2007, Alfred A. Knopf
339 pages

Kaddish Poznan makes a living by erasing evidence of the past. The son of a Jewish prostitute raised at a time and place when the Jewish community was attempting to eradicate its memory of his mother’s profession, he is clandestinely hired to sneak into a derelict cemetery and chip names off of headstones with a chisel. The headstones bare the names of the pimps and prostitutes whose services were once in high demand in Argentina, but their grown children want to lead respectable lives, untainted by the stigma of their parents’ aberrant trade. So they pay Kaddish, the one son-of-a-whore not ashamed of his heritage, to eliminate the only physical piece of evidence linking them to their relatives.

But Kaddish winds up enmeshed in a desperate struggle to un-erase his son, who is forcibly “disappeared” by a group of mysterious government agents. Instead of erasing proof of the past, he now must fight to prove that his son did, in fact, exist in flesh and blood—an irony not lost on the reader. As failure piles upon failure, Kaddish and his wife, Lillian, find themselves increasingly alienated by their neighbors, their community, their country and each other.

Set in Buenos Aires in the mid to late 1970s, “The Ministry of Special Cases” tells the story of one of the countless families victimized by Argentina’s “Dirty War,” when a military government abducted, tortured and murdered thousands of students, activists and other innocent citizens. Nathan Englander’s long-awaited first novel follows the release of a highly acclaimed book of short stories, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” (2000). With his debut novel, Englander tackles subject matter that examines the flimsy dichotomy between fact and fiction, truth and deceit, history and myth.

Pato Poznan is, in essence, a typical 19-year-old college student. Eager for independence, he fights with his father incessantly and spends his evenings smoking pot and listening to records with his like-mindedly liberal friends. He is simultaneously rebellious and timid. While he privately rants against the perceived injustices committed by his father and his government, he is afraid to take real action against either one. But following a military coup that leads to the establishment of a repressive and genocidal junta, Pato’s government decides to take action against him.

When a gang of insouciant officials shows up at the Poznan apartment, they unceremoniously confiscate three books and one Pato. Just like that, the two distraught parents are without a son. Kaddish and Lillian have no idea where he has been taken, and everyone around seems bent on denying that he ever existed. 

The parents quickly embark on a mission to recover their son. They check almost every police station in Argentina and are repeatedly and rudely turned away. Eventually, they make their way to the Ministry of Special Cases, a governmental bureau that appears to function as a vacuum for complaints with no solution. When this too proves to be a dead end, the parents are forced to resort to less conventional methods. But the failures and disappointments only mount.

Following a cryptic conversation with a fisherman who claims to have extensive experience tossing sedated children from planes at the government’s behest, Kaddish becomes convinced that his son is dead. His wife refuses to accept this conclusion and insists on carrying on, without sleep, until her son is safely home. Torn between believing what he knows to be false and appeasing his adamant wife, Kaddish begins to unravel.

By this point, Kaddish is accustomed to failure. His choice of employment long ago made him an outcast to his son, the Jewish community and “respectable society.” His every attempt at heroics seems to go terribly awry. (He accidentally chops off the tip of Pato’s finger with a chisel, and he finagles a free nose job for his wife that comes out less than satisfactory.) His only source of consolation is his wife’s unconditional love, but as the outlook for their son’s plight becomes bleaker, that love proves to have conditions, after all.    

The themes and concepts behind Englander’s novel have been dragged out famously in a number of literary works. The idea of a militant dictatorship wiping out or altering the past, convincing masses to believe what is blatantly untrue and disappearing those who dare to question its authority is memorably illustrated in George Orwell’s “1984” and Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” among other books.

But Englander updates these ideas in a context that seems both more modern and more realistic. Although the compassionless police officers and government employees in the book seem impossibly inhuman and the atrocities committed against some characters seem unfathomably cruel, the reader must remember that this type of scenario was a hard reality for thousands of Argentine families—as well as other families of other ethnicities in countries and eras throughout the world. Historical events like the Holocaust and the Inquisition show all too clearly what kind of evils human beings are capable of exacting—and with an icy banality that sickens the stomach.

Although the book is set some 30 years in the past, it has loud relevance in a modern context. At a time when suspected terrorists can be detained without being charged and privacies can be infringed in the name of patriotism, Englander’s message rings like a warning bell to Americans. (The author lives in New York City.)

“While the government did what governments do (taking ownership of the present, laying out visions of the future), this one also reached back into the past, to change what was, to deny what had been,” Englander writes in the latter part of the novel. “And this was the junta’s great success—recognizing that to truly take control one must move back with the same fervor that one moves forward (infinity reaches both ways).” Taken alone, the passage could be interpreted to describe almost any government.

“The Ministry of Special Cases” takes place in a society sharply divided by class, religion, occupation, age and political leanings. That this is a global and timeless phenomenon is hinted at in the book. One of the toughest notions for Lillian to swallow is the idea that other mothers have suffered just as she has suffered, deprived of their children or their husbands or their fathers. When she meets a couple that claims that their son was abducted years earlier, Lillian responds not with empathy, but with incredulity. (Indeed, hundreds of forced disappearances occurred in Argentina even before the 1976 coup around which Englander’s novel is set.)

Stylistically, Englander is not a flashy or dazzling writer, but he is definitely skilled. The main characters are well developed, and, at times, the reader can associate with Kaddish’s frustration, Lillian’s despair and Pato’s teenage angst. The ending is deliberately unsatisfying, but this, perhaps, is the point. In a society where men, women and children are systematically scratched out of existence, nothing can ever be resolved. “The Ministry of Special Cases” reinforces social and political commentaries that great authors have been emphasizing for decades, if not centuries.