Sweeping story of survival

ELLIOT Perlman's latest novel spans the globe from New York and Chicago to Poland's Auschwitz and Melbourne.

Melburnian Elliot Perlman's love affair with New York began in 1998, when some Aussie friends living there suggested he swing by after he'd finished his UK tour promoting his first novel Three Dollars.

 "So much has been written about New York and so many movies have been made, you wonder, 'Can there possibly be a square centimetre of it that could be mine?' " he says.

Regular visits in the early 2000s turned into a residency of four years. The idea for his latest novel The Street Sweeper came when he lived across the road from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre.

"Everyone has heard that New York is a microcosm of the world - well, this hospital, which took up a whole city block, was like a microcosm of New York," says Perlman, sitting outside the Elwood cafe where he wrote most of the novel.

"You had people of all different races, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, ages and socio-economic groups, all coming together to visit patients, to be patients or to work at this hospital. I wondered, 'What would happen if an unlikely friendship was to blossom from one of these seemingly random chance meetings between people at the cancer hospital?' "

A poetry reading provided another narrative thread. The poems Perlman heard had been written by a man dying in Sloan-Kettering, who had been a Jewish partisan in World War II.

"I imagined that it was possible that a black janitor with no knowledge of that man's world or his history could meet that man, or a man like him, and these two worlds could collide and they could become friends. From there I was off."

Perlman, a former barrister, says The Street Sweeper took more research than his other three books (Three Dollars, The Reasons I Won't Be Coming and Seven Types of Ambiguity) put together.

Parallel to the unlikely friendship between janitor Lamont Williams and Holocaust survivor Henryk Mandelbrot, Perlman adds Australian historian Adam Zignelik, whose professional and personal life is falling apart.

His other major character is Henry Border, inspired by a Chicago psychologist who interviewed Holocaust victims at the end of World War II.

"I heard some of the wire recordings that this man had done, and I heard this guilt in his voice, that made no sense to me, whatsoever," Perlman says.

"It made sense that he would be full of despair about the stories that he'd heard, but his guy was coming from Chicago; what did he have to feel guilty about? So that became one of the questions I felt I had to answer with my novel.''

Perlman visited Auschwitz six times and is grateful to Robert Nowak, of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, who shared his profound knowledge of the camp's history.

``I had always wanted to visit because of my family background. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews, and most of my family was wiped out in the Holocaust, and I always knew sooner or later I was going to write about this.''

He says those people who roll their eyes and think, ``not another Holocaust story'' have become over familiar with the imagery of the Holocaust - the emaciated bodies and striped uniforms - but are quite ignorant of what actually happened.

``The book is about many things, but to the extent that it deals with the Holocaust I wanted, for myself as much as the readers, to delineate quite carefully what happened.''

In particular, he highlights the role of the women who risked torture and death to smuggle gunpowder out of a munitions factory as part of a plot to blow up a crematorium at Auschwitz.

``More people should know about the incredible bravery of those women, who were barely more than teenagers, half-starved in flimsy clothing, who took the most incredible risk and their story deserves to be better known.''

He says his compassion for others, one of the reasons he became a barrister, is a product of his upbringing.

``My parents brought me up to look at those less fortunate than us. Essentially to instill me with the view that every human being is born with a certain inalienable dignity, and what happens to the person between the time they are born and the time they die, shouldn't rob them of that dignity.''

The Street Sweeper, by Elliot Perlman, Vintage, rrp $32.95