Sol Nazerman survived the Holocaust. His wife and children did not -he witnessed their murder in a concentration camp. He is now a Harlem pawnbroker, emotionally dead and indifferent to the desperation around him, running his shop as a front for a racketeer. Made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Rod Steiger, this is one of the most moving pieces in modern fiction.**

Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can't even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young black writer modeled on James Baldwin. Moonbloom hears their cries of outrage and abuse; he learns about their secret sorrows and desires. And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives.Edward Lewis Wallant's astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.