Jesse Kellerman:
Trouble
(Putnam; $24.95)
The author, son of writers Jonathan and
Faye Kellerman, writes a novel about a New
York medical student who believes he is
saving a woman from becoming a murder
victim. The woman's true identity looms as
a source of fear as they play out a troubling
romance.
Robert Littel:
Vicious Circle
(Overlook Press; $24.95)
In a novel of suspense and intrigue about
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, former jour-
nalist Littel features a female president
of the U.S. who, with the support of the
global community, brokers a major corn-
promise between Israel and the Palestinian
Authority in the hopes of snuffing out the
spiral of violence.
Elinor Lipman:
My Latest Grievance
(Houghton Mifflin; $24)
The teenage daughter of two earthy and
politico college professors meets up with
her father's glam first wife, who gets a job
on the campus where her parents teach.
Keeping the connections secret brings
comic havoc into the lives of the extended
family.
Joyce Carol Oates:
The Gravedigger's Daughter
(Ecco; $26.95)
A family escapes Nazi Germany and settles
in upstate New York, where the educated
father can find work only as a cemetery
caretaker. His daughter, born on the boat
carrying the family to America, ultimately
sculpts a life caring for her son.
Alvin Rakoff:
Patricia Schonstein:
Baldwin Street
A Quilt of Dreams
(Bunim & Bannigan; $23)
A Toronto neighborhood, filled with
European Jewish immigrants during the
1930s, becomes the setting as a cop
investigates the death of a young boy. The
neighborhood presents a rough-and-tumble
experience for a range of characters, includ-
ing a budding writer.
Jonathan Santlofer:
Anatomy of Fear
(Morrow; $24.95)
A vicious murderer sketches his victims
before killing them, and a police sketch art-
ist is asked to draw the killer nobody has
lived to describe. Drawings, mixed in with
text, advance the suspenseful tale.
(Knopf; 352 pp.; $25)
N
athan Englander's much-
anticipated first novel begins
and ends in darkness, in a
wailed-off corner of a cemetery the
Argentine Jewish community would like
to forget. This is the burial ground of the
Society of the Benevolent Self, once the
synagogue of Jewish pimps, prostitutes
and other underworld figures.
The wealthy and respectable offspring
of Jews with names like Hezzi Two-Blades
and Henya the Mute prefer to wipe out
traces of their less respectable back-
ground, anxious that they have enough
to worry about in the dangerous times of
1976, during Argentina's Dirty War.
Kaddish Poznan, the son of a prosti-
tute, is hired to sneak into the walled-off
section of the cemetery after midnight
and chisel away their names from the
tombstones. As the prosperous daugh-
ter of another prostitute explains to him,
"Which man is better off — the one with-
out a future or the one without a past?"
The Ministry of Special Cases is a
novel of ideas, a historical novel that at
times feels like one of magical realism,
but it's the story of a society gone awry,
when surreal things can happen.
The son of Kaddish and Lillian Poznan
"is disappeared," a term understood to
mean the government-sanctioned kid-
napping of individuals, with no traces,
Leslie Schnur:
Late Night Talking
(Atria; $22)
The host of a radio show preaches propriety
and realizes financial security for speaking
her mind. Disarray enters her disciplined life
with the arrival of her long-absent father, a
former boyfriend and the new owner of the
station.
Fiction on page 40
effort with a nose job for him
1111 and his wife performed by a
prestigious plastic surgeon,
no answers about
also the son of Benevolent
their fate and no
Self members. They get their
accountability by
Jewish noses erased, chiseled
the authorities.
off. Kaddish's surgery goes
The novel is a
well, altering his Jewish-
departure in sub-
looking profile to make him
ject and tone from
a handsome Argentine, but
Englander's award-
his wife opens her eyes to
winning and best-
the nightmare of a terrible
4 1 4.4
selling collection of
job performed by a student,
4444—‘
stories For the Relief
leaving her with a nose much
.1ra ttt ittI41 I) oft it ■
of Unbearable Urges,
worse than she began with.
published in 1999
She then faces a larger night-
when he was 29. In both, Jews figure
mare when her son, Pato, is taken away
prominently, but while the stories teased and vanishes.
out differences between religious and
Although her nose is fixed again to
secular Jews, the novel is about, among
make her look beautiful, she misses see-
other things, community, identity, mem-
ing the image of her son — who also had
ory and fathers and sons.
a prominent nose — when she looks in
Kaddish is the name given to Poznan
the mirror. Her pain is overwhelming.
by a rabbi who refused to come into
Lillian does everything she can to get
Poznan's home (because of his mother's
her son back, regularly visiting the cor-
line of work) when he was summoned
rupt offices of the Ministry of Special
to give the sickly infant a blessing.
Cases. She loses her job in an insurance
The rabbi suggested that his name be
office when she steals the private tele-
changed to Kaddish to ward off the
phone number of a general who was a
Angel of Death. The name turns out to
client and goes to see him.
be both blessing and curse.
The unnamed general denies the
Throughout his life, Poznan is a man
kidnappings and tells her, "Powerful as
who's kept out, relegated to the outside.
I am — I admit it — I can't undo what's
For him, "It's a bully's heaven we have
not been done. I can't make your son
been given, a coercive place where all
from nothing. You are Jews. Go to the
the self-righteous can float around judg-
river and mix him from clay. People from
ing, voyeurs with wings."
nothing is a Jewish affair."
Plastic surgery plays into the story,
Englander succeeds in creating a
and Poznan is paid for one gravestone
world that is darkly compelling. He
THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES
By Nathan Englander
(William Morrow; $24.95)
The lives of two strangers come together in
South Africa at the time of political unrest
against apartheid. The two resolve their
personal problems as a nation enters a new
direction.
All 0141%
writes bold and beautiful sentences,
sometimes with humor embedded in
his language and juxtapositions. Jewish
expressions, teachings and aphorisms
are woven into the way characters
speak.
"The story is both real and absurd,"
says Englander, 37, who visited
Argentina in 1991, traveling there for the
wedding of friends he'd met in Israel and
then joining them on their honeymoon.
He began the novel years later, working
"off of these vague memories of place,"
he explains. He speaks no Spanish
but since beginning the novel has
mastered a lot of Argentine history. He
returned to Argentina only when the
novel was finished.
"To lift up my head at the end of the
book, to see how close it is to my heart,
to see how much the Dirty War affected
me, how I feel about those mothers," he
reflects.
Interestingly, the Society for the
Benevolent Self has basis in history. As
reported by Isabel Vincent in Bodies and
Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish
Women Forced Into Prostitution in the
Americas, there was in fact a mutual-aid
society in Argentina known as Chesed
Shel Emet, Benevolent Society of Truth.
The organization was established and
maintained by Jewish women, mostly
from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, who
had been literally sold into slavery by
Jewish criminal gangs from 1869 until
the late 1930s.
- Sandee Brawarsky
iN
June 28 a 2007
39