// literary & arts //
Fall 2007
What's in a Name?
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The Ministry of Special Cases
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Today, a nose job costs around four thousand dollars. Many consider this a fair price for eliminating an embarrassing family nose. In Nathan Englander's novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, though, erasing the past is paid for with a different currency.
Kaddish Poznan earns his living by erasing names from the gravestones of former members of a Jewish prostitution ring in Buenos Aries. He is not vandalizing, but providing a valuable service. Under the volatile government in Argentina, mediocrity is safety. Having a pimp in the family tree makes blending in more difficult, so Poznan erases the evidence and provides precious anonymity to his clients.
When a talented and broke plastic surgeon hires Poznan to erase the name of his grandfather, Pinkus "Toothless" Mazursky, but is unable to pay for the job in cash, he offers Poznan's family nose jobs as payment. In exchange for erasing the doctor's past, the Poznans are rid of the most immediately visible element tying them to their own background—their unmistakably Jewish noses. But the bargain doesn't work out as planned for anyone. Kaddish's new nose doesn't change his pariah status in the Jewish community, an incompetent student botches his wife Lillian's surgery, and Dr. Mazursky finds new ways to ruin his own name. Nobody escapes the disaster; Kaddish cuts off part of his son Pato's finger while they are working on the Mazursky grave. Mishaps like these are business as usual in The Ministry of Special Cases.
Englander shows us through the Poznan family that that trading away one's past is never as simple as a quick nip-tuck. Through the Poznans, Englander questions why and when Jews cling to their disastrous and often painful past. The Poznans' Jewish community was once divided in two halves: the widely respected "United Jewish Congregations of Argentina," and the "Society of the Benevolent Self," which, in addition to being a synagogue, happened to function as a prostitution ring. In keeping with the best Jewish tradition of rivaling local synagogues, their feud escalated to the point that they erected a wall to divide their two cemeteries. The Society of the Benevolent Self was eventually exposed and dismantled. Now, faced with a dangerous and unpredictable government, most of the descendents of Society members are struggling to erase that chapter of their past and establish spotless reputations.
Only Kaddish Poznan, grandson of a member of the prostitution-tainted "Society of the Benevolent Self," clings proudly to the history he does have. Poznan, who cannot trace his lineage back past his mother, sees his current role of grave mutilator as a temporary step on the way to a bright future. Perhaps precisely because he has lived life bearing so little personal history, he cannot understand why other descendents of the Society of the Benevolent Self find their past an obstacle to social and economic success.
Englander delves deeply into the balance between memories we struggle to repress and the ones we long to recover. Even Kaddish's name carries heavy symbolic weight. In Jewish liturgy, the kaddish is the prayer recited in memory of the dead. In using this name, Englander suggests that the past is kept alive through the individuals who remember it. But he complicates the issue by having Kaddish earn his living by destroying memorials. With one name, Englander raises important questions—can one man alone carry the memory of an entire community? Can the past be remembered without a physical memorial? The name Kaddish gives his son, on the other hand—"Pato"—is not obviously meaningful. Does Kaddish feel tied only to his ancestors and not to his descendants?
Kaddish, along with his wife Lillian, is a community outcast exactly because he exhibits pride in his heritage. To the other Jews of Buenos Aires, the marriage between Kaddish and Lillian, daughter of respectable members of the United Jewish Congregations, is seen as the most profane intermarriage. Their only child, Pato, is a predictably rebellious university student whose main interests are Che Guevara, Pink Floyd, and arguing with his father. The Poznans' life is a comfortable and lonely one—so isolated that they are undisturbed by the coup that overthrows their national government. They are content, that is, until they are jerked into Argentina's political reality when four men in suits appear and inexplicably take Pato away.
From this point, the rest of the novel is taken up by Kaddish and Lillian's struggle to recover their son from the turmoil of Argentina's Dirty War, the late-1970s and early-1980s period characterized by widespread state-sponsored violence. Kaddish, the man who makes a living by destroying graves, is now trying to restore his son's erased name. Over many attempts to locate Pato, Kaddish and Lillian reach out to every possible connection, tapping Jewish and Argentinean contacts, but discover that after a lifetime of living on the fringes of the two groups, there is no one willing to help them. The Poznans become infuriated as they realize that they are the only people willing to acknowledge that the past exists at all. Some people feel threatened by the government, others are still too angry about personal tensions in the Jewish community, but no one has room in their personal agenda for the Poznans' struggle. The Poznans' behavior, of course, is no less selfish than their neighbors'.
Englander seems to tell us that that beneath the veneer of unity forced onto the nation by authoritarian regimes, society actually becomes characterized by an individualist, every man for himself, mentality.
The government keeps Pato Poznan hidden through its bureaucracy, the weapon of a government with secrets to bury under layers of paper. The pinnacle of that bureaucracy is the Ministry of Special Cases, the government bureau that gives the book its title, and exists for the sake of demoralizing the already-desperate people who visit it. Hundreds of people wait on line outside the ministry, hoping for the privilege of being allowed into the waiting room. The image of distraught parents and spouses wrestling with each other instead of banding together demonstrates the government's success. The Poznans, though, meet not only unhelpful bureaucracy but actively malicious opposition at every turn. Even when Lillian and Kaddish attempt to blackmail a powerful general and his wife, they are defeated by the cold, institutional sheen of the couple.
This same bureaucracy that drives the plot is one of the main flaws of The Ministry of Special Cases. Kaddish and Lillian discover that it is impossible to reclaim a lost child when nobody will acknowledge that he exists, but Englander fails to bring readers close enough to the couple to elicit our empathy. Of course, Englander intentionally puts his protagonists, and by extension, his readers, in the torturous position of seemingly endless waiting. However, like the impatience that grows during an interminable stay in a waiting room, reading the novel constantly forces you to ask whether any successful conclusion could be worthwhile.
Englander's reader is forced to feel that the book's protagonists are not interesting enough to hold their own against a dull army of bureaucrats. Kaddish, despite his intriguing background and surprising career choice, is too ineffectual and pathetic to inspire much compassion, and Lillian neatly portrays the stereotypical concerned Jewish mother. The most compelling characters in the novel are the quickly-sketched peripheral characters. When the Poznans appeal to the general and his wife, for example, the general's wife is so perfectly evil that readers can feel the warmth leave a room when she enters. Her palpable iciness is the absolute inverse of Lillian's overprotective Jewish mothering instincts. Against this pair, Kaddish and Lillian resemble a viable family unit struggling for something real—the preservation of their chosen identity, inextricably tied to their Jewishness, in the face of the mounting indifference. But, most of the time, Lillian and Kaddish are not provided with the opposition they need. Against the underwhelming two-dimensional nemesis of paperwork, the Poznans fall flat. If Kaddish and Lillian spent more time struggling against true villains like the general's wife and less time sitting in police station lobbies, perhaps the novel would have thrived.
Englander's first work, the critically acclaimed collection of short stories For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, is full of these gripping characters. It seems that the short story format gives Englander the ability to create lifelike characters in unique situations without allowing him to get bogged down by repetitive themes. His best stories utilize the opposition between stagnant and moving objects—a stubborn person confronted with an evolving society or a maturing individual stuck in one place. The collection's most powerful story, "The Twenty-Seventh Man," is also a story about a small group facing an oppressive government—in this case, twenty-seven Jewish authors have been selected for execution by Stalin's government. As in The Ministry of Special Cases, the enemy in this story is the absent totalitarian government rather than any individual soldier. The story powerfully contrasts the animated creativity and intellectual life of the authors with the dull, unintelligent regime. The setting becomes a character unto itself. In "The Twenty-Seventh Man," the 27 authors know who they are and must now reconcile their identities with shifting realities. Even as they die, these men are Jews, artists, and Russians. Englander's most beautiful characters are his strongest ones.
In The Ministry of Special Cases, Englander forgets the successful tactics he employed in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and makes his background the center of his story, letting his characters become mere accessories. At first, this is a compelling technique as he successfully conveys the mood in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War. But the few exceptional characters, such as the general's wife, are so outstanding that one wonders what this novel could have been if it were full of characters like her.
The story of the Poznans' nose jobs similarly implies that Englander had the right idea, but came up just short. The haggling between Dr. Mazursky and Kaddish over the value of grave defacement in terms of nose jobs would make a great short story of its own. Yet its richness is nearly forgotten when the whole of Englander's book is considered.
Ultimately, though, his plastic surgery teaches Kaddish that he cannot change his family's place in society by changing the contours of their faces. Beginning with Pato's disappearance, Englander tells Kaddish and his readers that the most sweeping changes often come about through non-elective procedures.
Kaddish Poznan earns his living by erasing names from the gravestones of former members of a Jewish prostitution ring in Buenos Aries. He is not vandalizing, but providing a valuable service. Under the volatile government in Argentina, mediocrity is safety. Having a pimp in the family tree makes blending in more difficult, so Poznan erases the evidence and provides precious anonymity to his clients.
When a talented and broke plastic surgeon hires Poznan to erase the name of his grandfather, Pinkus "Toothless" Mazursky, but is unable to pay for the job in cash, he offers Poznan's family nose jobs as payment. In exchange for erasing the doctor's past, the Poznans are rid of the most immediately visible element tying them to their own background—their unmistakably Jewish noses. But the bargain doesn't work out as planned for anyone. Kaddish's new nose doesn't change his pariah status in the Jewish community, an incompetent student botches his wife Lillian's surgery, and Dr. Mazursky finds new ways to ruin his own name. Nobody escapes the disaster; Kaddish cuts off part of his son Pato's finger while they are working on the Mazursky grave. Mishaps like these are business as usual in The Ministry of Special Cases.
Englander shows us through the Poznan family that that trading away one's past is never as simple as a quick nip-tuck. Through the Poznans, Englander questions why and when Jews cling to their disastrous and often painful past. The Poznans' Jewish community was once divided in two halves: the widely respected "United Jewish Congregations of Argentina," and the "Society of the Benevolent Self," which, in addition to being a synagogue, happened to function as a prostitution ring. In keeping with the best Jewish tradition of rivaling local synagogues, their feud escalated to the point that they erected a wall to divide their two cemeteries. The Society of the Benevolent Self was eventually exposed and dismantled. Now, faced with a dangerous and unpredictable government, most of the descendents of Society members are struggling to erase that chapter of their past and establish spotless reputations.
Only Kaddish Poznan, grandson of a member of the prostitution-tainted "Society of the Benevolent Self," clings proudly to the history he does have. Poznan, who cannot trace his lineage back past his mother, sees his current role of grave mutilator as a temporary step on the way to a bright future. Perhaps precisely because he has lived life bearing so little personal history, he cannot understand why other descendents of the Society of the Benevolent Self find their past an obstacle to social and economic success.
Englander delves deeply into the balance between memories we struggle to repress and the ones we long to recover. Even Kaddish's name carries heavy symbolic weight. In Jewish liturgy, the kaddish is the prayer recited in memory of the dead. In using this name, Englander suggests that the past is kept alive through the individuals who remember it. But he complicates the issue by having Kaddish earn his living by destroying memorials. With one name, Englander raises important questions—can one man alone carry the memory of an entire community? Can the past be remembered without a physical memorial? The name Kaddish gives his son, on the other hand—"Pato"—is not obviously meaningful. Does Kaddish feel tied only to his ancestors and not to his descendants?
Kaddish, along with his wife Lillian, is a community outcast exactly because he exhibits pride in his heritage. To the other Jews of Buenos Aires, the marriage between Kaddish and Lillian, daughter of respectable members of the United Jewish Congregations, is seen as the most profane intermarriage. Their only child, Pato, is a predictably rebellious university student whose main interests are Che Guevara, Pink Floyd, and arguing with his father. The Poznans' life is a comfortable and lonely one—so isolated that they are undisturbed by the coup that overthrows their national government. They are content, that is, until they are jerked into Argentina's political reality when four men in suits appear and inexplicably take Pato away.
From this point, the rest of the novel is taken up by Kaddish and Lillian's struggle to recover their son from the turmoil of Argentina's Dirty War, the late-1970s and early-1980s period characterized by widespread state-sponsored violence. Kaddish, the man who makes a living by destroying graves, is now trying to restore his son's erased name. Over many attempts to locate Pato, Kaddish and Lillian reach out to every possible connection, tapping Jewish and Argentinean contacts, but discover that after a lifetime of living on the fringes of the two groups, there is no one willing to help them. The Poznans become infuriated as they realize that they are the only people willing to acknowledge that the past exists at all. Some people feel threatened by the government, others are still too angry about personal tensions in the Jewish community, but no one has room in their personal agenda for the Poznans' struggle. The Poznans' behavior, of course, is no less selfish than their neighbors'.
Englander seems to tell us that that beneath the veneer of unity forced onto the nation by authoritarian regimes, society actually becomes characterized by an individualist, every man for himself, mentality.
The government keeps Pato Poznan hidden through its bureaucracy, the weapon of a government with secrets to bury under layers of paper. The pinnacle of that bureaucracy is the Ministry of Special Cases, the government bureau that gives the book its title, and exists for the sake of demoralizing the already-desperate people who visit it. Hundreds of people wait on line outside the ministry, hoping for the privilege of being allowed into the waiting room. The image of distraught parents and spouses wrestling with each other instead of banding together demonstrates the government's success. The Poznans, though, meet not only unhelpful bureaucracy but actively malicious opposition at every turn. Even when Lillian and Kaddish attempt to blackmail a powerful general and his wife, they are defeated by the cold, institutional sheen of the couple.
This same bureaucracy that drives the plot is one of the main flaws of The Ministry of Special Cases. Kaddish and Lillian discover that it is impossible to reclaim a lost child when nobody will acknowledge that he exists, but Englander fails to bring readers close enough to the couple to elicit our empathy. Of course, Englander intentionally puts his protagonists, and by extension, his readers, in the torturous position of seemingly endless waiting. However, like the impatience that grows during an interminable stay in a waiting room, reading the novel constantly forces you to ask whether any successful conclusion could be worthwhile.
Englander's reader is forced to feel that the book's protagonists are not interesting enough to hold their own against a dull army of bureaucrats. Kaddish, despite his intriguing background and surprising career choice, is too ineffectual and pathetic to inspire much compassion, and Lillian neatly portrays the stereotypical concerned Jewish mother. The most compelling characters in the novel are the quickly-sketched peripheral characters. When the Poznans appeal to the general and his wife, for example, the general's wife is so perfectly evil that readers can feel the warmth leave a room when she enters. Her palpable iciness is the absolute inverse of Lillian's overprotective Jewish mothering instincts. Against this pair, Kaddish and Lillian resemble a viable family unit struggling for something real—the preservation of their chosen identity, inextricably tied to their Jewishness, in the face of the mounting indifference. But, most of the time, Lillian and Kaddish are not provided with the opposition they need. Against the underwhelming two-dimensional nemesis of paperwork, the Poznans fall flat. If Kaddish and Lillian spent more time struggling against true villains like the general's wife and less time sitting in police station lobbies, perhaps the novel would have thrived.
Englander's first work, the critically acclaimed collection of short stories For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, is full of these gripping characters. It seems that the short story format gives Englander the ability to create lifelike characters in unique situations without allowing him to get bogged down by repetitive themes. His best stories utilize the opposition between stagnant and moving objects—a stubborn person confronted with an evolving society or a maturing individual stuck in one place. The collection's most powerful story, "The Twenty-Seventh Man," is also a story about a small group facing an oppressive government—in this case, twenty-seven Jewish authors have been selected for execution by Stalin's government. As in The Ministry of Special Cases, the enemy in this story is the absent totalitarian government rather than any individual soldier. The story powerfully contrasts the animated creativity and intellectual life of the authors with the dull, unintelligent regime. The setting becomes a character unto itself. In "The Twenty-Seventh Man," the 27 authors know who they are and must now reconcile their identities with shifting realities. Even as they die, these men are Jews, artists, and Russians. Englander's most beautiful characters are his strongest ones.
In The Ministry of Special Cases, Englander forgets the successful tactics he employed in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and makes his background the center of his story, letting his characters become mere accessories. At first, this is a compelling technique as he successfully conveys the mood in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War. But the few exceptional characters, such as the general's wife, are so outstanding that one wonders what this novel could have been if it were full of characters like her.
The story of the Poznans' nose jobs similarly implies that Englander had the right idea, but came up just short. The haggling between Dr. Mazursky and Kaddish over the value of grave defacement in terms of nose jobs would make a great short story of its own. Yet its richness is nearly forgotten when the whole of Englander's book is considered.
Ultimately, though, his plastic surgery teaches Kaddish that he cannot change his family's place in society by changing the contours of their faces. Beginning with Pato's disappearance, Englander tells Kaddish and his readers that the most sweeping changes often come about through non-elective procedures.
//Shifra Goldenberg is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in anthropology. She plans on keeping her nose the way it is.