Englander Being Facetious

Nathan Englander is about to publish his first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” about a poor Jewish couple in Buenos Aires whose only son is “disappeared” in 1976.

Deborah Solomon asked him some questions and he gave some answers.

Q. For a first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases” seems unusually inventive, avoiding the familiar account of adolescent angst and giving little sense of your own history as an Orthodox Jew educated at a yeshiva in suburban Long Island.

A. It’s true. In terms of personal experience, my only other option was to set this novel at the Roosevelt Field mall. But it would still be about the same thing — community and identity and injustice. It would still be about Kaddish.

Q. You’re referring to your protagonist, Kaddish Poznan, a man who erases the inscriptions on tombstones for a living and is named for the Jewish prayer of mourning. Isn’t that a little heavy?

A. I thought about it for a long time. I knew how loaded this name was. There is a long Jewish tradition of using symbolic names to trick the angel of death. [a Speaker of the Knesset was named Kaddish, Kaddish Luz]

Q. In the novel, Kaddish’s own face is erased when he accepts a nose job for himself and his wife as payment for a cemetery job.

A. We do this to ourselves. People are taking knives and spending a fortune and having their faces altered to look like another face. In America, there is one acceptable face, and it doesn’t look like a real face. It looks like the other faces that are not real in this acceptable way. I am trying to say something about the self-erasing and self-policing of identity.

Q.Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?

A. No. I would deny everything.

Q. What kind of name is Englander [a former Supreme Court judge in Israel is Yitzhak Englander]?

A. Someone must have had shoes from England. I don’t know. We all pretend we’re not from the Pale of Settlement.

Q. You were living in Israel when your story collection came out; these days, you’re back in New York.

A. I’m a big Jerusalemite. I moved there in 1996 to write literary short stories and starve to death and have this romantic life — there was going to be world peace, and we were going to hold hands from Tel Aviv to Baghdad.

Q. Sorry it didn’t work out.

A. I’m an optimistic pessimist. I always think the world is ending, but if you ask me about Middle East peace, I say Jerusalem could have peace tomorrow. Things are hopeless unless everybody chooses for them not to be hopeless.

From the Sunday NYT Magazine - sorry, permalink not working at present.