Nathan Englander’s long-awaited follow-up to his amazing story collection For the Relief on Unbearable Urges will be published later this month.
His first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, is about a Jewish man — named Kaddish Poznan — in Argentina in the mid-1970s whose son is “disappeared” during the country’s unrest.
Englander kicked off what’s sure to be a publicity frenzy with a very funny interview in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine.
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.
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.
Kaddish
Pronounced: KAH-dish, Origin: Hebrew, usually referring to the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead.
yeshiva
Pronounced: yuh-SHEE-vuh or yeh-shee-VAH, Origin: Hebrew, a traditional religious school, where students mainly study Jewish texts.
