SOURCE: Leff, Leonard J. “Hollywood and the Holocaust: Remembering The Pawnbroker.” American Jewish History 84, no. 4. (December 1996): 353-76.

In the following essay, Leff outlines the adaptive and production history of Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, calling it the foundation for such films as Schindler's List and various other pictures dealing with the Holocaust.

“Hollywood is just interested in making money. … No, to Hollywood, culture is just a dirty word. Callow, that's the word for American culture. They have so much to learn from the Europeans.”¹

—Selig (the brother-in-law) in Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker

In a 1961 novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, Sol Nazerman runs a pawnshop near the Harlem River in New York. A former inmate of the Nazi concentration camps, he has social contacts—a woman with whom he has sex, an assistant who helps him in the store, a sister and her family who share a comfortable...