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'The benevolent self was a disgrace beyond measure for every argentine Jew': Between the Need to Remember and the Desire to Forget in Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases

  • Gustavo Sanches Canales

Date Published:

4 Jan, 2015

Abstract:

Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) is a novel structured around two interconnected plots. One of them is the tragedy of the desaparecidos — the disappeared — that began in 1976, the year when general Jorge Rafael Videla came to power after deposing María Estela Martínez de Perón; until early 1981 Videla’s junta was responsible for the disappearance of thousands of students and political opponents to his dictatorship. The other plot is the contradictory personal life of Kaddish Poznan, a Jew who, during the day, tries to keep alive the memory of his mother Favorita’s Argentine-Jewish past but at night works to destroy it by chiseling names off the gravestones of former members of the Society of the Benevolent Self, such as Favorita. Unlike Poznan, his wife Lillian, who has been laying a glass and a plate on the dinner table for her son Pato since his disappearance, refuses to acknowledge his death, In order to address the implications of this traumatic event in her life, I will resort to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001). This article draws upon the significance of collective memory throughout Jewish history as discussed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), explores the struggle between memory and forgetting, and ponders the dangers of forgetting — and erasing — the past and of transforming one’s identity.

 

Gustavo Sánchez Canales teaches English at the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he is also Vicedean for Research and Innovation. He served as Viceadean for International Relations between 2011 and 2013. From 1999 to 2010 he taught English and American literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His research focuses on contemporary Jewish-American Literature. He has published book chapters, articles, and essays on Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and  Michael Chabon, among others.

He has recently coedited with Victoria Aarons (Trinity, San Antonio, TX) a thematic volume on Philip Roth entitled History, Memory, and the Making of Character in Roth’s Fiction. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.2 (2014) http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol16/iss2/  

(updated in January 2016)

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/14/2020