June 6, 2007
Nathan Englander struggles with identity
Untangling the ironies in Nathan Englander’s latest novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases
The lead character earns his living by chipping names off of tombstones belonging to Jewish pimps and whores whose ancestors wish to be spared the embarrassment.
This man, whose own name is Kaddish (more on that in a moment), practices his unusual occupation in an equally unsettling environment: the Argentine military junta of the late 1970s and early 1980s in which more than 30,000 people were “disappeared” by the government.
In the second half of the book, Kaddish embraces the full meaning his name when his son becomes one of the disappeared. But, as much as Kaddish wants to mourn, he cannot because his son’s body has never been found. At one point, the government releases the wrong prisoner in response to the family’s habeas petition. The father wants to mourn so badly he even steals a set of bones belonging to an Argentine general's family. But, this last-ditch effort to produce a funeral fizzles when Kaddish's wife recognizes that the bones he presents to her are not their son's.
So, we have a novel in which identities are altered — or trying to be altered — for individuals, for families, for the living, for the dead and even for a nation.
All of this from an author who left the Orthodox Judaism of his youth to become a secular literary writer whose characters cannot shake their Jewish roots. Are readers witnessing the identity crisis going on inside Englander’s head?
I’m not sure if that’s what Englander built with this novel but it feels close.
The novel’s voice is reserved, well paced and yet, comical. But, as other reviews have noted, this book has a slight problem with focus. It jumbles the story of Kaddish's family, which dominates the first half of the book, with the larger Argentine crisis, which comes into the foreground in the second half.
That said, I agree with the praise of Englander's work: many view him as the next Malamud or Isaac Bashevis Singer. Those are lofty comparisons but Englander is only 37 so I’m sure there will be a lot more of him to come.
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