Disappearances.(The Ministry of Special Cases)(Book review)

Early in Nathan Englander's first novel, "The Ministry of Special Cases" (Knopf; $25), Kaddish Poznan returns home late one night to find an unsettling welcome at his apartment door: "He reached for the keyhole and--accompanied by the sound of metal against metal--discovered that there was no hole to be found." Not on the wrong floor, not at the wrong door, neither drunk nor delusional, Kaddish sees that the keyhole, to which he has reliably found his way for twenty years, has, in his absence, disappeared.

Set in Buenos Aires in 1976, in the months after the coup that drove the Peronists from power, the novel contains many such disturbing erasures. Englander tells the story of a family's losses during Argentina's "dirty war," when thousands of people were kidnapped and killed by the military government, becoming known as "the disappeared." This morally fraught subject recalls Englander's first book, the story collection "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," which revolved around the persecution of Jews through history and the problems of Jewish identity in the face of such a history. As in the stories, Englander's approach to his dependably tragic subject remains dedicatedly ironic.

At the center of the novel's carefully staged ironies is Kaddish himself: an Argentine Jew, a prostitute's son, and a man who "takes money to desecrate the dead." His name conjures the Jewish prayer of sanctification that is also a prayer of mourning, but his actions are the opposite of pious. Late at night, hammer and chisel in hand, he steals into the Jewish cemetery "established by the pimps and whores of Buenos Aires." For descendants of those buried there who wish to avoid embarrassment, or reprisal from the capricious military junta, Kaddish offers "a face-lift for the family name": he makes the names of disreputable forebears vanish.

The work earns Kaddish an inconsistent living and the scorn of his son, Pato. Nineteen, a college student and a pot smoker, an idealist but no revolutionary, Pato decries his father's way of life and resents being brought along to assist in the nighttime defacements. Kaddish's long-suffering wife, Lillian, meanwhile, still loves him, although her opinion of him has shifted: "She had married him and his thick neck for the strength they promised, for exactly the things he hadn't delivered." And where Kaddish facilitates erasure--at one point, Pato loses a fingertip to his father's errant chisel--Lillian has become a broker against it: she sells insurance to people growing rapidly aware of all that could be taken from them, collecting "premiums against their worst fears."

In the novel's first third--against a background of tanks and soldiers occupying the city's streets, bodies being tossed from apartment windows, and men Pato's age being discovered with their throats cut--Englander shows a family bracing against the inevitable. "You cannot ever let your guard down in Buenos Aires," Lillian thinks. "It's like standing in the ocean and facing the beach. It's up to you to know what's behind you. Always there's another wave coming." Although Englander draws Buenos Aires quite sketchily--he depends more on a generic idea of the city--his evocation of the tensions the Poznans live under has nuance and power. In one scene, the family manages to clear a military checkpoint despite Pato's having forgotten his identity papers. Afterward, Pato, humiliated to the point of tears, berates his father:

Kaddish told the boy to stop. He yelled at him to stop. Pato continued long enough for Kaddish to give up his yelling and go silent, and then--Lillian tried to deny it--Kaddish drove on, weeping even more loudly and woundedly than Pato had. Kaddish cried and drove and wiped his eyes on a sleeve. Lillian understood that it had gone too far and decided to bring it to a halt. , ...