"Teach Me Gold": Pedagogy and Memory in The Pawnbroker

This essay examines the role of pedagogy and memory in the 1965 film adaptation of The Pawnbroker, a story of a survivor unable to mourn. I show that, in contrast to most pawnbroking films, this one transforms the pawnshop into a classroom in which the survivor attempts to give lessons in literacy, history, and values to his assistant, a Puerto Rican. Despite the pawnbroker's efforts, the lessons ultimately fail to give the assistant the cultural legitimacy that he seeks. I also suggest a number of ways The Pawnbroker works to establish its own legitimacy. First, a critical voice explicitly challenges the Europe-to-America model of transmission. Second, the film's representation of Holocaust memory emerges from an innovative synthesis of the visual ¯ashback and verbal inarticulateness. Third, The Pawnbroker self-consciously plays off the most in¯uential postwar European example of filmic memory, Hiroshima, mon amour, and points to an alternative model of coming to terms with the memory of trauma.