LAST January, a 75-year-old woman, Maria Estela Martinez Cartas de Peron, was arrested at her home near Madrid. She is more familiarly known as Isabel Peron, former president of Argentina, third and final wife of Juan Peron and now, three decades after her brief reign, an exile awaiting extradition to Argentina for questioning in connection with the 1976 disappearance of a student activist named Hector Aldo Fagetti Gallego and decrees she signed calling for the annihilation of "subversive elements" throughout Argentina. A military coup in March 1976 removed her from power. But Argentina's Dirty War was already underway: Over the next seven years, as many as 30,000 citizens, mostly students and unionists, would be silently and systematically erased from existence. They would become known as los Desaparecidos -- the disappeared.
Deeds of the Dirty War
The Ministry of Special Cases A Novel Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf: 352 pp., $25
In recent years, the Dirty War has itself nearly disappeared from collective memory, at least beyond the borders of Argentina. Yet the arrival of "The Ministry of Special Cases," a first novel set in Argentina circa 1976 by Nathan Englander, author of the widely praised 1999 story collection "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," comes at a propitious time (if you can call it that). In addition to Peron's arrest, a former Argentine naval officer is now on trial for human-rights abuses, having confessed his part in the infamous vuelos de la muerte -- the "death flights" in which drugged abductees were tossed from airplanes into the wide, brown Rio de la Plata. Meanwhile, an exhibition at New York's Museo del Barrio called "The Disappeared" examines, through the work of Latin American artists, the war's lingering aftershocks.
"The Ministry of Special Cases" -- which may have its roots in Englander's stay in Buenos Aires in 1990 -- is a mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory, spun out with a fabulism that recalls Isaac Bashevis Singer and only serves to heighten the absurdity and horror of the Dirty War. It's a family drama layered with agonized and often comical filial connections that are stretched to the snapping point by terrible circumstance.
The husband and father is Kaddish Poznan (a loaded name if ever there was one). He is an hijo de puta (the son of a whore) and belongs to a community of lowdown Buenos Aires Jews living in the shadow of their assimilated bourgeois neighbors. This split in the Jewish community extends to Kaddish's workplace, the walled-off cemetery of the Society of the Benevolent Self, home of deceased Jewish pimps, prostitutes and other salty characters, where he toils with hammer and chisel, chipping away the names of the dead.
"[W]hat I offer is a face-lift for the family name," the enterprising Kaddish tells a potential client, alluding to the beloved Argentine pastime of cosmetic surgery. Arriviste and newly respectable Jews, it seems, have lately become more anxious than ever to sever their familial ties to such past luminaries as Hezzi Two-Blades, "One-Eye" Weiss and Bryna the Vagina: The rumors of disappearances have begun to spread, and Jews (as Kaddish's patrons observe) tend to stand out -- particularly those with the Society of the Benevolent Self in their history.
If Kaddish believes he offers a valuable service, his son, Pato (the name means "duck"), is having none of it. Bookish, bright, secretive, well-meaning and rebellious, Pato is busy loafing his way through college with a joint in one hand and Marcuse in the other. Kaddish's loving and hectoring wife, Lillian, meanwhile, represents whatever respectability the Poznans can lay claim to. She works in an insurance office, where recent conditions have been good for business: The threat of disappearance has prompted many Portenos (inhabitants of Buenos Aires) to upgrade their policies.
Englander is masterly at establishing this trio, with their mix of affection and mutual disappointment -- and their brush with rhinoplasty, as Kaddish, ever the wheeler-dealer, arranges to get paid in free nose jobs. As the Poznans heal up (Kaddish and Lillian, anyway; Pato naturally begs off, horrified), we brace for the inevitable. Soon enough, Lillian encounters a tank near the Plaza de Mayo. The military coup has arrived, and the mood is lumbering, eerily calm. "War is not unleashed," Lillian realizes as she heads for the office. "It is slowly, it is carefully, installed."
