The Ministry of Special Cases
Nathan Englander, 2007
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375704444
Summary
The long-awaited novel from Nathan Englander, author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Englander’s wondrous and much-heralded collection of stories won the 2000 Pen/Malamud Award and was translated into more than a dozen languages.
From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, The Ministry of Special Cases casts a powerful spell.
In the heart of Argentina’s Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won’t accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence—and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.
When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, the refuge of last resort.
Nathan Englander’s first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government’s whims, one man—one spectacularly hopeless man—fights to overcome his history and his name, and, if for only once in his life, to put things right.
Here again are all the marvelous qualities for which Englander’s first book was immediately beloved: his exuberant wit and invention, his cosmic sense of the absurd, his genius for balancing joyfulness and despair.
Through the devastation of a single family, Englander captures, indelibly, the grief of a nation. The Ministry of Special Cases, like Englander’s stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness, and—despite that—hope. (From the publisher.)
About the Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—West Hempstead, Long Island , New York, USA
• Education—State University of New York, Binghampton
• Awards—PEN/Malamud Award; Frank O'Connor Short Story Award
• Currently—lives in New York City
Nathan Englander is an American short story writer and novelist. His debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published in 1999; his second, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012), won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His novels include The Ministry of Special cases (2007) and Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017).
Biography
Englander was born and raised in West Hempstead on Long Island, New York, in what is part of the Orthodox Jewish community. He attended the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County for high school and graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In the mid-1990s, he moved to Israel, where he lived for five years.
Englander now lives both in Brooklyn, New York, and in Madison, Wisconsin. He has taught fiction at City University of New York - Hunter College in the MFA Creative Writing program. He currently teaches fiction in the MFA program at New York University.
Literary career
Since the 1999 publication of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Englander has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Four of his short stories have appeared in editions of The Best American Short Stories:
— "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" (2000 ed.: guest editor, E.L. Doctorow
— "How We Avenged the Blums" (2006 ed.): guest ed.,r Ann Patchett
— "Free Fruit for Young Widows" (2011 ed.): guest ed., Geraldine Brooks
— "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2012 ed.): guest ed., Tom Perrotta.
The Ministry of Special Cases, Englander's 2007 novel is set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "Dirty War." His 2017 novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth is concerned with the Israel-Palestinian conflict and has elements of a political thriller.
Englander has also served as juror for Canada's 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
Beautifully written, The Ministry of Special Cases nonetheless presents a conundrum. Englander does in fiction what his absent God cannot: create a world. And then he peoples that world with characters that he treats better than history ever would. Such decency is not a large failing in a young novelist. If only the junta had been half so kind.
Will Blythe - New York Times Book Review
A mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory.... It's a family drama layered with agonized and often comical filial connections that are stretched to the snapping point by terrible circumstance...builds with breathtaking, perfectly wrought pacing and calm, terrifying logic.
Los Angeles Times
A tour-de-force....A few pages into The Ministry of Special Cases, it becomes clear how much [Englander] has to bring to the topic: pitch-black humor, a skeptical affection for his characters, and the narrative ability to trace the impact of fascism-with-a-modern-face on a cluster of lives.
Seattle Times
Wonderful.... Since much of the book’s power comes from its relentlessly unfolding plot, it’s not fair even to tell who disappears, let alone whether that person reappears.... Englander maintains an undertone of quirky comedy almost to the end of his country.
Newsweek
Englander's prose moves along with a tempered ferocity — simple yet deceptively incisive.... Englander’s book isn’t so much about the search for a lost boy. It’s about fathers and sons and mothers and faith and community and war and hope and shame. Yes, that’s a lot to pack into 339 pages. But not when a book reads at times with the urgency of a thriller.
Esquire
Resonates of Singer, yes, but also of Bernard Malamud and Lewis Carroll, plus the Kafka who wrote The Trial.... You will wonder how a novel about parents looking for and failing to find their lost son, about a machinery of state determined to abolish not only the future but also the past, can be horrifying and funny at the same time. Somehow...this one is.
Harper's
(Audio version.) Morey's dulcet theatrical tones offset the messy lives of the characters in Englander's first novel about Jewish residents of 1970s Buenos Aires who live in fear of Argentina's vicious military dictatorship. Against the backdrop of the dirty war conducted against leftists and activists, Kaddish Poznan scratches together a living vandalizing the gravestones of Jewish criminals who are embarrassments to their families, even in eternal slumber. Morey struggles manfully with the book's religious terminology and outbursts of Spanish, but his reading is too mannered to render the vibrancy of Englander's prose. His pauses are often too long, and his line readings sometimes lean awkwardly, and puzzlingly, on certain words. Nonetheless, Morey's professional assurance means that, certain flaws notwithstanding, his reading flows along without overly noticeable interruption, accurately conveying the menace lurking behind every word, every sentence of Englander's death-haunted tale.
Publishers Weekly
Kaddish Poznan, who's been scraping along at the edge of society, suddenly finds himself in the middle of Argentina's infamous Dirty War when his son disappears. We've waited many years for Englander to follow up his remarkable story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, with a first novel.
Library Journal
This is a staggeringly mature work, gracefully and knowledgeably set in a milieu far from the author’s native New York.... Four p’s best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal.
Booklist
The fate of Argentina's Jews during the 1976-83 "Dirty War" is depicted with blistering emotional intensity in this stark first novel from the author of the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). Englander focuses tightly on the family of Kaddish Poznan, who scrapes together a living by obliterating despised surnames (those of "the famous Jewish pimps of Buenos Aires . . . [and] their . . . whores") from gravestones in a cemetery unvisited by their scandalized relatives. This earns him little respect from his wife, Lillian, who works for a life-insurance firm, and their 19-year-old son Pablo (nicknamed "Pato"), a university student whose political idealism estranges him from his parents' strategies for survival, as their country's ruling junta hunts down "undesirables" and innocent citizens swell the ranks of "the disappeared." A context of uncertainty and terror is gradually defined: Lillian invests in a steel door for their apartment; Kaddish trades his services to a plastic surgeon for rhinoplasties that may make him and Lillian look "less Jewish"; and the precautionary burning of their son's books in the family's bathtub sends Pato angrily away from them and into the clutches of their oppressors. Englander's perfectly engineered plot then takes the distraught parents into the belly of the beast as they importune the police and the eponymous Ministry (a Kafkaesque nightmare of doubletalk and indifferent brutality). They have a chilling confrontation with a prosperous general and his heartless wife and more despairing encounters with a phlegmatic relief worker, a priest who can do good only by circumventing moral action and a self-described "monster" who survives by performing the dirty war's dirtiest deeds. One stunning twist discloses Pato's fate in a way neither parent will ever accept, and the novel climaxes where it began, in a cemetery, where Kaddish hopes, against hope, to beat the murderers at their own game. A political novel anchored, unforgettably, in the realm of the personal. Englander's story collection promised a brilliant future, and that promise is here fulfilled beyond all expectations.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Kaddish is the only one of the children of the Society of the Benevolent Self—“a disgrace beyond measure for every Argentine Jew”—who is willing to acknowledge his heritage. Yet he makes his living from obliterating the names on tombstones in the sealed-off cemetery that contains his heritage. How does Kaddish see himself: as a servant of the truth and of history, or as an opportunist with no particular loyalties?
2. Why does Kaddish force Pato to work with him in the graveyard, and why does he force him to strike the chisel that will obliterate the name from the stone? As they drive home from the hospital Pato tells Kaddish, “You're lazy. You're a failure. You've kept us down. You embarrass us. You cut off my finger. You ruined my life.” The narrator goes on to refer to “the grand Jewish tradition of the dayeinu.... And central to the form is the notion that each accusation, if that had been Kaddish's only shortcoming, still it would have been enough” [p. 61]. How complicated are Pato's feelings for his father? Why does Kaddish so often make poor decisions?
3. The Ministry of Special Cases is rooted in Argentina's history from the time of the Zvi Migdal—a criminal organization of Jewish gangsters who were active in Buenos Aires and ran the brothels—to the time of the military junta of 1976-1983, during which thousands of Argentine citizens, mostly young people, vanished without a trace. Do some research into this history, and discuss with your group how it affects your reading of the story.
4. Kaddish's mother, Favorita, was the victim of another kind of kidnapping, a form of white slavery [p. 21]. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, poor young women from Russian shetls were seduced into false marriages and sold into prostitution in the brothels of Buenos Aires. How much control do the people in this novel have over their lives? We're told that Kaddish had “never expected a happy life; only moments of joy to carry him through” [pp. 94-95]. How does Kaddish's background influence his approach to life?
5. Kaddish's negotiations with Mazursky, and the fallout from his acceptance of the offer of two nose jobs, constitute an absurdist episode in a largely tragic story. How does Englander manage to mingle comedy with his darker plot? What is the effect of his narrative style for you as a reader?
6. A chain of books including Chekhov, Lermontov, and Voltaire tells how Pato chose his patrimony: “Each book begat another. For a boy whose entire family history dead-ended on his father's side, this is how Pato traced his line” [pp. 93-94]. The second struggle—a fateful one—between father and son takes place after Kaddish has tried to burn Pato's books. What do the books tell us about Pato, and why does he attempt to save them even though he understands the risk to himself if these books are discovered? Why does Kaddish curse his son [p. 116]? What does Pato mean by his parting statement, “Fathers are always fathers. Sons always sons” [p. 122]?
7. Look closely at the descriptive prose, the tone, and the pacing of Chapter 17, and discuss what this passage demonstrates about Englander as a writer.
8. It is a matter of historical fact that during the junta young people suspected of having politically subversive views were arrested, interrogated and tortured, drugged and thrown out of airplanes. Infant children of the disappeared were sometimes adopted by military families—as happens here with the general and his wife [pp. 107-08]. These facts seem, perhaps, utterly surreal and fictional. How does Englander want his readers to experience history in this story?
9. Given the fact that no one (except the extremely brave woman in the bakery) will help Kaddish and Lillian recover their son, and that in their loss the parents too are negated, the novel implies that the Argentine people capitulated, in their silence, to the corruption and savagery of the junta. As Cacho says, “Everyone is sleeping deeply” [p. 126]. Does the novel imply that people get the government they deserve? What might cause such passivity and acquiescence in a population?
10. What are the key elements of Lillian's character, and how does she differ from Kaddish in her attempts to deal with Pato's disappearance? Do you identify more with her continuing hope than with Kaddish's belief that Pato is dead? Or the reverse?
11. What is ironic about the concept of habeus corpus as a legality by which the junta protects itself from accusations of kidnapping? Why do Kaddish and Lillian need a witness in order to get a writ of habeus corpus for Pato [pp. 209, 223-27]?
12. What strategies does The Ministry of Special Cases use in dealing with the families of the disappeared? What do the people who work there, including the military priest who takes Lillian's money, hope to achieve? How does Kaddish attempt to deal with the impossible demands being made by the priest and with Lillian's desire to meet them?
13. Discuss Englander's decision, in Chapter 43, to introduce the character of the unnamed girl who finds Pato's notes to his parents and dies without ever delivering these notes. “The memory is the girl's alone, and that's how it will stay. Still, in this horrible time when the junta would weave a nation's truth from lies, Lillian would have been happy and Kaddish would have been happy that, independent of them, one fine girl for one fine day believed in Pato Poznan—both living and dead” [p. 304]. What is interesting about this situation in which one desaparecido bears witness, silently, to the existence of another?
14. The novel is deeply concerned with the questions of identity: we see the changing or the removal of names, the alteration of faces and of the past. In contrast to all this, the girl who finds the notes on which Pato has written his name thinks, “It was such a civilized act, writing one's name, a concrete act. It made her think she could leave a history herself” [p. 302]. Why are these two sentences so important to the novel?
15. The rabbi who named Kaddish said, “Let his name be Kaddish to ward off the angel of death. A trick and a blessing. Let this child be the mourner instead of the mourned” [p. 8]. Does Kaddish's name suit him? What resonance do the rabbi's words take on, given the arc of the whole story?
16. The episode of the girl in the cell reveals the fact that Pato was held there as well, and that he undoubtedly shared the same fate as the girl who finds his notes in the foam mattress. So Kaddish is right about his son's fate, while Lillian is wrong. How does this knowledge affect your reading of the last final chapters?
17. Kaddish's desire to bury and to mourn his son meets with frustration when a rabbi tells him, in an ironic return to the habeus corpus problem, that he cannot bury his son if he has no body to bury. Does this constitute a final estrangement from the Jewish community for Kaddish, especially since the desire to give the dead the proper rites of burial accords with an ancient Jewish tradition? What do you make of Kaddish's attempt to trick Lillian into accepting the bones of a stranger for her son's?
18. Englander says that in writing the novel, “I became obsessed with the almost quantum-mechanical evil that is a byproduct of disappearing people. To kill a person is to deny that person a future—the basic act that is murder. To 'disappear' that same person is also, oddly, to reach in and undo the past. It's not to make them no-more. It's to make them, not-ever. It is to be undone. It's a way of fracturing the seeming unbreakable link between future and past. The question that flows through much of this novel, I guess, is: Despite the best intentions how do we–as individuals, or societies (take your pick)—contribute to our own undoing?” How would you address the ideas here, as well as the final question?
19. What is the effect of the novel's final pages? How do you imagine the rest of life for Kaddish and Lillian? Does the conclusion provide a sense of closure, or does it refuse to do so?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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