The Street Sweeper – an admirably plainer and less grandstanding title than that of the previous novel – also addresses major contemporary social concerns, some of which have been with us throughout the twentieth century but are no less urgent for that. A central character, Australian historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, is encouraged to pursue a research project as to whether African-American troops were present at the liberation of Dachau or any other concentration camp. This project, with all its complications and byways, is both the novel’s central quest, for The Street Sweeper is both a quest myth and a detective story, and a means for Perlman to bring together his two principal areas of concern: the fate of the Jews under Nazism; and the fate of African Americans in their profoundly racist society.

A subplot, concerning the fate of Rosa Rabinowicz, contains an injunction that is crucial to the novel.

That was how it came to pass that late one night in the cold of early winter, 1944, the prisoners in the basement of the prison block in Auschwitz cried out together to whoever might survive, ‘Tell everyone what happened here.’ ‘Tell everyone what happened here.’

The novel concludes on a street in Manhattan, which brings together several of its principal characters, speculating that if Manhattanites ‘had known the people they were looking at’,

if they had known where they had come from, if they had known their histories, if they’d had even an inkling of the events the historian, the street sweeper with the menorah, and the oncologist had knowledge of, if they had known the whole story of everything that had got these three people to that block at that time, they might well have felt compelled to tell everyone what happened here. Tell everyone what happened here.

Thus the novel closes. Perlman as novelist is a witness to history. The book, however, does not end where the novel ends. As extensive a bibliography as might grace a PhD thesis is provided, as are several pages of notes and acknowledgments. It is not merely that Mr Perlman has done his homework; but also that The Street Sweeper’s fiction is grounded in facts, and facts of the most momentous kind. Yet the novel-with-bibliography is surely a contemporary phenomenon that may bespeak a certain lack of confidence in the authority of fiction. Did Patrick White need a bibliography for his account of the story of Himmelfarb? Did Tolstoy provide one for War and Peace, Hugo for Les Misérables, to cite but two novels profoundly rooted in fact?

What is history, as those great novels and The Street Sweeper ask? Adam Zignelik winds up a lecture at Columbia by rhetorically asking this question and elaborating:

Barbara Tuchman addresses this question in a number of illuminating essays. In one she writes, quoting historian G.M. Trevelyan, ‘… ideally history should be the exposition of facts about the past, in their full emotional and intellectual value to a wide public by the difficult art of literature’.

Note the academic technique: Trevelyan is quoted by Tuchman is quoted by Zigelnik is quoted by Perlman in his work of fiction. It is a deft move for a novelist who does not wish to teach or preach to the public to include in his fiction several characters who are teachers, professors, rhetoricians, so that teaching and preaching may be practised appropriately, in character. Fiction offers a panoptic scope. ‘At the time’ Zignelik is ‘stumbling’ through his ‘What is history?’ lecture uptown, the eponymous street sweeper, African-American Lamont Williams, recently released from prison and at this stage employed as a probationary janitor at memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, looks in upon Henryk Mandelbrot, survivor at no small cost of the concentration camps, who lectures Lamont to force him to be a witness to history, rewarding him with the silver menorah which further complicates Lamont’s life and assists at the resolution of the plot. 

A novel concerned with the nature of history and with bearing witness to history must inevitably address the question: ‘What is memory?’ Perlman’s novel asks. ‘It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced, of information.’ Memory provides the structures of The Street Sweeper. Interviews with Holocaust survivors, and the tracking down of the interviews, provide Zignelik with his career, and Elliot Perlman with his plot. Or one of his plots, or half of his plot. For there is that other principal theme, the history of African-American oppression. Scholar Dr Henry Border, who ‘had heard things on his trip to Europe that had shaken his core understanding of mankind’, is shown the underside of Chicago by his twelve-year-old daughter.

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.

There are other homologies. Williams is being taught how to work the hospital incinerator: ‘huge incinerator gets rid of toxic waste, all sorts of things. You don’t want to know.’ But Mandelbrot says, ‘I already know … I used to work with an oven … in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz-Birkenau.’ In one of the exquisite and exquisitely inhumane techniques of Nazism, Mandelbrot and other Jewish prisoners serve as Sonderkommando: ‘they were the prisoners forced to deal with the bodies there in the crematoria, the gas chambers and the ovens. He [Mandelbrot; this is Lamont’s recitation] was part of the resistance inside the camp. I mean resistance from inside, from within the Sonderkommando. There was a Sonderkommando uprising.’

‘All sorts of things you don’t want to know.’ Much of The Street Sweeper is almost unreadable, though true. Again and again the reader is confronted with the facts of history. It is yet another instance of ‘The horror! The horror!’ abiding forever. Ten thousand Jews were gassed in one day. Memory is served by burying two giant milk cans and several tin boxes whose contents are the records of the Jews of Poland. Yet is anything learned? There is anti-Semitism and racism at Columbia, of all places. An African-American character in the novel tells his son the professor:

Then I saw you got some good old-fashioned anti-Semitism going on over in Lewisohn Hall. Someone’s gone over there and drawn a swastika next to a caricature of a Jew in a yarmulke and now, yesterday I read about this. A noose is found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office over at the Teachers College. I’ve seen a lot in my time, you know I have. But when it comes out of the blue in a place like this.

The Street Sweeper is a big book, a brave book, a humane and liberal book in a period of history when those values are being derided by conservatives of several schools. It is at times repetitious, suggesting falterings of confidence, and occasionally prone to coincidence, though that may be hard to avoid in such a large, bold canvas. It certainly fulfils its own injunction: ‘Tell everyone what happened here.’