Word: nazerman
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...Pawnbroker. In his murky, cluttered shop in Spanish Harlem's upper depths, Sol Nazerman sits behind a wire partition coldly doling out pittances to the people he calls "scum and rejects." Hopefully, they come to hock personal or stolen goods. They look to the old Jew for understanding, or even a fair price, and see the eyes of a man whose last links to life were cruelly severed decades ago in a Nazi concentration camp. Now he speaks of those days as if he were carving an epitaph: "Everything I loved was taken from me, and I didn...
...third-rate hock shop can be excused for taking a crabbed view of humanity. To his barred window, clutching their appalling array of tattered goods, come junkies, alkies, homosexuals, whores and pimps, as well as the faceless poor. Reflecting on his part in these endless, trivial transactions. Sol Nazerman, the Harlem pawnbroker, "became filled with the idea that he was building a tower of junk, struggling and draining himself to amass nothing . . . For him the core of life was there in all its reality: brutal, wretched, and grasping...
Before the war, Sol Nazerman had been an instructor at the University of Cracow; the Nazis packed him off to Belsen and Dachau, where his wife and daughter were murdered. Surviving somehow, Sol escaped to the U.S. and prosperity; but at 45 he is a grey echo of a man. By day he shuffles about the dusty hock shop that he manages for a tax-wise hoodlum: by night, at the home he shares with his sister's family, he listens stolidly to the family's spoiled and petulant quarrels. On Sundays, he sits in the backyard, reading...
Once a year Sol Nazerman's joyless routine is unset. His family had died in August, and each Summer, like the recurrence of some odd tropical disease, the memory of their torture returns to him. Sol's nights become long, sleepless nightmares; during the day, to the astonishment of his Puerto Rican apprentice, he fumbles through business in a trance, unaccountably appraising brass as gold. In one such August, the pawnshop is robbed; the apprentice-whom Author Wallant. with a disturbingly heavy hand, has called Jesus Ortiz-steps in front of a bullet meant...
...first novel, The Human Season, Author Wallant wrote well of another sorrowing Jew. This time the theme is not nearly so fresh. But Sol Nazerman. the erudite Shylock of Harlem, is a creature of fascinating complexity. As the centerpiece of a flawed book, he is that literary rarity-the character whose sorrows seem as real as the reader...