The Ministry of Special Cases By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2007, $25, pp. 352

Nathan Englander, Back from the Land of the Disappeared

In 1999, Nathan Englander burst into print with a collection of short stories called For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Still in his 20s, he was immediately hailed as a wunderkind and the literary heir of a pantheon of writers, including Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Cheever and Kafka. One of his early magazine editors giddily described Englander as “Isaac Bashevis Singer on crack.”

Even his striking good looks, crowned by a tumbling thatch of dark curls, were commented on in the press. The influences on his work (if not on his appearance) were apparent and graciously acknowledged, but his prose and his worldview were original and remarkably mature. The nine stories, rooted mainly in the Orthodox Jewish world in which the writer was raised, careened between hilarity and heartbreak, sending the endearingly foolish Wise Men of Chelm up in chimney smoke and allowing a spontaneous conversion to Judaism to take place in the back seat of a New York City taxicab.

Such an auspicious debut led, of course, to even greater expectations, and the bar was set perilously high for Englander’s second book. There was also much speculation about the man himself, who’d abandoned Orthodox ritual, trimmed his famous curls, practiced yoga and continued to write. Now, eight years later, Englander is back with his first novel, and it’s a beauty. The Ministry of Special Cases takes place in Argentina in 1976, during the Dirty War, when thousands of people—children and pregnant women notably among them—were turned into desaparecidos, the Disappeared, by a corrupt and stealthy military government. Englander spent time in Argentina, and he credits numerous writings on that period in the country’s history as part of his research. But, as in his collection of stories, there are echoes and shadows of the Third Reich and other oppressive regimes in his novel. His theme is the national horror rendered by the greed for totalitarian power, but the heart of the story is in his characters’ individual suffering.

Englander’s fallible hero, Kaddish Poznan, “the only Jew proud to be a son of a whore,” is self-employed in a business involving the dead but not via prayer as his name might imply. He’s paid, sometimes in cash and sometimes in barter, by respected but nervous members of the Jewish community in Buenos Aires to destroy the names on the gravestones of relatives buried on the “wrong” side of the synagogue cemetery wall. “There was terror from all quarters and murder on the rise. It was no time to stand out, not for Gentile or Jew. And the Jews, almost to a person, felt that being Jewish was already plenty different enough.” So Kaddish hacks away the colorful, chiseled-in names of the deceased, disgraced Jewish pimps and prostitutes, like Hezzi Two-Blades and Bryna the Vagina. This is a typically dark Englander joke, in which the victims try to ward off or preempt the enemy’s strike by “disappearing” evidence of themselves, along with any desecrating graffiti like the scrawled swastikas left by others. These Jews don’t want to make trouble, and they even rid themselves of ancestral embarrassments, but trouble finds them nevertheless.

Kaddish’s wife Lillian disapproves of his clandestine work and tells him, in her proclamatory style, “Truth can be denied, but it can’t be undone.” But Kaddish labors discreetly at night beside his reluctant 19-year-old son. Pato, a college student struggling against an increasingly tyrannical academic environment and with the last vestiges of his own rebellious adolescence. Pato would rather be almost anywhere else than the second-class graveyard of the Benevolent Self. In true Freudian form, he’s compelled to separate from his parents, who are equally compelled, in such uneasy times, to keep a protective eye on their only child.

Despite a somewhat absurdist style and with a few overly broad strokes, Englander draws the reader into the family plight with his own protectiveness and playful sympathy. Father and son love each other, but they bicker and trade insults as a way of communicating. Pato calls Kaddish a fascist (to which he blithely replies, “Good for me”), and Kaddish amputates the tip of Pato’s finger in a bizarre, work-related accident. One night the pair come across the body of another young man at the cemetery, recently slain and dumped aboveground. Pato sees the corpse as an innocent kid, like himself, killed by the police for no reason; Kaddish suggests the government is just “cleaning up” the rebels. In any event they leave the incident unreported, rather than volunteer themselves as suspects.

Tensions on the job and in the general atmosphere inevitably carry over into the household, but Kaddish thinks of his life as reasonably happy. He has high hopes for his difficult son’s future. And he delights uxoriously in Lillian, an insurance agent who married beneath her social station, assuring her disappointed father that she’d chosen Kaddish for the man he would someday become.

As more citizens vanish and public anxiety escalates, each of the Poznans responds in a distinct way. Lillian buys a tamper-proof steel door to keep invaders out and her family safe; Kaddish continues with his usual tactics of denial, though he burns some of Pato’s “subversive” books as yet another way of erasing or avoiding the truth. And Pato wears his youthful defiance as a kind of all-purpose armor. He hangs out at his friend Rafa’s fatherless house, rather than in what he regards as the police state at home, and they and other students smoke joints and congregate at concerts, where the real police are known to make sudden, random arrests. The novel moves inexorably, but with excruciating suspense, to the night Pato is taken, miraculously returned, then taken again, this time without a trace.

Englander has said of writing this book, “I became obsessed with the almost quantum-mechanical evil that is a by-product of disappearing people.” Kaddish’s obsession is less analytical: He just wants to find his son. His search for Pato becomes his odyssey, his opportunity to morph into the mensch that Lillian promised her father he’d eventually become. There is an almost surreal quality to his desperate mission and to the people he and Lillian turn to for help: Dr. Mazursky, the plastic surgeon who trades a pair of nose jobs for Kaddish’s work on his family’s graves; the general and his heartless wife who become the sudden parents of someone else’s disappeared infant; the priest who promises results he can’t or won’t deliver; neighbors who refuse to acknowledge knowing anything, as if the Disappeared are simultaneously removed from the living world and from memory; and the bureaucrats at the Ministry for Special Cases—that Kafkaesque place of last resort—who hand out numbers that are never called.

Then there’s a payoff. Dr. Mazursky refers Kaddish to a former navy navigator named Victor Wollensky who matter-of-factly describes how he takes the kidnapped and drugged young people up in a plane and then tosses them down into the river and to their deaths. Kaddish interrogates him about the possibility of even a single child surviving the drop. “What if one were to hit right and hit awake? What if one were to land in the cold water and land awake and swim away?”

“Wake and fly is what is needed,” the navigator tells him.

Kaddish goes home and begins to follow the Jewish rituals of mourning. He covers the bathroom mirror with a sheet, rends the fabric of his jacket’s lapel, and, with an uncertain memory of ancient practice, ashes his cigarette onto his head.

But Lillian is appalled by his acceptance of such unspeakable loss. “Not under this roof, husband. Under this roof Pato is still alive,” she tells him. “In this house live a mother and a son who is soon to come home.” Then, as if they’re characters in a fairy tale, she delivers an ultimatum, giving Kaddish a final chance to prove himself worthy of her and her long-suffering love for him. He, too, must believe, against all the evidence, in their son’s continued existence and in his eventual safe return, or he will lose her, too.

The denouement of The Ministry of Special Cases isn’t tidy; it commits neither to hope nor despair. Instead, it leaves the reader with harsh truths and the idea that everyone must decide every day how to live. Englander may have left the Orthodox community in which he grew up, but his Yiddishkeit, the fine balance of gravity and joy that informed and illuminated his first fiction, remains intact in this memorable novel.

Hilma Wolitzer’s most recent novels are Summer Reading and The Doctor’s Daughter.