Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases: Two Reviews by Zeek

Fantasy and Totalitarianism: On Ministering to Special Cases Jay Michaelson Even if you’re Nathan Englander, inventor of the prostitution-prescribing rabbi, truth is stranger than fiction. Like Jonathan Safran Foer before him, Englander has chosen to expand his palette from the fantastic to the political – in Englander’s case, from neo-Yiddish-lit fantasies to the true stories of Argentina’s “disappeared,” the between 5,000 and 30,000 leftists, trade unionists, students, and other rabble-rousers of that country’s military dictatorship. Between 10% of 20% of those victims were Jews, and Englander’s novel is the (fictionalized) story of one of them.

It’s the right move, but a dangerous one, because, as Englander himself must have realized as he laboriously wrote and re-wrote the manuscript (so the grapevine says, anyway), the arc to the disappearances is a difficult one for a novel. One day, a boy named Pato is there; the next, he isn’t. And he probably isn’t coming back either. Indeed, without giving too much away, The Ministry of Special Cases is largely the narrative of how Pato’s parents, Kaddish and Lillian Poznan, are slowly swallowed by despair. There are plot twists, but really the book is like Requiem for a Dream and other junkie-lit classics; there’s only one way to go, and it’s down.

And down and down they go: beaten (physically and emotionally), impoverished, ruined, separated, the Poznans are utterly destroyed in the book, chapter by chapter As their approaches to their loss begin to diverge – Kaddish moving through despair into acceptance, Lillian refusing to give up hope – their marriage unravels. And, credit Englander for truthfulness, there are few miracles in military dictatorships.

As the arc of the story became clear, my hope was that Englander’s prose style, which I have personally studied, emulated, and puzzled over, would carry me through the despair of the book’s plot, perhaps redeeming in artistry what was stolen in history. To my surprise, I had no such luck. While there are some quintessentially Englanderian images and turns of phrase, much of the writing settles, particularly in the second half of the book, into the conventional tone of a well-written and earnest historical novel. Now, admittedly, it’s difficult to write prose that is neither overwrought nor undercooked, and Englander pulls it off. But for fans of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, much of the magic is gone.

That might, however, be the point.

In the first half of The Ministry of Special Cases, all seems to be Englander Business as Usual. We are introduced to Kaddish Poznan, the son of a prostitute and member of a seemingly fictional underground Jewish community, the Society for the Benevolent Self, whose wacky characters have such names as Talmud Harry and Toothless Mazursky. In the universe Englander creates, this Society for the Benevolent Self was comprised of prostitutes and their illegitimate children, and existed alongside the mainstream Buenos Aires Jewish community, with their own cemetery, synagogue, and benevolent association. Eventually, some of the Society’s members grow up to be respectable members of the community, and so Kaddish hires himself out to the community’s descendants – like Mazursky’s son, the unscrupulous plastic surgeon who plays a pivotal role in the book – erasing their family names from their ancestors’ tombstones, thus effacing any trace of the now-wealthy families’ dubious origins.

Fantasy, right? Not so fast. Actually, as recounted in such studies as Isabel Vincent’s Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas, there was a real Society for the Benevolent Self: a mutual-aid society known as Chesed Shel Emet (“The Benevolent Society of Truth”), set up by women who were forced into prostitution by Jewish criminal gangs between 1860 and 1939. During this period, thousands of Jewish girls were sold into slavery by such gangs as Warsaw’s notorious Zwi Migdal, with Buenos Aires being the primary trading post between Eastern Europe and South America. According to Vincent, the Zwi Migdal cartel earned $50 million a year at its height. And by 1913, Argentina had more than 3,000 brothels, an uncounted number of which were run by Jews.

Like Englander’s fictionalized version, the Society of Truth even had to run its own cemetery, as the mainstream communities in Buenos Aires shunned these victims of the sex trade for their “sin,” marginalizing their children as well (hijo de puta, ben zona and other euphemisms for “son of a whore” are insults in many languages). The Society closed in 1968, and most Jews have been happy to forget it ever existed. Indeed, some early reviews of The Ministry of Special Cases have assumed that Englander simply invented the Society for the Benevolent Self, treating it as a fictional creation as he did the rabbi in his For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, who prescribes visits to a prostitute to a man unable to obtain sexual release.

I wasn’t sure myself at first; I didn’t know this episode of Jewish history. Englander embellishes the details (the names themselves are hilarious) and, having read his stories, I assumed he was weaving a fantasy. In fact, this sleight-of-hand carries the book. Kaddish’s erasure of memory is an obvious (some might say too obvious) foreshadowing of the Argentine junta’s attempts to uproot any history of the “disappeared.” But it also greatly complicates what would otherwise be a simple good-guy/bad-guy polarity in the novel. Granted, excommunication and ostracism are not the same as torture and murder, but as our own ignorance of this chapter of Jewish history makes us all – not merely the “bad guys” of the junta, or the Argentine Jews in the book – complicit in a form of willful cultural amnesia.

It’s all too easy to paint Jews as victims – and profitable too, as any notion that we might also be oppressors is routinely demonized as self-hatred, or helping the anti-Semites, or worse. This, doubtless, is how The Ministry of Special Cases will primarily be received: as telling a little-known tale of Jewish suffering. I can see the monument already. But the book is much more than that. By including forms of Jewish oppression within its narrative, it greatly complicates the questions of memory and accountability. The junta, obviously, is Satanic; when, in a highly implausible passage, Kaddish and Lillian confront one of the generals, his evil is palpable. The Buenos Aires Jewish community is morally ambiguous; when Lillian (who came from the right side of the fence but transgressed the boundary by marrying Kaddish) goes to its leader for help, she is aided but not entirely welcomed. Englander admirably draws a nuanced portrait of the community’s chief rabbi, allowing the reader to decide whether he is an appeaser or a hero, a savior or a scoundrel – or, as perhaps in the leadership of German and American Jewish communities during the Holocaust – some of each.

But we, too, are implicated, by our general ignorance of what happened in Argentina – and our own government’s support of the junta, one among many murderous regimes our nation propped up in its fight against communism – as well as by our tendency to acknowledge our own community’s past sins, both the Zwi Migdal and all of us who blame victims for their enforced shame.

All this would be rather pious if Englander didn’t include the questions of narrative and art within the critique. We want our stories to be fantastic, to have trajectories, to have good guys and bad guys. Many of us wanted another fabulous tale of mystical rabbis from Englander. I myself wanted resolution to the plot of this book. And, in the wider arena, we want there to be an “endgame” in Iraq, as if the country were a chessboard; a “game plan” for climate change, as if the atmosphere is a football field; coherent narratives for tragedies like Virginia Tech and Oklahoma City, with good guys, bad guys, and no one in between, when in fact, all of this is delusion. Worse than that, it is a kind of aesthetic proto-totalitarianism: a demand for the tidy. Argentina’s fascists, like Italy’s, were largely about cleaning up society – picking up trash, shutting up the rabble, and generally putting the country’s house in order. Like Hitler’s fascism, their ideology was one of cleanliness, purity, strength. The Hebrew word for it, courtesy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, is hadar – a kind of dignity and aesthetic beauty that is appurtenant to higher forms of humanity. The classical forms of Leni Riefenstahl, the broad boulevards of fascist Italy, as well as the inchoate sense that, yes, well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet – but at least someone is doing the cooking, and cleaning up the kitchen too.

In other words, the demand for tidy narrative and clear characters is itself part of the problem. An honest politics is one which ministers to special cases, and recognizes that a neat society is intrinsically an unjust one. In the book, the Ministry of Special Cases is a Kafkaesque maze, where the slightest technical slip-up means failure, and where distraught parents are met by dismissive bureaucrats. Its very name, of course, an oxymoron: a bureaucratic department of that which cannot be categorized. Yet we somehow hope that Lillian’s persistence will somehow shake something loose (actually, she accidentally frees someone else’s child), as if the great anti-humanity of homogenizing totalitarianism, mechanizing bureaucracy, and endless, endless forms might somehow, perhaps by mistake, yield an answer. Whereas in fact it is only Kaddish, the schlemiel, the schemer, whose life has been spent in the underworld, who is able to find the few blades of grass growing through the cement, and obtain a measure of truth.

So perhaps it makes sense, although not a lot of fun, that the magic has been drained from this novel – that Kaddish’s dysfunctional relationship with his son is so unpleasant as to make one wonder why he searches in the first place and that whatever endings the novel does provide are not happy ones. Throughout, the reader wants there to be a sudden twist, a happy reunion, a breakthrough, a revelation – not to mention good guys and bad guys, entertainment, and charming Jewish nostalgia. In fact, all we get is bleakness. Does any of this sound familiar? Is anyone else watching the news?

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This Can’t Be Real Peter Bebergal Latin America has produced many writers who understood reality to be malleable – subject to magical transport and fantastic puzzles containing locked boxes and mazes and labyrinths. On the other side of the world, Eastern Europe produced its own literary fabulists like Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer. These writers also infused the real with a sense of the unreal: Kafka pinned cockroaches and nameless protagonists against apathetic and crushing administrative monoliths. Singer populated a world ravaged by antisemitism with demons and dybbuks. In The Ministry of Special Cases, the first novel by award-winning short story writer Nathan Englander, these two worlds merge in a tale about a Jewish family in 1970s Argentina. Writing about Jews living amidst a South American revolution that turns totalitarian, Englander takes his deep influences – the dread of Kafka and the lyricism of Singer – and places them in Argentina. Along the way, he conjures Jorge Luis Borges and creates something utterly real, but which one wishes was merely a dream.

Englander’s novel centers on Kaddish Poznan, his wife Lillian, and their son Pato. The family members are outcasts, even among the small population of Jews that lives in Buenos Aires. Kaddish’s mother was a prostitute, part of a group of underworld Jewish hoodlums known as the Society of the Benevolent Self – Englander’s fictionalization of the Chesed Shel Emet, a mutual-aid society set up by women forced into prostitution by an Eastern European criminal gang. With names like Talmud Harry and Hezzi Two-Blades who ran a portion of the Jewish community, these men were deemed so treif that they were forced to build their own cemetery adjacent to the Jewish one – with a large fence to keep the respective dead as separate as possible.

A generation later, the only work that Kaddish is able to find – a near-blasphemous work no one else would touch – is to enter the Benevolent Self cemetery and chip names off of tombstones, the names that might link “respectable” Jews with not-so-respectable family members from their past. In one of the book’s most remarkable sections, a plastic surgeon convinces Kaddish to accept payment for his work with nose jobs for the whole Poznan family, blessed (or cursed) as they are with large noses. The surgeon, Dr. Mazursky, explains the Jewish predicament as contained in Kaddish’s nose:

‘Happiness is contained in the nose. Like a diamond, it only crystallizes under pressure. In so much space…happiness cannot form. This is why Jews, as a people, are dysthymics. In those ample noses happiness moves around like a firefly in a jar. It must be contained more exactly. One must keep it in place. Like a butterfly pinned to velvet, happiness runs through. We can cure you, Poznan. We can liberate the man trapped inside the Jew.’

Kaddish agrees, and like Dr. Mazursky believes that who we are can be chipped away like a name on a tombstone belonging to a whore or a card shark or a shady moneylender. But Jewishness is only part of what decides the fate of the Poznans. Some of it is also about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Pato is a university student who spends his free time listening to music on his headphones, getting stoned, and talking politics with friends. After being arrested at a concert, Pato is eventually sent home, only to be taken out of his house later that night by an anonymous group of men. Pato is “disappeared.”

At the start of Argentina’s Dirty War, Eva Peron gave the military almost dictatorial power to rout out leftists. Eventually becoming a junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictatorship was responsible for the disappearance of over 8000 students and activists. For Englander’s Poznans, Jewishness is incidental, but however you slice it, being taken in the middle of the night remains a Jewish predicament. The Poznans are not singled out because they are Jewish, but being Jewish makes them singled out a little bit more than others. Everyone is equal in the eyes of a totalitarian government, but Jews a little less so. Even with their shorn noses, Kaddish and Lillian can’t pass for anyone other than who they are: powerless Jews in search of their missing son, one of thousands. What is a nose in the face of so much terrible anonymity?

Englander has crafted a tale both lyrical and devastating. That such dread, despair, paranoia, and rage could be written with such poetry reveals him as a writer of considerable power. But there is resignation in the prose – in the anger and even in the tenderness that heightens the uncertainty. The influence of Kafka here is important because it’s through the individual that the larger body politic of Englander’s story is invoked. Avoiding the dangerous cliché, Englander has written an existential novel, demonstrating that there is no better way to truly understand history than through what it does to the personality of an individual.

Kaddish is a man who seems destined to fail at everything, but this is no more apparent than in his relationship with his son Pato. Before Pato is kidnapped, Kaddish becomes more and more paranoid about Pato’s safety, going so far as to burn his books in the bathtub, books that in Argentina at that time could make you “disappear.” Father and son are at each other’s throats, but this is because neither one can admit how much they need the other. Kaddish, supposedly the adult, cannot get past his own stubbornness to love at any cost. In an unbearably tense moment, the family is stopped at a roadblock when they realize Pato doesn’t have his ID:

Lillian surrendered to a fear that springs from helplessness. She’d felt it from the first glimpse of those jeeps. In Kaddish it welled up with Pato’s irresponsibility and turned right into anger, into a rage that overtakes fathers who only want to protect their sons.

The bulk of the novel involves Kaddish and Lillian’s attempts to find Pato, each in their own futile way. Kaddish is all brusque questions and tough guy tactics while Lillian spends her days drifting through administrative nightmares. And it’s here that something happens to Englander’s novel that is both unexpected and which would be wondrous if not for the way in which it demoralizes his characters. For the Poznans, the world of Argentina becomes a kind of fantasy, and Englander himself becomes its fabulist. He invokes Kafka to take a stroll around one of Borges’ fantastic libraries, but instead of lost books on mysticism, he discovers an obsession with paperwork, levels of deliberate ineptitude, and malevolent clerks that take sadistic delight in playing on the hopes and fears of those who have lost a child. While reading, the thought emerges page after page, This can’t be real, please let this not be how it really was.

But this is what it was; the disappearance of thousands of children under a paranoid and ruthless junta that pretended that there was legitimacy and logic to its tactics. And it’s this pretense that lends the novel its awful hope, a hope that drives Lillian to near-delusion in her desperate optimism. Yet her hope emerges as a buffer to Kaddish, whose whole life seems to have been about expecting the worst – and when it finally arrives – we are surprised by his ability to do more than simply rage.

This is not an easy novel, but it is an important one. Not only is it a contemporary Jewish novel that isn’t about New York or Eastern Europe, it’s also a Jewish novel that magically shows the almost surreal condition of being Jewish, where the state of being is both tragically unlike any other, but also contains the sum of all that it means to be human. Kaddish and his family are Jewish, something that is almost accidental, except when it’s not. As one minor character, another mother who has lost a child explains: “I know that when there’s death in the air, the Jew is more susceptible, more likely to catch it.”