ABSTRACT
Hollywood had a complicated attitude toward the Nazi ascendancy and the events that followed. In the 1930s, economic motives prompted its deference to Germany’s self-representations. After Kristallnacht, industry executives made private efforts at rescue, but their public stance reflected a combination of self-serving tact, complicated by Jewish self-consciousness. And the war, the cultural climate, evolved. In response to the civil rights movement, the universal normativity of the 50s yielded to the interest in particularities, and especially ethnicities, of the 60s. This became a good time for the story line of The Pawnbroker, with its interest in the street life of East Harlem, the blacks and Puerto Ricans, and a Jewish merchant, a Holocaust survivor. The pawnbroker, Sol Nazerman, has been so extraordinarily traumatized by the camp experience, that he can in no way find a new lease on life. His pawnshop, in its iconography and social practice, has become the resurrection of the death camp, a camp in which he is now in command. As a reaction to his humiliating passivity in the camp, he is determined to never be powerless again. The only truth that really matters to him is the truth of the Holocaust, and his life has become a bearing of witness to that suffering. Sol has made an unconscious Faustian bargain with his conscience: he will be allowed to live as long as he agrees to remain dead. Although the Holocaust is drenched in universal meanings, for each inmate there were, of course, particularities, and for Sol it was his failure to protect his son. Arguably the central concern of this film is authenticity, the need to speak truth, that which the Holocaust could not exterminate, that which has been expressed in the efforts to bear witness. Sol comes to face what he has been concealing from himself, but this does not stop him from creating a reenactment of his son’s death. There are tragedies we cannot overcome, despite our best efforts, and we need to find ways to bear that.
