NATHAN ENGLANDER WRITES ABOUT ‘THE DIRTY WAR’
by Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio
Minnesota Public Radio, MN
/11/15/englander/
Nov 16 2007
Nathan Englander’s new book "The Ministry of Special Cases" is set
against Argentina’s ‘dirty war.’ It was the time in the late 1970s
when thousands of people disappeared — kidnapped and murdered by
the military junta. Englander says the book grew out of a trip to
Jerusalem.
St. Paul, Minn. – Nathan Englander grew up in a deeply religious Jewish
family in the U.S. Looking for a way to escape the strictures of that
life he moved to Jerusalem, where he met people from all over the
world. In particular he was fascinated by the Argentinian Jews he met.
"As a group, just unbelievably sweet, unbelievably sensitive and also
unbelievably hardened and closed at the same time," he says.
They had escaped the junta, and told tales of "the disappeared." But
Englander was also taken by how loyal they were to their homeland.
"It is touching to me this love of a place that, for want of a better
word, regularly betrays its citizens."
In time, after the junta fell, he visited and fell in love with
Argentina too. Englander was looking for a way to write a novel about
community, and it was a natural spot.
"The novel is set in Buenos Aires in 1976 at the start of the dirty
war," he says. "Obviously there were a lot of victims in that country
but in the way that I believe fiction is truer than truth, or allows
you to tell the bigger story through focusing it, I thought the best
way to tell this story was through one mother and one father and
one son."
Lillian and Kaddish are the parents, Pato the son. They are the
Posznans. They live a normal life until one day, as Englander reads,
the world changes.
"As the four men from the Navy threw a career man from the window,
he was thinking his last thoughts. A retired colonel, his uniform
covered in the medals from the military regime. All those decorations
were upended with him as the blood rushed to his head.
"A medal came loose and clanked against the street. A chest full of
honors and what good did it do him?
"I should have served in the Air Force," he thought. "And then I
would have wings."
The coup brings gradual change to the Poznan’s life. Lillian works
in an office. Pato is a college student.
And Kaddish? Well, Kaddish makes his money in a strange way.
He is hired by prominent people to climb into a certain Jewish cemetery
where men and women who worked as pimps and prostitutes were buried in
decades past. His employers are descendants of the dead, who want him
erase some embarrassing history by chiseling off the names. Englander
laughs that he he has spent the last 10 years writing two stories
that the many in Argentina don’t want to the world to hear.
"Which is the dirty war, you know, everyone has worked so hard to keep
that story from being known. ‘It’s over and it’s done.’ The people keep
it alive, but this thing was just quashed. And then the story of the
Jewish community which had this little problem, you know representative
same as the French and everybody else there and not generally known
as a Jewish business but they had their representative segment of the
white slavery population of pimps and prostitutes and the community
did an excellent job of keeping that story hidden for a hundred years."
Kaddish is viewed as a vandal and a pariah within the community,
but still makes good money for what he does.
In "The Ministry of Special cases" Kaddish and Pato butt heads,
particularly because Pato has some books Kaddish thinks the authorities
won’t like. They fight and exchange harsh words, just as the secret
police arrive and take Pato away. Englander describes his parents’
desperate search for their son and how people react to them.
Englander says he has traveled around the U.S. and Europe, and each
country has reacted positively. He’s awaiting the Spanish translation
though, and perhaps his biggest critics when the book is published
in Argentina. Englander is sure he will be dismissed by some as a
whippersnapper, as he puts it, but he hopes they will give it a chance.
"It’s another thing that I have been interested in, how we are
bequeathed historical memories," he says. "I am from new York and my
family generations before are from Boston. You know this idea that
the Holocaust is my cultural memory was given to me and educated into
me because I am Jewish. And I said, why wasn’t I given the Armenian
genocide. But after 10 years with this book it is passionate for
me personally. The dirty war, it’s just a terrible crime and I
wish the whole world knew about it and personally I hope they get
my intentions."