Customer Reviews

The Ministry of Special Cases (Vintage International)

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Set in the Argentina of 1976 - a dark and violent time of upheaval - "The Ministry of Special Cases" is about a family torn apart by a power-corrupted government. It centers primarily on the actions of Kaddish and Lillian Poznan after their teenaged son, Pato, is `disappeared' by mysterious officials one night, perhaps never to be seen again. Kaddish and Lillian are locked in a futile race against time, knowing that every day their son is missing the likelihood that he has not survived increases. But how can they penetrate the defenses of the government and the police to get information regarding a son whose existence is now denied? At best, Kaddish and Lillian are told that their son must have run away from them, and are advised to give up their search before making `needless' trouble. But the Poznans know the truth about Pato's disappearance - Kaddish was home when his son was escorted from their apartment by mysterious men, who also removed three of Pato's books that they had deemed inappropriate.

The search for their son leads Lillian to Argentina's Ministry of Special cases, where hundreds of people line up and fight for information about missing loved ones, and are frustrated by bureaucratic dead-ends. Worse than the government's unswerving apathy toward Kaddish and Lillian is the fearfully uncaring attitude that they find from general citizens they turn to for assistance. Everyone is too wrapped up in their own problems to care about the Poznan's plight - and much too afraid of losing their own family if they anger the government. Until their own son was taken from them Kaddish and Lillian themselves had been blind to the severity of the problem - Lillian is genuinely startled to find so many people waiting at the Ministry of Special Cases, and dismayed to hear from a couple that is finally giving up hope after two long years of no news.

The strength of Englander's story is that the Poznans are a believable family unit. They are not the utopian family of amateur fiction, but a realistic family burdened by animosity and failure and bitter disappointment. Kaddish is marked by his low birth - an `hijo de puta' who will never earn respect or dignity, and the spectacular failures of his numerous get-rich-quick schemes to overcome his status have put a great deal of strain on his marriage to Lillian, who had believed in his abilities as a young (naïve?) young woman. And Pato is your typical disgruntled teenager; he hates his parents, acts out, runs away to his friends' home, smokes pot, and refuses to listen to their sage advice that could have kept him safe. And yet the reader feels the strength of their familial bond thanks to Englander's prodigious talents as a writer. Despite their fighting, it feels devastating when the Poznans are torn apart.

But is "The Ministry of Special Cases" for everyone? No. Englander is a gifted writer, but his eccentricities will turn some readers off as unnecessary and annoying. As a fan of Nathan Englander's story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories, perhaps I was already primed for his style before picking this book up, but I enjoy his quirks and I have spoken to several other people who do too. For those who can appreciate them, "Ministry" is a one-of-a-kind treat and an amazing novel.
Grade: A-

Seldom has a novel commanded so many of my emotions. My heart felt like a piano on whose strings a master musician was playing both polkas and dirges. But most of all, Mr. Englander kept surprising me. I usually read mysteries to enjoy fictional surprises, but The Ministry of Special Cases provided many more surprises than any mystery I've read in recent years.

When I began reading the book, I had to stop and start over. I couldn't believe what I was reading. It's almost as though Hamlet started with the grave digger's scene.

How can I summarize this book? I'm not sure I can do so accurately, but I'll hit some of the right notes of I call this book Don Quixote at The Trial. In the process, Mr. Englander unerringly portrays a society that's failing because each person only wants to look out for himself or herself.

You will find yourself in Argentina during the beginning of the "dirty war" when many young people disappeared. What would it like to be a parent of such a young person? That's what you will graphically experience by reading The Ministry of Special Cases.

Kaddish Poznan was conceived through an accident between his prostitute mother and a customer. The rabbi granted Kaddish such an unusual name in hopes it would protect him. As the book evolves, you'll see that the name has indeed shaped his character as well as his actions. Many of the "respectable" Jews in Argentina at the time had forbearers who also engaged in illicit and illegal activities, while sporting colorful names such as Hezzi Two-Blades.

Kaddish has been looking for the big score all of his life, but hasn't found it. As the book opens, Kaddish is busy defacing a grave in the older part of the Jewish cemetery so that a connection to a dubious forbearer can be disguised. That's how Kaddish earns his cigarette money. His university student son, Pato, is a reluctant participant. Father and son are in continual conflict. Kaddish's wife, Lillian, supports the family by working hard for little pay in an insurance broker's office. Concerned about safety, she is soon out buying the strongest door she can locate.

I won't go into more of the story from there lest I give away important details, but you'll find the plot to be amazingly well constructed to open up unexpected doors to empathy and understanding as you identify with one or both of the parents and wonder what you would do to keep your youngster safe.

How can I summarize what I feel about the book? It's a masterpiece.

This book is profound in both its tragedy and humor. This book is one that will change the history of the novel. The way this book deals with mankind on the level of family, individual and part of the state is mesmerizing. Kaddish Pozen, his wife Lillian and there son Pato will be glued into your memory. This book is about mans struggle to overcome when one has already lost , what is most dear. This book is about when one should give up but can't.

This book travails the life of a father and mother who lose their son in a terrible buracracy and never know if they will find him. This is the novel of the nobilty of a man and a woman who do not do every thing right but do most things even their mistakes for the most nobel of reason. This book show the potential evil of governments and buracrats.

I picked up Ministry of Special Cases at 10 p.m., figuring I would plow through 20 pages before falling asleep. Captivated by its peculiar melancholy and its ability to maintain a precise balance between optimism and resignation, I didn't stop turning pages until I got to the last one.

If you choose books for their clever and detailed plots, Ministry will disappoint you. But if you revel in complex characters and writing that transports you to a particular time and place, then Ministry will suck you in and keep you mesmerized.

The book works on many levels. For starters, it evokes the horrors of Argentina in the post-Peron period. But it goes far beyond historical fiction, interweaving themes of love--among family members, co-workers, and even strangers-- with topics ranging from class differences to Jewish alienation to loss and futility. At its core, it's a novel about the absurdity of existence. Englander manages to squeeze an epic into a few hundred pages, with a style that is unembellished yet poignant.

My only quibble with the book is that Pato, the family son, functions mostly as a literary device, exemplified by the opening graveyard scene in which he is serving as a counterbalancing weight for Kaddish's gravestone defacement. That image recurs throughout the book, as Pato mirrors and reacts to his parents but does not emerge as a fully realized character himself. We feel his parents' anguish when he is disappeared, but we don't miss him as a person.

But such flaws are minor, and do nothing to diminish the lyricism and the humor, which manages to stay on the sober side of slapstick. Any author who can spin phrases like "the seam where the seedy underground was sewn to the seat of power" and "if everyone believes the same lie, isn't it, maybe, the truth?" is worth your time.

Ministry of Special Cases will crawl into your head and haunt your dreams--if you can sleep after you finish it.

It's difficult to believe this is a first novel. Indeed, Englander has written two books here, blending themes and forms in a setting alien to his native Long Island: the Jewish community in Argentina during the mid-1970s "Dirty War," when thousands of citizens, including many students, were "disappeared" by the authoritarian regime of Jorge Rafael Videla.

One novel--the first half--is a family drama featuring Kaddish Poznan, who lives a blithely contented life as an outcast from Buenos Aires's "respectable" Jewish society and who hires himself out to upper-crust families who want to expunge the evidence of their less-than-reputable ancestors. Kaddish, a somewhat endearing buffoon always on the cusp of becoming rich (or so he thinks), lives with his long-suffering wife, Lillian, who provides her family with a more reliable source of income by working in an insurance office, and a son, Paco, a university student embarrassed by his father's uncouthness.

Englander has most often been compared to I. B. Singer, and with reason: Kaddish would feel right at home in a Polish shtetl or in an Upper West Side diner, and the familial strife is torn right from the pages of "The Family Moskat." Yet the conflict between father and son couldn't possibly lead more suddenly and seamlessly from what David Roskies has called the "demonic realism" of a Singer tale to the Kafkaesque terror in the second half of the book. Kaddish and Lillian are forced from the parochialism of their neighborhood into the claustrophobic hallways of a malicious bureaucracy and the dark-lit alleys of a frightened city. The familial nightmare rends Kaddish and Lillian, who had always lived in a fragile harmony and who choose separate paths to determine their son's fate.

There are moments and scenes where the Argentinean setting feels researched rather than experienced--Englander's South America seems never that far away from New York--but the universality of this family's love and grief ultimately transcends hemispheres. But what's truly noteworthy is the author's ability to balance horror and humor, tragedy and comedy, realism and fabulism. While the government is erasing its citizens and respectable citizens are erasing their pasts, Kaddish and Lillian are erasing their noses in a comic set piece on plastic surgery that may turn out to be the final word in fiction on nose jobs. And that's ultimately what the novel is about: the often foolish, occasionally evil, but never successful desire to obliterate the past.

In the late 1970s, Argentina's Videla 'junta' carried out a campaign of violence against its population, a "National Reorganization Process" comprised of the illegal arrest, torture, killing or forced disappearance of thousands of people, primarily trade unionists, students and activists.

Set during this turbulent time, Nathan Englander's first novel focuses on a poor Jewish couple, Kaddish and Lillian Pozan whose only son, Pato, becomes one of the approximately 30,000 people that were lost during this time.

A novel about community, identity and injustice, The Ministry of Special Cases illuminates not only a dark period in Argentina's history, but also that of its Jewish population. Embarrassed by their members who were pimps and prostitutes, the larger Jewish community refused to allow them to be buried in the community graveyard, requiring that they be separated by a wall and thus able to be ignored by "good people."

Decades later, their children want to protect their "good name" and they hire Kaddish, the invisible Jew, to remove their ancestors from public record. As The Ministry of Special Cases opens, Kaddish is found chiseling away at a gravestone in a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Ares.

The juxtaposition of the secret "Jewish Reorganization," with the turbulent family dynamics of the Pozans, the self-policing of identity by the Argentinean population, and the broader political reorganization, makes for a complex novel about community, identity and injustice. Like the Jews who hire him, Kaddish now finds himself eliminating Pato's history as a student and freethinker, by destroying his books.

Kaddish, a man who carves his own path in life, is often in conflict with his wife and son who see him as someone who can never get anything right. Lillian is exasperated by his futile efforts to make a living and the need to constantly save him while his son refuses to accept him. It is only when his son becomes 'disappeared' that Kaddish finally fulfills his potential, becoming the man Lillian had seen glimpses of when they dated. The irony for Lillian is that in losing her future, she gains a full partner in their marriage.

Armchair Interviews says: Strong characters, strong story.

Englander's book is truly an amazing example of the author's superb writing abilities. It compares very favorably with his first book of short stories, but here, Englander gets into serious depth of character development and how they deal with bad situations way beyond their ability to control.

The book describes a period during the dictatorship of Argentina and the discrimination experienced by Jewish Argentinians during the reign of the dictatorship in the country at the middle and end of the 20th century. The book focuses on not just discrimination against Jews, but governmentally sanctioned discrimination against youth and liberal or different political and social ideas and ideals. The book is the story of one very unusual Jew, who realized that an old and closed Jewish cemetary could in fact be of danger to those still living. Many decades ago, the business of prostitution in Buenos Ares was a Jewish monopoly, no longer true, but at a time it was. Those people had their own cemetary and it occured to Kadish, the protagonist, that people would pay to have their last names removed from those tombstones. So, he started a business removing the names off people's tombstones to protect those still living.

While the story centers around the Jewish element of the social climate, Englander is careful to point out that the discrimination was not just against Jews, but against Youth and Thought. The police randomly rounded up groups of youths and then either incarcerated them, released them or killed them. The actions of the police were related to power and control.

In addition, Englander paints a wonderful picture of the legal system and its absurdity. In fact, the book is reminiscent of "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, in that no matter what is done, there seems to be no end or ability to seek legal relief or redress. The system seems to be designed to specifically frustrate and delay the attempts of any individual trying to get information on any youth taken away by the police.

In totality, the book is a truly wonderful picture of life in a totalitarian dictatorship, where those who are given the power to enforce the law, abuse this duty to the maximum extent. Absolute power corrupts absolutely; as illustrated so beautifully and graphically by Englander in this book.

The book is truly powerful and beautifully written. All the author's unique talents have been brought to bare in this fabulous work. The book is recommended to all adults who have interest in seeing how things become skewed horribly in situations where there is no check and balance on power, and where people find it amusing and fun to inflict pain, anguish and even death randomly on people, purely because they CAN! It is a fast reading book and highly recommended for its beautiful writing and its clarity of intent.

When a young author produces a short story collection as lavishly praised as FOR THE RELIEF OF UNBEARABLE URGES, it's understandable that expectations for his first novel will be high. But when the author takes eight years to produce that novel, the weight of those expectations can be crushing. Happily, readers of Nathan Englander's THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES won't be disappointed with this rich and vividly imagined work.

Englander's novel is set in Buenos Aires in 1976, the first year of Argentina's "Dirty War," which began after a military coup ousted Juan Peron's widow, Isabel. Kaddish Poznan and his wife Lillian view the militarization of their city with increasing unease. Their 19-year-old son, Pato, is a college student who expresses his resentment of the political crackdown by refusing to carry his identity card, but exhibits more in the way of typical teenage rebelliousness than political radicalism.

At first, the military's encroachment on civil liberties has little effect on the Poznans' daily lives. Kaddish continues to pursue his bizarre vocation, removing the names from gravestones in the cemetery of the Society of the Benevolent Self --- the Jewish burial ground that houses the remains of the lower classes of Argentine Jewish society, the social strata from which Kaddish, himself the son of a prostitute, comes. One of Kaddish's clients, a prominent but cash-strapped plastic surgeon, persuades him to accept two free nose jobs in exchange for such an assignment, with transforming consequences for Kaddish and disastrous ones for Lillian.

Both Lillian and Kaddish fear for Pato's safety, but they exhibit their concern in oddly different ways. Lillian spends a relative fortune on the installation of a steel door in their working class apartment, while Kaddish takes it upon himself to burn what he considers to be some of Pato's more questionable books. In the end, neither measure succeeds, as the secret police raid the Poznans' apartment and haul Pato away, converting him into one of the thousands of "disappeared" whose absence haunts this story.

When Pato is seized, Lillian becomes obsessed with finding him. In the process she's enmeshed in the military junta's bizarre and almost comical bureaucracy. She spends long days in a world that owes an obvious debt to Kafka and Orwell, shuttling between the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Special Cases, a strange agency that seems to have as much to do with helping citizens make arrangements to flee the country as it does with efforts to find the "disappeared." Eventually, Lillian's search becomes a fulltime occupation, her emotions cycling from despair to hope and back again.

From the beginning, Lillian's determination to find her son is counterbalanced by Kaddish's rising pessimism about the prospect he will ever return. Kaddish, feeling himself inadequate to the task when he compares his activity to Lillian's, combs the underbelly of Buenos Aires society, searching for clues. Eventually, he encounters a character known as "the navigator," who describes in harrowing detail one method for disposing of the prisoners and convinces Kaddish that all hope is lost.

Lillian and Kaddish turn finally to the Jewish community for help. At first, Lillian is optimistic that the leader of the United Jewish Congregations of Argentina, the organization representing respectable Jewish society, will assist her, but in a scene of profound disillusionment, it becomes clear that her pleas for aid are fruitless. Kaddish consults an elderly rabbi, hoping he will sanction the father's belief that Pato is dead and thereby permit the family to observe the Jewish mourning rituals. Kaddish's ultimate act to raise the money that may purchase Pato's freedom is stunning in its audacity and heartbreaking in its execution.

In THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES Englander has skillfully interwoven vibrant elements of family and political drama that is at times surreal but is no less poignant for being so. He dwells on the theme of what it means to be Jewish in a non-Jewish world: Kaddish's dubious ancestry, his work erasing Jewish names from memory, even the plastic surgeries he and Lillian undergo all echo this theme. Thankfully, he offers no glib answers to the weighty questions he poses and his admirable willingness to wrestle with them is consistent with much that is valued in the Jewish tradition.

One can only hope it won't be another eight years decade before Englander produces his next work. His voice is too singular, passionate and compelling to remain silent that long.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

For many of us the idea of living in a country that is so corrupt that the government could easily snatch your child without any repercussions is unfathomable. Unfortunately, for those living in Argentina during the years of the Dirty War this was an everyday fear, which is the subject of Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases.

What made this book fantastic:
- Englander writes beautifully; he captures fear, hope, anger and heartbreak in each and every character
- This is not a political book; the politics at the forefront of the Dirty War serve to bring years of family, cultural and identity issues to the surface, forcing the Poznan's to deal with the strengths and weaknesses of the bonds that hold their family together
- On the other hand, when politics is mentioned it is done in such a way as to make you curious to learn more (I found myself doing extra research to gain a better understanding of what was happening in Buenos Aires during this time)
- The plot and characters are realistic; it's not a fairy tale

If you're being nit-picky you may have issues with:
- The fact that everything isn't neatly tied up with a pretty red bow at the end; Englander is being brutally honest about this time period
- You may be slightly confused about the role of the Jewish community in Argentina (again, doing a quick internet search will help)
- Feeling frustrated for information or progress in regards to the plot. This frustration is what you're supposed to be feeling, though. Take your frustration, multiply it by a thousand and you'll only begin understanding what Kaddish and Lillian are feeling about not easily finding their missing son.

This is a really wonderful novel that will make you appreciate so many things about your life and your family.

I am just about to finish this novel and I can't put it down. It builds in intensity as a desperate Aregentinian jewish couple tries to find their "disappeared" son. The characters here are flawlessly drawn, the story line strong, the atmosphere created of oppression, doom and gallows humor superb. One of the best novels I have read on the repressive era of Argentina in the 70s. Don't miss it!