Interview: Elliot Perlman’s sweeping history lesson

Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper is an extraordinary book. It is not perfect — it is repetitive, opinionated and long — but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Perlman unites the Holocaust and the civil rights movement as themes in a narrative that runs from rural Lithuania in the early ‘30s to modern day New York. Calls are made at Auschwitz, Little Rock and downtown Chicago along the way, as chance meetings connect a barely literate black street sweeper in Manhattan with the last of Sonderkommando (the handful Jews who were coerced into assisting the Nazis deliver the Final Solution, and clean up afterwards). They are both victims, Perlman says in the dedication, of ‘the same disease’.

The Street Sweeper is a novel about history rather than a historical novel. It is largely based on real events and people. Perlman and I met under the eaves of Faber&Faber, and he said that he researched the book ‘with all the vigour of a historian’.