The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant

First published: 1961

Type of work: Psychological realism

This novel, which takes place fifteen years after the Holocaust, presents an indelible portrait of the results of human behavior so sadistic that some who survive it biologically do so only by committing emotional suicide. At the same time, the work offers a testament to the healing power of goodness.

Principal characters:

• Sol Nazerman, a Holocaust survivor and pawnbroker in New York City’s Harlem
• Jesus Ortiz, a Puerto Rican youth, Sol’s assistant
• Marilyn Birchfield, a Protestant social worker
• Bertha, Sol’s sister, who came to the United States before the war
• Tessie Rubin, Sol’s mistress, a Holocaust survivor
• Mendel, Tessie’s father, a Holocaust survivor
• Goberman, a refugee and extortionist
• Murillio, a racketeer who “launders” profits from illegal businesses through the pawnshop

Overview

The Pawnbroker is a stunning work that details the psychic journey of a tortured Holocaust survivor. A third-person omniscient narrator introduces and describes characters and circumstances that reinforce the main character’s rage as well as those who help release him from it.

The novel’s protagonist, forty-five-year-old Sol Nazerman, was a professor at the University of Kraków in Poland. Arrested by the Nazis for being Jewish, he was physically and emotionally tortured in an extermination camp where his wife and children died. At the beginning of the novel, Sol lives in Mount Vernon, New York, with his sister, her teacher husband, and their two children, and he supports them by running a Harlem pawnshop, a setting redolent of lost dreams and corrupted lives. Bertha, Sol’s sister, tries hard to assimilate herself into American upper-middle-class life, while Sol’s nephew Morton, like Sol, is a solitary soul who studies drawing.

Described as an intensely private, bitter man with no allegiances, Sol speaks mostly in cold monosyllables to his family and isolates himself from them. Sol’s sleep is often interrupted by flashbacks to horrific experiences, as when his son drowns in the bottomless human feces in the railroad cattle car en route to the death camp.

At the pawnshop, Sol hires a lively, amiable young assistant, Jesus Ortiz, who rapidly becomes more than a mere apprentice to Sol. Jesus wishes to learn the pawn business so that he can open his own shop someday. Sol explains that the Jewish affinity for business and money comes from thousands of years of insecurity caused by anti-Semitism. A typical day at the pawnshop includes an endless series of junkies, prostitutes, and other desperate souls, each with an item to pawn. Sitting in his wire cage like a trapped animal, Sol coldly ignores their entreaties for more and gives each customer from two to five dollars.

Another important character is Marilyn Birchfield, a warm and caring social worker. She is not put off by Sol’s coldness, and she senses the tortured person behind his impenetrable facade. Her friendly visits seem to quell Sol’s inner rage slightly. Although he chafes at her kindness, Sol has a few moments of peace when they take a Hudson River boat trip; still, he dissuades her interest by likening a relationship with him to necrophilia.

The Holocaust is never far from Sol’s mind. He frequently visits his mistress Tessie and her father Mendel, both of whom are tortured by their memories of the death camps. It is loss, not love, that ties Sol and Tessie together, as each has lost both spouse and children at the camp. A less sympathetic survivor is Goberman, who betrayed his own family for food rations and who now threatens and manipulates other survivors to contribute to the Jewish Appeal. In another flashback to an episode in which a terrified inmate threw himself against an electrified fence, Sol recalls Tessie’s idea that the dead are far better off. Therefore, when pawnshop owner and racketeer Murillio shoves the barrel of his gun down Sol’s throat because Sol is angry that the pawnshop illegally launders money from Murillio’s brothel, Sol encourages him to pull the trigger. Readers are then shown another flashback to Sol’s horror at having to watch his wife’s forced sex acts in a Nazi brothel.

After Mendel’s painful death and Sol’s traumatic flashback to his camp job of dragging gassed corpses to the crematoria, Sol treats Jesus more coldly. Sol even lectures Jesus that he trusts and believes in money only. This motivates the young man to conspire with some unsavory associates to steal cash from the pawnshop. When Sol thwarts the robbery by standing in front of the safe, Jesus moves to protect Sol and is accidentally killed by his coconspirators. This crime—occurring on the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Sol’s family—so stuns Sol that he suddenly feels great compassion and love for Jesus, reaches out to his nephew Morton for help at the shop, and begins to grieve his terrible losses.

Wallant’s major characters function both as well-developed individuals and as symbols that advance the novel’s themes. His minor characters are never stock or one-dimensional, but their full development is necessarily subordinated to that of the major characters.

Because Sol rarely communicates verbally in more than monosyllables, readers learn about him mostly from the reactions of and comparisons with Jesus, Marilyn, Tessie, and Mendel as well as from omniscient narration, interior monologues, and nightmarish flashbacks. Wallant uses eye imagery for Sol, who wears the eyeglasses he removed from a corpse about to be cremated; this becomes symbolic of Sol’s Holocaust-driven outlook on life. In addition to communicating the theme of the war’s indescribable horrors, Sol’s flashback to a family picnic in Poland shows him as a loving family man whose emotions and soul are later eviscerated by unimaginable depravity and deprivation. Indeed, the geographic, psychic, and professional parameters of Sol Nazerman’s life are a study in violent contrasts: peaceful 1930’s Poland versus Holocaust depredations; filthy death camps versus affluent Westchester, New York; Westchester versus decrepit and decaying Harlem; and erudite university professor versus heartless pawnbroker. Images of death and isolation permeate the scenes in which Sol appears. By contrast, river and water imagery is a positive force in readers’ understanding of Sol. He finds momentary peace on his boat trip with Marilyn, and at the end of the novel he metaphorically casts his agony into the water.

Sol’s taciturnity contrasts strongly with Jesus’ garrulousness, accenting their complementary teacher-student, father-son relationship. Although energetic conversation defines his character, Jesus’ facial expressions and body language (often a smile and sprightly movement) give nonverbal cues to his youthful innocence, ambition, and sensitivity. These qualities lead the reader to affection for Jesus and to shock and grief at his violent, untimely death.

Wallant presents a balanced portrayal of Marilyn Birchfield, who represents both good and life in the novel; Marilyn is defined through her talkativeness, her verbal hesitation, and her kindly inner thoughts as she attempts to draw out and soothe Sol’s tortured psyche. Like Sol, Marilyn is associated with river imagery as a natural force that moves forward and diminishes pain. It is her invitation to a Hudson River cruise that helps Sol to commence the exorcism of his inner demons.

Name symbolism also colors the novel’s characters. “Nazerman” could imply “Nazi” or “Nazarene” (early Christians of Jewish origin who retained Jewish rituals), and “Sol” could relate either to the sun or to the biblical kings Saul and Solomon. Jesus, a fatherless young man who was threatened with emasculation by a white gang, just as Sol was threatened by Nazi doctors, looks to Sol as a father or uncle—even though Sol, ironically, teaches his “pupil” only the most negative, materialistic view of life. The name Jesus has added resonance because Sol begins to live after Jesus sacrifices his own life. By contrast, Marilyn Birchfield’s purity, strength, and stability are suggested by her name, which connotes a field of birch trees.

The Pawnbroker is a shocking and indelible portrait of the results of human behavior so sadistic that some who survive biologically do so only by committing emotional suicide. Taking place some fifteen years after the Nazi genocide, the novel suggests that although many millions were slaughtered, those who survived did so only with deepest agony, suppressed outrage, and resultant aberrant behaviors; one survival mechanism is the resolution never to be vulnerable to human feeling again. Sol Nazerman has so successfully cauterized his emotions that he is, though ambulatory, among the living dead. Through the macrocosm of Harlem and the microcosm of the pawnshop, Sol’s memories of crime and despair at the death camps are reinforced. The novel depicts in flashbacks the excruciating pain and loss that engender Sol’s volcanic rage, survivor guilt, and emotional shutdown, through which he has lost the ability to give, feel, and receive positive emotion.

In fact, Sol’s protracted fury embodies the axiom that if one hates long and deeply enough, one becomes the thing he hates. Though Sol has left the sadistic sociopathy of the death camp “kingdom,” he has, perhaps unconsciously, set up his own unfeelingly mendacious pawnshop fiefdom, where he fosters Murillio’s criminal corruption and sits in judgment, and often condemnation, of innocent and pathetic customers.

Wallant’s novel, however, is more than a scathing indictment of human inhumanity and its terrifying, debasing consequences. It is also a testament to the healing power of human goodness in the persons of Marilyn, Jesus, and even Morton and Tessie. While Sol uses all of his energy to keep shut the door on his titanic pain, Marilyn, Jesus, and Tessie honestly admit to their pain but still feel and spread positiveness and love.

Through the deaths of Jesus and Mendel, Sol emerges from his agonized carapace and finds expiation in the courage to cry, to vent rage and self-poisoning hatred, to grieve his tremendous losses, and to help Tessie grieve hers. On the anniversary of their deaths, Sol realizes that the proper memorial for his lost family is not to consume himself in fury but to live. Wallant suggests that self-destructive wrath is almost as toxic and pernicious as human sadism and that real life and healing begin with self-forgiveness and reaching out to others. The Pawnbroker is about the complexities of grief and suffering and the self-exorcism of the demons of hate required for spiritual transcendence and redemption.

As a child, Wallant spent many hours in an uncle’s pawnshop; later, he befriended a Holocaust survivor. The memory of these two life threads merge and blend in The Pawnbroker. In 1960, Wallant’s first published novel, The Human Season, a celebration of human courage and strength, won the Jewish Book Council Fiction Award. The Pawnbroker was nominated for the National Book Award, and the film rights were purchased by director Sidney Lumet. Wallant died suddenly at age thirty-six, and his remaining two novels—The Children at the Gate (1963), which deals with the tension between intellect and emotion, and The Tenants of Moonbloom (1964), a comic revolt against the absurdity of life—were published posthumously.

The Pawnbroker evinces such stylistic influences as Fyodor Dostoevski, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway. Thematically, Wallant’s work focuses on the deterioration of the American family (especially the delicate and difficult father-son relationship) and increasing individual isolation. Through use of both Jewish and Christian imagery, Wallant’s most prevalent themes are confrontation with and responsibility for oneself and others and the possibilities of spiritual rebirth and regrowth.

The Pawnbroker was one of the first American literary works to so centrally deal with the Holocaust. Like Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, Wallant also emphasizes Jewish American alienation within society as well as an innate and profound humanism through which his protagonists, despite their agonized isolation, still work to rejoin the human family.

Although Sol, like the protagonists of Philip Roth’s and Richard Elman’s novels, is conflicted about his own Jewishness, Wallant does not diminish the unique horror of Nazi genocide by displaying Sol’s agony alongside Black, Hispanic, and Christian suffering. In fact, by placing Sol’s humanity in front of his Judaism, Wallant clearly elucidates that human inhumanity transcends race and religion.

Sources for Further Study

Berger, Alan L. Crisis and Covenant: The Holocaust in American Jewish Fiction. New York: University of New York Press, 1985. Places the Holocaust as a central Jewish thematic focus in the works of Malamud, Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel, and others. Includes a chapter on The Pawnbroker.

Bilik, Dorothy. Immigrant-Survivor: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish-American Fiction. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. A far-ranging critique of The Pawnbroker, with comparisons to the works of Malamud and Singer.

Galloway, David D. Edward Lewis Wallant. Boston: Twayne, 1979. The only full-length analysis of Wallant’s life and works, an invaluable source for a close and perceptive reading of each of Wallant’s four novels.

Hoyt, Charles Alva, ed. Minor American Novelists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Hoyt traces the separateness and alienation of Wallant’s protagonists, focusing on The Pawnbroker.

Leegant, Joan. “A Jewish Novelist Rediscovered: The Work of Edward Lewis Wallant, Author of The Pawnbroker, Is Given a Second Life.” Jewish Advocate 195, no. 12 (March 25, 2004): 1.

McDermott, John V. Flannery O’Connor and Edward Lewis Wallant: Two of a Kind. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005.

Shatzky, Joel, and Michael Taub, eds. Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.