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PDF FormatEarly in The Ministry of Special Cases, the long-awaited first novel from Nathan Englander, the protagonist Kaddish Poznan drags his resentful son Pato along on a job effacing the tombstones of Buenos Aires’ more unsavory Jewish ancestors. When Pato refuses to wield the chisel himself, Kaddish tries to force his hand. In the ensuing struggle, Kaddish accidentally chops off the tip of one of Pato’s fingers. On the way home from the hospital, Pato, overcome with bitterness and humiliation, unleashes a tirade against his father. This verbal assault, “in the grand Jewish tradition of the dayeinu,” is a list of Kaddish’s deficiencies, the implication being that if each had been the only one, it would have been enough: “You’re lazy. You’re a failure. You’ve kept us down. You embarrass us. You cut off my finger. You ruined my life.” It is this kind of writing—a near-seamless blend of tragedy and comedy, and the infusion, even into the narrative’s darkest and most emotion-laden moments, of an air of farce—for which Englander is famous, and for which he has rightfully been compared to such Jewish literary giants as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Franz Kafka. In The Ministry of Special Cases, however, it proves to be a mixed blessing, turning a tale of devastation and loss into an undeniably entertaining read, even as that very entertainment threatens to overwhelm the profound message the book seeks to impart.
This style proved far less problematic in Englander’s acclaimed short-story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which propelled him to literary stardom nearly eight years ago. There, Englander presented characters who struggle to reconcile inner turmoil—their vanity, their sexual urges, their hatred of a spouse or desire for domestic bliss—with an external world defined by the strictures of faith. In the unending battle between the two, Englander’s characters learn, disappointment always emerges victorious. True, their stories were not without humor, but it was invariably humor of the darkest kind, heightening rather than detracting from their suffering. In “Reb Kringle,” for example, a Hasid is forced by his pragmatic, domineering wife to support his family as a mall Santa, only to blow his cover when a child admits that what he’d really like for Christmas is for his non-Jewish stepfather to let him celebrate Hanuka again. In “The Wig,” a married woman forced by the dictates of modesty to cover her head yearns for the beauty—and singularity—her hair once granted her, and bullies a delivery man into selling her his locks for use in a most immodest wig. And in the titular story, a man whose wife refuses to make love to him receives a special dispensation from his rabbi to visit a prostitute in order to save their marriage, only to find that the ensuing guilt renders him unable to respond to his wife’s advances when her love returns. In Englander’s ritual-bound world, deliverance from spiritual or emotional anguish is not merely distant; it is, quite simply, never going to arrive. Nor, for that matter, is it even the point. Rather, Englander sought to explore the consequences of a life lived amidst a war of competing desires for which there is, ultimately, no resolution.
In The Ministry of Special Cases, it is not inner turmoil that threatens to overwhelm the book’s main characters, driving them to the brink of madness and despair. It is, instead, the horrific acts of a totalitarian regime determined to shore up its authority at any price. The setting is Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the state-sponsored campaign of violent repression carried out between 1976 and 1983 under dictator Jorge Videla’s military junta. Kaddish and Lillian Poznan, working-class inhabitants of Buenos Aires’ Jewish ghetto, suddenly find themselves thrust into a living nightmare when their teenage son Pato becomes one of the state’s desaparecidos, citizens—overwhelmingly youth—disappeared” by the government on account of their alleged subversion. The bulk of the novel follows the Poznan’s agonizing attempt, in chapter after excruciating chapter, to save their son by navigating a Kafkaesque maze of impregnable bureaucratic offices, all of which deny that their son was ever taken—deny, in fact, that he ever existed at all.
Indeed, attempts to erase the past run like a leitmotif through The Ministry of Special Cases—Kaddish himself makes a living chiseling names off tombstones for a Jewish community determined to deny its past; Kaddish and Lillian accept nose jobs as payment for one of Kaddish’s assignments, altering their faces and “erasing” their old appearances; and Pato continually finds himself without his ID card, without which he is deemed “non-existent” by the state, foreshadowing his eventual disappearance at its hands. Yet, as with the stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, the point of this tragic tale is not to provide a satisfying outcome to the Poznans’ desperate search for answers. It is, instead, to explore the question: What is the cost of attempting to erase a past? If the Poznans’ story is any testament, Englander’s answer is surely: Always too high.
The pariah of the Buenos Aires Jewish community, Kaddish Poznan nonetheless provides its members with a valuable service in their moment of need. In 1976 Argentina, when chaos threatened and uncertainty reigned, and “there was terror from all quarters and murder on the rise,” it was no time, Englander explains, “to stand out, not for Gentile or Jew. And the Jews, almost to a person, felt that being Jewish was already plenty different enough.” Thus, the community’s respectable members, the “ones who had what to lose,” seek out Kaddish’s help in erasing the evidence of a shameful past in the family line: Members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, a group of Jewish pimps and whores. Only Kaddish, an hijo de puta, or son of a whore, refuses to disavow his disreputable origins. It is, in fact, on account of his mother—-or rather, her profession—that he received his distinctive name. A sickly child, Kaddish was just a week old when his mother summoned the rabbi to save his life. Refusing even to cross the threshold of her home, the rabbi peers in at the child and grants him a name that is both a trick and a blessing: “Let his name be Kaddish to ward off the angel of death…. Let this child be the mourner instead of the mourned.” In the future, Kaddish will have ample opportunity to live up to his name.
Lillian, his long-suffering wife, fell in love with his big dreams, high hopes, and oversized optimism—in short, “with what he’ll become,” and not with what he was. She continues to stand by him, despite his having become not much at all. It is his son Pato, however, a sullen, pot-smoking, mildly revolutionary university student, with whom Kaddish has never made peace. In the great literary tradition of fathers and sons, their relationship is defined by the differences between generations, by pride perpetually wounded and admiration perpetually unexpressed. The scene in which the uneducated Kaddish searches through his son’s shelves for potentially incriminating books thus provides one of the most touching insights into his character: “He pulled a Marcuse off the shelf. He was embarrassed and quickly turned as if Pato was right there behind him. Only Pato could make him feel inadequate in this way. When Pato shook his head at the holes in his father’s knowledge, Kaddish felt sorry for himself and felt stupid before his son.” Nonetheless, the books make Kaddish proud, although he would never admit as much. “He loved that Pato was educated. It was Pato’s educated attitude,” Englander concludes, “that made Kaddish want to wring his neck.” Thus does Kaddish insist that his son accompany him on his work in the cemetery, although Pato openly reviles his father’s profession. Kaddish is as determined to maintain his authority as Pato is to deny it—as determined, in fact, as the tyrannical state that will eventually “disappear” his son.
Yet Pato does not merely deny Kaddish’s authority. In keeping with the book’s theme of erasure, Pato has, in his mind, actually replaced his patrimony with the ideas in his books. Thus, had Kaddish asked him how he had come to read this or that work, “Pato could have led him the whole way: How Ward Six had gotten him to The Cherry Orchard and that to Onegin and on to A Hero of Our Time, which led him by fluke to Voltaire. Each book begat another and another. For a boy whose entire family history dead-ended on his father’s side, this is how Pato traced his family line.” It is for this reason, perhaps—his belief in his books as a more authentic and desirable heritage than his own—that Pato refuses to comply with his parents’ wish that he destroy his collection, even though he surely knows the books could get him into trouble with the authorities. It is also the likely reason why he reacts the way he does when he happens upon Kaddish burning them, touching off a series of events that result in his arrest and “disappearance” by the state.
