Word: sol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...runs a 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 for Sol...
...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...
Unsalaried, Unlettered. For four days each week, the peasants must work for the hacienda; they are supposed to get one sol, or 4?, per day for their labor; in practice, they say, they get nothing. In addition, they and their wives must do servant duty in the big house for a week at a time, also without pay. If a sheep strays, or is killed by a fox, the peasant must prove that the loss is "an act of God"; otherwise it is required that he must replace the animal from his own herd or pay in cash...