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The Ministry of Special Cases
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)

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Published:
Books on Tape 2007
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Description
From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES 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–and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.
Nathan Englander’s first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government’s whims, one man–one spectacularly hopeless man–fights to overcome his history and his name, and, if for only once in his life, to put things right. THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES, like Englander’s stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness, and–despite that–hope.
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Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
04/24/2007
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781415938126
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Nathan Englander. (2007). The Ministry of Special Cases. Unabridged Books on Tape.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Nathan Englander. 2007. The Ministry of Special Cases. Books on Tape.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases. Books on Tape, 2007.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Nathan Englander. The Ministry of Special Cases. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2007.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:35:49
Date Updated:
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      • bioText: NATHAN ENGLANDER is the author of the novels Dinner at the Center of the Earth and 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—winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. Englander's play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiered at The Public Theater in 2012. He translated the New American Haggadah and co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly a Knock on the Door. He is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter.

        Arthur Morey has acted in a number of productions, both Off-Broadway in New York and Off-Loop in Chicago. He’s won several Earphones Awards and has been repeatedly listed by AudioFile Magazine as a Best Voice over the years.
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The Ministry of Special Cases
fullDescription
From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES 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–and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.
Nathan Englander’s first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government’s whims, one man–one spectacularly hopeless man–fights to overcome his history and his name, and, if for only once in his life, to put things right. THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES, like Englander’s stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness, and–despite that–hope.
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
      • content:

        "The fate of Argentina's Jews during the 1976-83 "Dirty War" is depicted with blistering emotional intensity in this stark first novel. . . . Englander's story collection promised a brilliant future, and that promise is here fulfilled beyond all expectations."

      • premium: False
      • source: Booklist (starred review)
      • content: "This is a staggeringly mature work, gracefully and knowledgeably set in a milieu far from the author's native New York. . . . Four p's best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal."
      • premium: False
      • source: Bookforum
      • content: "[A] harrowing and brilliant first novel . . . Englander's great gifts are an absurdist sense of humor and a brisk, almost breezy narrative voice. He handles his unbearable subjects with the comic panache of a vaudeville artist, before delivering the final, devastating blow."
      • premium: False
      • source: Harper's Magazine
      • content: "Resonates of Singer, yes, but also of Bernard Malamud and Lewis Carroll, plus the Kafka who wrote The Trial . . . You will wonder how a novel about parents looking for and failing to find their lost son, about a machinery of state determined to abolish not only the future but also the past, can be horrifying and funny at the same time. Somehow . . . this one is."
      • premium: False
      • source: Los Angeles Times
      • content: "A mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory. . . . It's a family drama layered with agonized and often comical filial connections that are stretched to the snapping point by terrible circumstance . . . builds with breathtaking, perfectly wrought pacing and calm, terrifying logic."
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly
      • content: "Englander writes with increasing power and authority . . . Gogol, I. B. Singer and Orwell all come to mind, but Englander's book is unique in its layering of Jewish tradition and totalitarian obliteration."
      • premium: False
      • source: Library Journal
      • content: "This chilling book of intrigue examines the slow obliteration of culture and families perpetuated by forces seeking absolute political power. Highly recommended."
      • premium: False
      • source: Details
      • content: "Englander secures his status as a powerful storyteller with this book about the disappearance of the son of a down-and-out Jewish hustler during Argentina's Dirty War in the seventies."
      • premium: False
      • source: Esquire
      • content: "Englander's prose moves along with a tempered ferocity -- simple yet deceptively incisive. . . . Englander's book isn't so much about the search for a lost boy. It's about fathers and sons and mothers and faith and community and war and hope and shame. Yes, that's a lot to pack into 339 pages. But not when a book reads at times with the urgency of a thriller."
      • premium: False
      • source: Newsweek
      • content: "Wonderful . . . Since much of the book's power comes from its relentlessly unfolding plot, it's not fair even to tell who disappears, let alone whether that person reappears. . . . Englander maintains an undertone of quirky comedy almost to the end of his story."
      • premium: False
      • source: People
      • content: "[Englander's] journey into the black hole of paradox would have done Kafka or Orwell proud."
      • premium: False
      • source: Time Out New York
      • content: "Brace yourself for heartbreak . . . most of the story is so convincingly told that it's hard to imagine that Englander hasn't weathered political persecution himself."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Hartford Courant
      • content: "A vibrant, exquisite, quirky and devastating historical novel--and a gift to readers. . . . This is a story propelled by secrets, and part of Englander's achievement is how well he builds nerve-wrecking tension. . . . Written in crisp, unsentimental prose, The Ministry of Special Cases is as heartbreaking a novel as Sophie's Choice."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Miami Herald
      • content: "[S]pare, pitch-perfect passages . . . Through deft, understated prose, Englander evokes the incremental way in which fear grips a community, citizens accustom themselves to ignoring those small outrages and how those outrages gradually but inexorably give way to larger atrocities, tolerated by an ever more complicit populace."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Boston Phoenix
      • content: "The combination of a gift for narrative, a proclivity for pathos, and a lode of arcane knowledge is put to great use in Nathan Englander's first novel."
      • premium: False
      • source: New York Observer
      • content: "Nathan Englander bravely wrangles the themes of political liberty and personal loss with the swift style and knowing humor of folklore. In the spirit of the simple ambiguity of its title, The Ministry of Special Cases is carefully contradictory, wise and off-kilter, funny and sad."
      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: Arthur Morey transports listeners to Buenos Aires, 1976, during Argentina's "dirty war." Morey hits just the right sardonic note as protagonist Kaddish Poznan, "hijo de puta" (son of a whore), who nightly rewrites history by removing the names of Jewish whores and pimps from gravestones for their respectable children who are embarrassed by their parents' jaded pasts. As Kaddish, Morey is thoughtful, philosophical: "I offer a face-lift for the family name." With wife Lillian and son Pato, Kaddish lives in a world in which Gogol meets Kafka. Morey is especially strong when Pato is taken away in a government-green Ford Falcon and his parents are forced to approach the Ministry of Special Cases for assistance. The novel is a chilling reminder of the way a nation can disappear into totalitarian oblivion. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        May 28, 2007
        Morey’s dulcet theatrical tones offset the messy lives of the characters in Englander’s first novel about Jewish residents of 1970s Buenos Aires who live in fear of Argentina’s vicious military dictatorship. Against the backdrop of the dirty war conducted against leftists and activists, Kaddish Poznan scratches together a living vandalizing the gravestones of Jewish criminals who are embarrassments to their families, even in eternal slumber. Morey struggles manfully with the book’s religious terminology and outbursts of Spanish, but his reading is too mannered to render the vibrancy of Englander’s prose. His pauses are often too long, and his line readings sometimes lean awkwardly, and puzzlingly, on certain words. Nonetheless, Morey’s professional assurance means that, certain flaws notwithstanding, his reading flows along without overly noticeable interruption, accurately conveying the menace lurking behind every word, every sentence of Englander’s death-haunted tale. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 19).

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        March 19, 2007


        Reviewed by
        Allegra Goodman
        Young writers are often told to write about what they know. In his 1999 collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
        , Nathan Englander spun the material of his orthodox Jewish background into marvelous fiction. But the real trick to writing about what you know is to make sure you know more as you mature. Englander's first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases
        , conjures a world far removed from "The Gilgul of Second Avenue." The novel is set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "dirty war." Kaddish Poznan, hijo de puta
        , son of a whore, earns a meager living defacing gravestones of Jewish whores and pimps whose more respectable children want to erase their immigrant parents' names and forget their shameful activities. Kaddish labors in the Jewish cemetery at night. His hardworking wife, Lillian, toils in an insurance agency by day, and their idealistic son, Pato, attends college, goes to concerts and smokes pot with his friends. When Pato is taken from home, Kaddish learns what it really means to erase identity, because no one in authority will admit Pato has been arrested. No one will even acknowledge that Pato existed. As Lillian and Kaddish attempt to penetrate the Ministry of Special Cases, Englander's novel takes on an epic quality in which Jewish parents descend into the underworld and journey through circles of hell.
        Gogol, I.B. Singer and Orwell all come to mind, but Englander's book is unique in its layering of Jewish tradition and totalitarian obliteration. At times Englander's motifs seem forced. Kaddish, whose very name evokes the memory of the dead, chisels out the name of a plastic surgeon's disreputable father, and in lieu of cash receives nose jobs for himself and his wife. Lillian's nose job is at first unsuccessful, and her nose slides off her face. One form of defacement pays for another. Kaddish fights with his son in the cemetery and accidentally slices off the tip of Pato's finger. Attempting to erase a letter, Kaddish blights a digit. But the fight seems staged, Pato's presence unwarranted except for Englander's schema. Other scenes are haunting: Lillian confronting bureaucrats; Kaddish appealing to a rabbi to learn if it is possible for a Jew to have a funeral without a body; Kaddish picking an embarrassing embroidered name off the velvet curtain in front of the ark in the synagogue. When he picks off the gold thread, the name stands out even more prominently because the velvet underneath the embroidery is unfaded, darker than the rest of the fabric. Englander writes with increasing power and authority in the second half of his book; he probes deeper and deeper, looking at what absence means, reading the shadow letters on history's curtain. (May)

        Allegra Goodman is the author of five books, including
        Intuition.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        September 15, 2007
        Argentinas Dirty War of 1976 is the focus of Englanders first novel. Kaddish, his wife, Lillian, and their son, Pato, live uneasily in Buenos Aires even before Pato is taken away for having objectionable books. Efforts to find him lead the couple to the nightmarish bureaucracy of the Ministry of Special Cases. In treating such subjects as identity and history as a Jewish fable, Englanders work invites comparison with more compelling predecessors such as Bernard MalamudsThe Assistant and Jonathan Safran FoersEverything Is Illuminated . While Foer successfully melds two stories, Englander seems to be struggling to balance his lovely character portraits with his political allegory. Arthur Morey gives a lackluster reading of the work, which might be the problem; Englander is an author of worthy ambitions and obvious talent, and reviews of the book itself have been strong. Recommended only where Englanders books have been popular.Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr.

        Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity
91
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From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES 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–and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.
Nathan Englander’s first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government’s whims, one man–one spectacularly hopeless man–fights to overcome his history and his name, and, if for only once in his life, to put things right. THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES, like Englander’s stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness, and–despite...
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