resources, usurer, pawnbroker, witch, and what have you....”
“Good lesson, Sol,” Jesus said. “It’s things like that that make it all worthwhile.” All right, you are a weird bunch of people, mix a man up whether you holy or the worst devils. I figure out yet what’s behind that shit-eatin’ grin.
The scene plays like parody, but it is much more than that—though the reader only gradually appreciates what it means. Later, in bed with his prostitute girlfriend, Jesus tells her: “Nazerman say to me one day, ‘You know how old this profession is?’...I say no, how old? And he say thousands of years. He say one time the Babylon... some crazy tribe, they use to take crops and even people for pawn. A man make loans on his family—wife, kid, anything. I mean you see what a solid business that is—thousands of years. Hard to think on thousands of years, people back then...” And thus Wallant catapults this novel out of the world of today’s uplifting Holocaust fiction and into the canon of Jewish literature and its twenty-five centuries of artistic responses to catastrophe.
Jesus, of course, is unknowingly invoking the biblical book of Lamentations and its descriptions of the exiles of Jerusalem: “They have bartered their treasures for food to keep themselves alive... Behold my agony, my maidens and my youths have gone into captivity!...The precious children of Zion, once valued as gold, alas, they are accounted as earthen pots, work of a potter’s hands...” The young man has no tools to understand it, but there is a truth to the timelessness he perceives in his employer. This is a novel about not only the Holocaust, but about responses to trauma, which in Jewish history is ultimately a theological subject, one that is posed as a question rather than an answer.
The Book of Lamentations gives us as much gore as this novel does, and in fact exactly the same kind of gore: young women are raped, bodies are piled in open air, babies are eaten by their own parents, children starve, young men are worked to death as slaves. Yet it is also a book full of promises—“But this do I call to mind, therefore I have hope: The kindness of God has not ended; His mercies are not spent”—and the recurrence of this lament in Jewish history is itself a promise of an immutability beyond what any mortal can perceive. That place in the continuum of history, evoked in the subtle humanity of these many flawed characters and their inability to transcend their own histories, transforms the novel’s stunning climax into an astonishing and unexpected moment of earned redemption.
If you must, go ahead and call The Pawnbroker an American novel, a Holocaust novel—or worst of all, a novel about “the human condition.” But know that these terms will turn a treasure into cheap collateral on a short-term loan. This book is a link in a burning chain. Take hold, and feel it burn into your hands as it pulls you toward eternity.
His feet crunched on the hard-packed sand. On his left was the Harlem River, across the street to the right was the Community Center, and beyond was the vast, packed city. At seven thirty in the morning it was quiet for New York. In that relative silence, his footsteps made ponderous, dragging sounds that were louder and more immediate in his own ears than the chugging of the various river boats or the wakening noise of traffic a few blocks away on 125th Street.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
It could almost have been the pleasant sound of someone walking over clean white snow. But the sight of the great, bulky figure, with its puffy face, its heedless dark eyes distorted behind the thick lenses of strangely old-fashioned glasses, dispelled any thought of pleasure.
Cecil Mapp, a small, skinny Negro, sat nursing a monumental hangover on the wooden curbing that edged the river. He gazed blearily at Sol Nazerman the Pawnbroker and thought the heavy, trudging man resembled some kind of metal conveyance. Look like a tank or like that, he thought. The sight of the big
