Fiction filled with promises and first-rate writing
The Ministry of Special Cases
by Nathan Englander, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 339 pages, $25
Nathan Englander came to wide attention when his collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published in 1999. Perhaps he had come to his distinctive brand of fabulism as a function of his Orthodox upbringing; perhaps it was added as a result of the fiction workshops he took at the University of Iowa. No matter: What resulted was a group of stories that caused critics to find ways of linking his work to that of Bernard Malamud and I.B. Singer. All this is heady stuff for a young writer still in his 20s.
The rub comes, as it always does in cases where a first book has been (perhaps) over-praised, with the second book. 
It seems destined to be a let-down, a cause for critics to take back with one hand what they had given with the other. The Ministry of Special Cases avoids many of the pitfalls a second Englander book might have fallen into. For one thing, it is a novel rather than a collection of stories and thus avoids story-by-story comparisons. For another, Englander changes his venue and even something of his characteristic fictive techniques. He still writes sentences with a characteristic ring (e.g., "Jews bury themselves the way they live, crowded together, encroaching on each other's space."), but the larger canvas of the novel forces him to take on larger themes and to sustain them through hundreds of pages. On this last (tall) order Englander is only partially successful because there are at least two — possibly three — story lines that do not entirely converge.
The Ministry of Special Cases is set in Buenos Aires during 1976, a chaotic time when the military junta dealt with dissent, especially by the young, by "disappearing" them. Enter Kaddish Pozman, Englander's hapless protagonist, a man born in the wrong country at the wrong time. His odd name inextricably ties him to the mourner's prayer and his luckless profession as a man who erases names from the tombstones of the dishonored dead. Kaddish is, himself, a pariah, a hijo de puta, a Spanish phrase that roughly translates as "son-of-a-bitch" but that is a particularly powerful coupling of hate words in Argentina.
Kaddish is a latter-day shlemiel, a failure who fails at every cockamamie scheme he's ever tried. He presses his reluctant 19-year-old son, Pato, into what has become the family business — namely, jumping the wall that separates a respectable graveyard from a shunned one and chiseling off from certain grave markers the names of the deceased, whose living relatives pay handsomely. Englander gives this elaborate mock history a delightfully comic touch, and the comedy only deepens when one client, unable to pay hard cash, offers to give the Pozman family free nose jobs. Just when you might have thought that there is no more mileage in scenarios about Jews and big noses, Englander proves that, in capable hands, even very tired materiel can be freshened up.
Kaddish's long-suffering wife, Lillian, is equally vivid. Here is one of her characteristic riddles: "Which man is better off, the one without a future or the one without a past?" Given the concentration on efforts to erase — that is, to chisel out — the past as well as on efforts to construct a future for Pato in a dark political climate, neither man seems "better off." That, alas, resonates in a novel in which some readers may find parallels between Argentina in the 1970s and present-day America.
At one point, the plot thickens as Pato is "disappeared" by three government agents who pluck him out of the family apartment, along with three subversive books. His mother searches for him at police stations, assorted government offices, and even through the labyrinthine passageways of the Ministry of Special Cases, the last entity a dead ringer for Kafka's bureaucratic mazes.
The extended father-son theme gives the novel a sense of poignant sadness as Lillian continues to believe that Pato is somehow alive while Kaddish covers the apartment mirrors and rents his garments.
The "dirty war" in Argentina affected far more than Jews alone, but because Englander focuses so tightly on the Pozmans, one nearly comes to think that what happened there is yet another in a long string of anti-Semitic pogroms. As Kaddish instructs his son: "No one is desecrating anything…. We are here [at the Benevolent Cemetery] to prevent further damage. I'll tell you what the job is. It is work that needs to be done in a world that runs on shame. Guilt feelings or no, they'd have smashed this place to rubble without us."
There is much to admire in Englander's first novel, even if its various threads do not all pull together as seamlessly as do his earlier short stories. But by avoiding the potholes that damage many a writer's second book, he gives us every reason to believe that he will continue to fuse his wonderfully innate Jewish imagination with whatever political subject strikes his fancy. The Ministry of Special Cases is not a major book from a major novelist; it is, instead, something perhaps even rarer: a work of fiction filled with promises of every sort and even first-rate writing to keep us turning the pages.
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