The horrors of Argentina’s dirty war
Lynn Bonney
Friday, September 7, 2007
Life is past, present and future. But what if the powers-that-be are obliterating the past, altering the present and making the future uncertain? What if life becomes tinged by fear at every step? How do people survive?
The questions might make for the stuff of science fiction, but Nathan Englander places them in the all-too-real world of Buenos Aires, during the days of Argentina’s Dirty War. “The Ministry of Special Cases” is a stunning novel that focuses all the horrors of that frightening time on the relationship between a father and son.
The father is Kaddish Poznan, an outcast in the city’s tight-knit Jewish community. He received his unfortunate name from a rabbi, at the request of his mother, a prostitute, now long dead. Kaddish supplements the family income by performing clandestine night work. He slips into the Jewish cemetery and obliterates the names from gravestones, his salary paid by the society families who want to erase their connection to ancestors involved in the Society of the Benevolent Self. The members of this misnamed group were the backbone of highly organized crime in Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century. Their now-respectable descendants are willing to pay to wipe out their pasts.
Kaddish and his wife, Lillian, who has a good job at an insurance agency, are the parents of Pato, a pot-smoking college student whose library is filled with books that raise suspicions among government watchers, who seem to be everywhere. It’s a dangerous practice for those who live in a society in which “people can be erased in a day.”
When Pato is disappeared, snatched by men purporting to be police officers, Kaddish and Lillian plunge into grief that many of the neighbors understand, but few are brave enough to acknowledge. Their desperation sends them to the Ministry of Special Cases, an agency they hope will bring them answers and return their beloved child
The ministry turns out to be its own particular form of bureaucratic hell. Each day, anxious families line up to seek an interview with an official they trust can help them. But only a few make it to the head of the line and the rest are turned away, told to come back tomorrow and start again.
Kaddish and Lillian are learning what it means to live in a nation that seeks quiet, no matter the price, that Pato was right when he told them that they hadn’t understood the difference between terrorism and terrorized. When a patronizing general tells her he believes that rumors and gossip are destroying “the best nation on earth,” Lillian is defiant: “I think you might mean that,” Lillian said. “It’s even scarier to think that the people who run this country believe their own lies.”
As Lillian holds out hope for Pato’s return, Kaddish wants to bury his child. He’ll settle for a memorial service, but the rabbi tells him that mourning without a body is forbidden. Kaddish will resort to unimaginable measures, but Lillian continues to wait — and to hope.
Englander has written a novel that transcends its base in history to become a universal revelation of family relationships. “The Ministry of Special Cases” is special indeed.
An Internet search will take readers on visits to the old cemeteries of Buenos Aires and also will bring information about the Benevolent Society of Truth, a real organization founded by Jewish women who were sold into slavery between 1860 and 1939.
Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”