The Ministry of Special Cases.

Englander, Nathan (author).

Related Features

The years between the 1999 appearance of Englander’s highly applauded first work of fiction, the short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and the release of his first novel have apparently gone to good stead. This is a staggeringly mature work, gracefully and knowledgeably set in a milieu far from the author’s native New York. The time is the mid-1970s, and the place is Argentina. The widow of Juan Perón (Isabella, that is, not his 1940s wife, Eva) has just been given the boot from the presidential office by the military, which has inaugurated an internal terrorist program that came to be known as the dirty war. Kaddish Pozman, a Jewish resident of Buenos Aires, works for hire as a midnight eraser of names from tombstones of Jews whose living families do not want any connection to their dear departed’s past dubious behavior, now that an uncertain regime governs the land. Of course, one of the major characteristics of the military government is its widespread program of making people who just might be revolutionaries or insurrectionaries or even free thinkers disappear into the regime’s system of detention centers, and Pozman’s son becomes one such desaparecido. The bulk of this overwhelming novel, then, is Pozman’s and his wife’s attempt to locate their missing son. Four p’s best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal.