The author of “Barbara the Slut” talks with Nathan Englander — about the making of her boundary-pushing debut collection.
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Overview
From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, the debut novel from the Pulitzer-nominated, bestselling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges casts a powerful spell.
In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.
In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence. When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, a terrifying, byzantine refuge of last resort. Through the devastation of a single family, Englander brilliantly captures the grief of a nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780375704444 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2008 |
| Series: | Vintage International |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.20(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.
Read an Excerpt
[One]
Jews bury themselves the way they live, crowded together, encroaching on one another's space. The headstones were packed tight, the bodies underneath elbow to elbow and head to toe. Kaddish led Pato through uneven rows over uneven ground on the Benevolent Self side. He cupped his hand over the eye of the flashlight to smother the light. His fingers glowed orange, red in between, as he ran his fist along the face of a stone.
They were searching for Hezzi Two-Blades' grave, and finding it didn't take long. His plot rose up sharply. His marker tipped back. It looked to Kaddish as if the old man had tried to claw his way free. It also looked like Two-Blades' daughter had only to wait another winter and she wouldn't have needed to hire Kaddish Poznan at all.
Marble, Kaddish had discovered, is chiseled into not for its strength but for its softness. As with the rest of the marble in the graveyard of the Society of the Benevolent Self, Hezzi's marker was pocked and cracked, the letters wearing away. Most of the others were cut from granite. If nature and pollution didn't get to those, the local hooligans would. In the past, Kaddish had scrubbed away swastikas and cemented back broken stones. He tested the strength of the one over Two-Blades' grave. "Like taking a swing at a loose tooth," Kaddish said. "I don't even know why we bother—a little longer and no sign of this place will remain."
But Kaddish and Pato both knew why they bothered. They understood very well why the families turned to them with such urgency now. It was 1976 in Argentina. They lived with uncertainty and looming chaos. In Buenos Aires they'd long suffered kidnap and ransom. 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.
Kaddish's clients were the ones who had what to lose, the respectable, successful segment of their community that didn't have in its families such a reputable past. In quieter times it had been enough to ignore and deny. When the last of the generation of the Benevolent Self had gone silent, when all the plots on their side were full, the descendants waited what they thought was a decent amount of time for an indecent bunch and sealed up that graveyard for good.
When he went to visit his mother's grave and found the gate locked, Kaddish turned to the other children of the Benevolent Self for the key. They denied involvement. They were surprised to learn of the cemetery's existence. And when Kaddish pointed out that their parents were buried there, they proved equally unable to recall their own parents' names.
Harsh a stance as this was, it was born of a terrible shame.
Not only was the Society of the Benevolent Self a scandal in Buenos Aires, at its height in the 1920s it was a disgrace beyond measure for every Argentine Jew. Which of their detractors didn't enjoy in his morning paper a good picture of an alfonse in handcuffs, a Caftan member in a lineup—who didn't feel his reviling justified at the sight of the famous Jewish pimps of Buenos Aires accompanied by their pouty-lipped Jewish whores? But this was long over in 1950, when Kaddish found himself locked outside the gate. That terrible industry as a Jewish business was by then twenty years shut down. The buildings that belonged to the Society of the Benevolent Self were long sold off, the pimps' shul abandoned. There was only one holding that couldn't possibly fall into disuse. Disrepair, yes. And derelict, too. But, like a riddle, what's the only thing man can build that is guaranteed perpetual use? The dead use a graveyard forever.
That cemetery was also the only institution established by the pimps and whores of Buenos Aires that was built with a concession from the upstanding Jews. Hard-hearted as those Jews were when it came to the_Benevolent Self, they couldn't turn away in death. The board of the fledgling United Jewish Congregations of Argentina was convened and an impasse reached. No Jew should have to be buried as a Gentile, God help them. But neither should the fine Jews of Buenos Aires have to lie among whores. They shared their quandary with Talmud Harry, who, as leader of the Benevolent Self, sat at the head of a board of his own. "You lie with them living," Harry said, "why not cuddle up when they're dead?"
Eventually it was agreed. A wall to match the one surrounding the graveyard would be built toward the back and a second cemetery formed that was really part of the first—technically but not halachically, which is how Jews solve every problem that comes their way.
The existing wall was a modest two meters, a functional barrier meant to set off a sacred space. The establishment of a Jewish cemetery in a city obsessed with its dead had signaled a level of acceptance of which the United Congregations only dreamed. They'd wanted to show their ease in its design.
But being accepted one day doesn't mean one will be welcome the next—the Jews of Buenos Aires couldn't resist planning for dark times. So atop that modest wall they'd affixed another two meters of wrought-iron fence, each bar with a fleur-de-lis on its end. All those points and barbs four meters up gave that wall an unwelcoming, unclimbable, pants-ripping feel. The United Congregations allowed themselves one hint at grandeur in the form of a columned entryway capped with a dome. Before any balance was achieved among the Jews, this was the one they'd struck with the outside world.
Two sets of board members stood watching the new wall go up. The Westernized Liberator's shul rabbi had declined to attend. It was the young old-country rabbi who paced nervously, making sure certain standards were met and horrified to find himself presiding.
When the mortar had dried, the governors of the United Congregations returned for the installation of the fence. They were surprised to find the pimps assembled on their side. It was a sight those upstanding Jews had hoped never to see again. A line of famed Benevolent Self toughs stood before them, including a still-robust Hezzi Two-Blades, Coconut Burstein, and Hayim-Moshe "One-Eye" Weiss. Towering over Talmud Harry was the very large, very legendary Shlomo the Pin.
"The wall is plenty high enough," Talmud Harry said. "A fence is an insult that need not be made." The Jews of the United Congregations didn't think it was an insult; they thought it would match nicely with the fencing all around. A number of ugly threats were already implicit. There was nothing much Harry needed to add. He pointed at the wall and said only, "This is as separate as it gets."
Their faces went long. They turned to the rabbi, but he couldn't support them. A solid two-meter wall was a separation by any standard: It would suffice for mechitza or sukkah or to pen a goring ox. While the finer points were being argued, Talmud Harry gave the nod. A jittery Two-Blades began to reach, and Shlomo the Pin rolled the fingers of his right hand into a tight cudgel-like fist. Feigenblum, the first president of the United Congregations and father to the second, saw this out of the corner of his eye. He took it as an excellent moment to declare the young rabbi's word binding, and a speedy departure was made.
The pimps didn't want to be second-class any more than their brothers who'd demanded a wall in between. When they put up the facade to their cemetery they commissioned a replica—but one meter higher—of the grand domed entrance that welcomed mourners into the United Congregations side.
Thank God again that it was settled. It allowed Talmud Harry to die in peace and be spared the sight of his own sons, lawyers both, facing Kaddish in the living rooms of their big houses and denying whence they came. It was the same when meeting with One-Eye's daughter and the son of Henya the Mute. All that these children had was fought for and paid for the Benevolent Self way.
It was Lila Finkel—whose mother, Bryna the Vagina, was said to have an incisive perspicacity as well as a cunt of pure gold—who took it upon herself to set Kaddish straight. "Take a breath," she said. Kaddish took one. "Do you smell it in the air?" she asked. Kaddish thought he might. "That's what good fortune smells like, Poznan. It's the season of our prosperity and it's never come this way before."
It was the heyday of Evita, of the liberated worker and her shirtless ones. Factories were rising up under Peron, and Lila drew for Kaddish a picture of the middle class rising with them and making room for the Jews. All she asked was that he join them in looking forward. No reason to dwell on ugly memories soon forgotten. Kaddish wasn't convinced, and Lila's patience began to wear. "Think," she said, and gave a good solid tap to her temple. "Which man is better off"—another riddle—"the one without a future or the one without a past? That's why the wall went up. So that one day the Jews might join together, so we could stand in the United Congregations Cemetery out of joy, not sadness, and all of us, looking toward that wall, might together forget what's on the other side."
Except that, for Kaddish Poznan, the future looked no brighter than the past. He'd not yet met and married Lillian; it was before the birth of his son. Without his mother Favorita's grave to visit, Kaddish had no one at all.
"So what?" Lila said. "In every people's history there are times best forgotten. This is ours, Poznan. Let it go."
Among the children who didn't acknowledge their parents' existence, someone else aside from Lila had been unnerved by what Kaddish said. When he went back to the cemetery bent on getting in, Kaddish found a chain had been added to the gate, a sloppy weld applied, and, for good measure, tar used to gum up the keyholes in both locks. He gave it a kick that echoed off the dome and sent a pigeon swooping down from above. Kaddish thought about what Lila said and went around to the United Congregations side. He entered through its always-open gate, he walked through its manicured grounds, and reaching it—reaching up, Kaddish scraped his shoes against brick as he pulled himself to the top of that wall. Perched there and taking in the Benevolent Self, Kaddish wondered if there'd ever been a wall built that someone hadn't managed to cross. This one wasn't much of a challenge. It wasn't meant to stop the living but to separate the dead.
As a solution it was fine with Kaddish and, as word spread, with the rest of the Jewish community from both sides of the wall. Kaddish was occasionally spotted climbing over to the Benevolent Self or dropping back down between United Congregations plots. No one acknowledged he was there. If they could forget every last person buried in that ruffians' graveyard, it wasn't difficult to add one more. From then on, it was as if he wasn't. The Jews forgot Kaddish Poznan too.
This is how it stayed for a very long time. It was how Kaddish was treated after he fell in love with Lillian and when she, God bless her, fell in love right back. The Jews of Buenos Aires made room for her in their forgetting—no small matter, considering her family aligned itself on the United Congregations side. (Pity also the parents. What to do with a daughter who insists on marrying an hijo de puta? Why did Lillian have to find herself the only Jew proud to be a son of a whore?) This is how the situation remained for them when Evita died two years later, and in five, when Peron was driven off. Kaddish's visits to his mother's grave became ever more frequent after Pato was born. His mother was the family's single unbroken link to a past.
Not even Kaddish's name was family given; it was the young rabbi who'd picked it and, no more than a half kindness, it was the most the upstanding Jews had ever shown. Sickly, weakly, and grasping at survival, Kaddish barely lived through his first week. His mother—a faithful woman—begged that the rabbi be summoned to Talmud Harry's to save him. The rabbi wouldn't cross the threshold. Standing in the sunlight out on Cashew Street, he peered into the vestibule at the infant in Favorita's arms. His judgment was instant. "Let his name be Kaddish to ward off the angel of death. A trick and a blessing. Let this child be the mourner instead of the mourned." Assuming no fathering beyond the physical (and commercial) act, the rabbi gave Kaddish the last name that goes with the legend—it's from Poznan we know that a man's offspring through a prostitute will come to no good. Favorita repeated the name: Kaddish Poznan. She held out Kaddish and gave him a turn, as if trying it on for size. The rabbi didn't smile or take leave. He simply stepped out into the gutter, feeling he'd done right by the child. Let the name Kaddish save him. And if the boy is righteous, let him get out of the other one on his own.
Had Kaddish known the origins of his name, he wouldn't have felt cursed. He was happy with his family. He believed in a bright future for his son. And as creaky as his knees were when he climbed that wall, as lightly and with as little oomph as he tried to land, he hadn't given up on his own self either. If she'd acknowledged him in the intervening twenty-five years, Kaddish would have told Lila Finkel she was partly right. Hard as life got, there was something to living it with a little hope. Maybe that was why Kaddish never needed his fellow Jews any more than they needed him.
This was the balance maintained through the Montoneros and the ERP and after Ongania was overthrown. During those two decades, the community prospered and attained status. And Kaddish was convinced he'd have prospered most of all had any of his schemes worked out.
The Jews didn't feel any great need to take stock when Peron returned to power. It surely didn't make them think about Kaddish Poznan's treatment all those years. The community did give a collective twitch when, during Peron's welcome home, there was a small massacre in the welcoming crowd. There were some in Once and Villa Crespo who bounced their knees nervously throughout Peron's short reign and two brothers in two big houses in Palermo who began to bite their nails in earnest when he died.
Reading Group Guide
“Who is this Nathan Englander, so young in novelist years, but already possessed of an old masters voice? . . . One reads this novel in awe of Englander's talent. —The New York Times Book Review
The introduction, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enhance your group's conversation about The Ministry of Special Cases, the long-awaited novel from Nathan Englander, whose story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, won the 2000 Pen/Malamud Award and was translated into more than a dozen languages.
1. Kaddish is the only one of the children of the Society of the Benevolent Self—“a disgrace beyond measure for every Argentine Jew”—who is willing to acknowledge his heritage. Yet he makes his living from obliterating the names on tombstones in the sealed-off cemetery that contains his heritage. How does Kaddish see himself: as a servant of the truth and of history, or as an opportunist with no particular loyalties?
2. Why does Kaddish force Pato to work with him in the graveyard, and why does he force him to strike the chisel that will obliterate the name from the stone? As they drive home from the hospital Pato tells Kaddish, “You're lazy. You're a failure. You've kept us down. You embarrass us. You cut off my finger. You ruined my life.” The narrator goes on to refer to “the grand Jewish tradition of the dayeinu . . . And central to the form is the notion that each accusation, if that had been Kaddish's only shortcoming, still it would have been enough” [p. 61]. How complicated are Pato's feelings for his father? Why does Kaddish so often make poor decisions?
3. The Ministry of Special Cases is rooted in Argentina's history from the time of the Zvi Migdal—a criminal organization of Jewish gangsters who were active in Buenos Aires and ran the brothels—to the time of the military junta of 1976-1983, during which thousands of Argentine citizens, mostly young people, vanished without a trace. Do some research into this history, and discuss with your group how it affects your reading of the story.
4. Kaddish's mother, Favorita, was the victim of another kind of kidnapping, a form of white slavery [p. 21]. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, poor young women from Russian shetls were seduced into false marriages and sold into prostitution in the brothels of Buenos Aires. How much control do the people in this novel have over their lives? We're told that Kaddish had “never expected a happy life; only moments of joy to carry him through” [pp. 94-95]. How does Kaddish's background influence his approach to life?
5. Kaddish's negotiations with Mazursky, and the fallout from his acceptance of the offer of two nose jobs, constitute an absurdist episode in a largely tragic story. How does Englander manage to mingle comedy with his darker plot? What is the effect of his narrative style for you as a reader?
6. A chain of books including Chekhov, Lermontov, and Voltaire tells how Pato chose his patrimony: “Each book begat another. For a boy whose entire family history dead-ended on his father's side, this is how Pato traced his line” [pp. 93-94]. The second struggle—a fateful one—between father and son takes place after Kaddish has tried to burn Pato's books. What do the books tell us about Pato, and why does he attempt to save them even though he understands the risk to himself if these books are discovered? Why does Kaddish curse his son [p. 116]? What does Pato mean by his parting statement, “Fathers are always fathers. Sons always sons” [p. 122]?
7. Look closely at the descriptive prose, the tone, and the pacing of Chapter 17, and discuss what this passage demonstrates about Englander as a writer.
8. It is a matter of historical fact that during the junta young people suspected of having politically subversive views were arrested, interrogated and tortured, drugged and thrown out of airplanes. Infant children of the disappeared were sometimes adopted by military families—as happens here with the general and his wife [pp. 107-08]. These facts seem, perhaps, utterly surreal and fictional. How does Englander want his readers to experience history in this story?
9. Given the fact that no one (except the extremely brave woman in the bakery) will help Kaddish and Lillian recover their son, and that in their loss the parents too are negated, the novel implies that the Argentine people capitulated, in their silence, to the corruption and savagery of the junta. As Cacho says, “Everyone is sleeping deeply” [p. 126]. Does the novel imply that people get the government they deserve? What might cause such passivity and acquiescence in a population?
10. What are the key elements of Lillian's character, and how does she differ from Kaddish in her attempts to deal with Pato's disappearance? Do you identify more with her continuing hope than with Kaddish's belief that Pato is dead? Or the reverse?
11. What is ironic about the concept of habeus corpus as a legality by which the junta protects itself from accusations of kidnapping? Why do Kaddish and Lillian need a witness in order to get a writ of habeus corpus for Pato [pp. 209, 223-27]?
12. What strategies does the Ministry of Special Cases use in dealing with the families of the disappeared? What do the people who work there, including the military priest who takes Lillian's money, hope to achieve? How does Kaddish attempt to deal with the impossible demands being made by the priest and with Lillian's desire to meet them?
13. Discuss Englander's decision, in Chapter 43, to introduce the character of the unnamed girl who finds Pato's notes to his parents and dies without ever delivering these notes. “The memory is the girl's alone, and that's how it will stay. Still, in this horrible time when the junta would weave a nation's truth from lies, Lillian would have been happy and Kaddish would have been happy that, independent of them, one fine girl for one fine day believed in Pato Poznan—both living and dead” [p. 304]. What is interesting about this situation in which one desaparecido bears witness, silently, to the existence of another?
14. The novel is deeply concerned with the questions of identity: we see the changing or the removal of names, the alteration of faces and of the past. In contrast to all this, the girl who finds the notes on which Pato has written his name thinks, “It was such a civilized act, writing one's name, a concrete act. It made her think she could leave a history herself” [p. 302]. Why are these two sentences so important to the novel?
15. The rabbi who named Kaddish said, “Let his name be Kaddish to ward off the angel of death. A trick and a blessing. Let this child be the mourner instead of the mourned” [p. 8]. Does Kaddish's name suit him? What resonance do the rabbi's words take on, given the arc of the whole story?
16. The episode of the girl in the cell reveals the fact that Pato was held there as well, and that he undoubtedly shared the same fate as the girl who finds his notes in the foam mattress. So Kaddish is right about his son's fate, while Lillian is wrong. How does this knowledge affect your reading of the last final chapters?
17. Kaddish's desire to bury and to mourn his son meets with frustration when a rabbi tells him, in an ironic return to the habeus corpus problem, that he cannot bury his son if he has no body to bury. Does this constitute a final estrangement from the Jewish community for Kaddish, especially since the desire to give the dead the proper rites of burial accords with an ancient Jewish tradition? What do you make of Kaddish's attempt to trick Lillian into accepting the bones of a stranger for her son's?
18. Englander says that in writing the novel, “I became obsessed with the almost quantum-mechanical evil that is a byproduct of disappearing people. To kill a person is to deny that person a future—the basic act that is murder. To 'disappear' that same person is also, oddly, to reach in and undo the past. It's not to make them no-more. It's to make them, not-ever. It is to be undone. It's a way of fracturing the seeming unbreakable link between future and past. The question that flows through much of this novel, I guess, is: Despite the best intentions how do we–as individuals, or societies (take your pick)—contribute to our own undoing?” How would you address the ideas here, as well as the final question?
19. What is the effect of the novel's final pages? How do you imagine the rest of life for Kaddish and Lillian? Does the conclusion provide a sense of closure, or does it refuse to do so?
Interviews
A Conversation with Nathan Englander, author of The Ministry of Special Cases
Q: Your debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was a national bestseller in hardcover and paperback, winner of the PEN/Malamud award, and drew comparisons to Anton Chekhov and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Eight years later, THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES is your debut novel. What did it feel like to achieve success so early in your career?
A: Before the first book came out, I was living in Jerusalem and writing short fiction, literary short fiction-about Hasidim. I didn't plan on success, early or late. When the collection received the reception it did, it was all very exciting and very humbling and now it's also all very moot. Eight years later, what does it mean? The writing part never stops; that's what I do. But as far as the career part-whatever was achieved-it feels like starting again. And when you publish one book in your late twenties, and then another in your (late) thirties, it becomes clear that a sizable hunk of your future is tied up in what happens with each book. Right now I'm packing my apartment up in boxes-because I know things are going to go one way or the other. I'm either upsizing or downsizing come summer, but everything is going to change.
Q: Have you been working on the book for eight years? What else have you been doing with your time since the publication of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges?
A: The book has been all consuming. I've failed miserably at my attempts to take a day off every week. And I don't like to have to be anywhere but sitting at my table writing. Due to my inability to have anycasual hobby, there's usually some activity I'm obsessed with at the same time, so that it'll be write-and-run for a year or two, and then write-and-swim, or write-and-bike. For the last couple of years I've been obsessed with yoga-which has been fantastic but would have ruined me if I'd started earlier. It makes me too calm and optimistic. My first book would have been called something like, The Big Book of Daisies and Meadows: There's a Little Good in All of Us.
Q: THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES is set against the backdrop of Argentina's Dirty War. How did you become interested in the Dirty War and what inspired you to write about it?
A: Simply put, I became interested in what it is to lose your world, to have a city you love change around you. But I think that's an idea that grew as the book did, developing alongside ideas relating to community and identity and (one hopes after spending all these years on it) a host of other themes. If I try and trace the idea to its very inception, I think I'd have to say it started when I went to Israel for a year in 1989. It was the first time I was properly exposed to people from other cultures (at least to Jews from other cultures-which was already racy for me). I was fascinated by this group of Argentines. I surely didn't have a coherent way to say it then, didn't know what it was I was seeing, but they were this very sweet, very kind, very closed group of guys, whose personalities-who they were as people, not just their worldview but everything that informed them as individuals-were shaped, very clearly, by the political realities of their childhoods. A fascination with the people became a fascination with the place. And when my ideas had taken shape and there was a story ready to be built up, it was clear that Argentina was the base on which to set it.
Q: At the start of THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES, one character asks another: "Which man is better off, the one without a future or the one without a past?" To what extent do you think this is a choice people are commonly faced with?
A: Every big decision probably forces the choice in some way. There's always a concession involved. Are you going to be truer to the person you want to be (i.e., yourself in the future) or to the person you're supposed to be (i.e., yourself according to the selectively edited history with which you were raised)? In the novel, the idea plays out on a much larger scale. Because in the Argentina I created, in the Dirty War setting as imagined, I became obsessed with the almost quantum-mechanical evil that is a byproduct of disappearing people. To kill a person is to deny that person a future-the basic act that is murder. To "disappear" that same person is also, oddly, to reach in and undo the past. It's not to make them no-more. It's to make them, not-ever. It is to be undone. It's a way of fracturing the seeming unbreakable link between future and past. The question that flows through much of this novel, I guess, is: Despite the best intentions how do we-as individuals, or societies (take your pick)-contribute to our own undoing?
Q: THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES focuses on a Jewish family in Buenos Aires. To what extent does your own religion influence your writing?
A: This is the kind of answer that gets me in trouble, but the influence of religion on my writing is simply not my concern. I say this while acknowledging the very obvious role religion has played in my fiction until now, and with the awareness that this book, like the last, is chock full of Jews. My obligation is to the story-and I view any sort of outside categorization or conscious acceptance of themes that aren't generated from within the fiction as limiting and potentially corrupting forces. Because to say, as it does in the question above, that the book "focuses on a Jewish family" is true. But it also means that the Poznan family is in some way "other." The Poznans are the center of this novel. They are the family. And they are only "other" to me in the ways that they are other to themselves. That's why I don't think about religion when I work-I am exactly as aware of it as, say, Kaddish is at any given moment, or as that moment demands. Personally, I don't think I could introduce myself to a stranger, or even see my oldest friend, and make it ten seconds without saying that I'm Jewish, or referencing it in some way. That's me. But I don't consider myself a Jewish writer, and I definitely do not look at the work as Jewish. For anyone who'd say, Hogwash! How could he not call himself a Jewish writer? Tell me-after a decade of obsession with it, in a book that is at the very least equally as much about being Argentine as it is about being Jewish-is anyone, anywhere, ever going to call me an Argentine writer? A single person? No, because I'm not Argentine. So if it's not about subject matter, or the characters, or the soul of a book, and it's not about how much time and energy, how much of a writer's life he or she has spent dedicated to a subject, then it must be based on other judgments that should not, and must not, be part of the process.
Q: Would you compare Argentina's Dirty War to events happening in our world today?
A: Do you want me to list by topic: Military coups, state-sanctioned murders, disappeared innocents, silenced journalists . . . or should we go by victims as percentage of a population or break it down by hemisphere? I don't know if there's ever been a peaceful time on this planet, but at least, from my very-often-protected perspective, there have been times of greater hope. There's definitely no shortage of ways to link those dark times in Argentina to current events-this, I say, while acknowledging the unique nature of the Dirty War (as I don't think a nation that's been through something like that believes any other experience is comparable, and rightly so). What was shocking to me was getting to the end of this novel and lifting my head up to find that one of the larger elements, the part about habeas corpus, was actually in the news in America. If I'd spent all this time writing a children's book about an industrious Central Park squirrel that learns to drive a city bus, I would be no less surprised to have dropped off my manuscript at the publisher and then stepped on the M104 to find Chippy the Opposable-Thumbed Squirrel at the wheel than to find Congress passing laws denying people the right to file a writ of habeas corpus in 2006. I really don't know what to say about it yet; I've got some studying to do. As regards Argentina in 1976 my position is crystal clear.
Q: As much as this book is about Argentina and the Dirty War, plastic surgery also plays a considerable role. How does that theme fit in?
A: In a book where history is being altered on so many levels, I got interested in what's behind people's willingness to physically alter themselves. It's fascinating to me, the idea of one acceptable nose (and, as technology advances, one acceptable body, or one acceptable age). This book is very much about the links between the past and the future, and the altering of identity through surgery is another way that the continuum gets broken. Insert your own body part and the gender of your choice, but how often do you hear someone say, "Her nose is so perfect it can't be real." Well that's an odd thought, that the "perfect" nose would (or even could) be a fake nose. And it's that agreed-upon illusion, and the kind of society that forms around it, that really fit with the novel for me.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a series of e-mails called In-Box Since 1999, where I try and salvage a thousand lost friendships. I'm really in trouble with the whole world.
From the B&N Reads Blog
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