The Pawnbroker

EB: Harcourt, Brace & World. Very Good in Very Good- dust jacket. 1961. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc, New York. 1961. 279 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light chipping, shelf-wear and rubbing present to the extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have shelf-wear present to the extremities. Bookplate present to the front pastedown. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called “survivors” could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer. At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. Nazerman’s dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. (Dramatizations of these scenes in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film version are famous for being the first time the extermination camps were depicted in a Hollywood movie. ) Remarkable for its attempts to dramatize the aftereffects of the Holocaust, The Pawnbroker is likewise valuable as an exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups. EB; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 279 pages .