Sidney Lumet’s film, The Pawnbroker, Picasso’s masterpiece- Guernica, and Eduard Munch’s “The Scream “have all been powerful symbols for me throughout the years in representing the horrors of war and man’s capacity for inexplicable cruelties. Yet, the problem for me, still remains: how do we translate a horrific historical event into art that both honors and transcends it?

The film, The Pawnbroker, is, in my opinion, still the most powerful film dealing with the Holocaust survivor’s re-entry into “society.” Sidney Lumet‘s film says nothing about Hitler nor the Nazis as a political phenomena. It chooses instead, to track the impact of horror on a Jewish survivor in America 15-20 years after the event. By the mid 1950’s, most American Jews, having lost no immediate family in that European tragedy, were thriving. Public expressions of anti-Semitism were taboo. Holocaust memory, though never dead, had been driven deeply into the consciousness and writing about the Shoah became an agonizing task. Putting it on the screen posed a challenge to Hollywood for many reasons.   In The Pawnbroker, the actual scenes of the Holocaust – restrained and stylized- are all presented in flashback. This is where the emotional power of the film is its strongest. The memory of a single survivor, Sol Nazerman who has nothing to hold on to but life itself, is an incredible character study of post-traumatic stress.  As the anniversary of what would have been his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary approaches, Naverman’s unraveling becomes palpable. The subterranean shadows are brought to life when scenes of Poland interrupt his present pawnshop days in Harlem and his home life in a Long Island suburban tract house.  It is no wonder that as he sits in his pawnshop and greets customers through his cage, he is haunted by scenes of Nazi officers tearing gold rings and necklaces of the newly arrived inmates at the camp. .The Sol Nazerman of the 1950’s is living with American relatives who have absolutely no comprehension of him nor his nightmares. Europe is miles away.

Dark memories of barbed wire fences come back to him as he walks through the dark, back-lit streets of Harlem where a number of black and Hispanic youths are fighting. When Mabel, a friend’s prostitute black girl friend bares her breasts and offers to have sex with him, Nazerman ‘s memory flashes back to his wife’s humiliation by the Nazis and of an SS guard forcing him, to watch his wife’s degradation. Nazerman is so overwhelmed with pain and guilt at his own survival that he starts to give money away to his customers- while previously he had told his worker, “Money is the whole thing.” Nazerman had been living in his own twilight zone and learns too late the error of his ways- “No man is an island,” is an important theme of this film.