The architecture of Jewish memory has undergone explosive growth in recent years: Holocaust memorials and museums, plaques, donor walls — and works of literature, like “The Ministry of Special Cases,” Nathan Englander’s new novel about Argentina’s “disappeared,” the thousands of students, dissidents and labor leaders tortured and killed during seven years of military dictatorship. Between 10% and 20% of those victims were Jews, and Englander’s novel is the (fictional) story of one of them.
The protagonist of “The Ministry of Special Cases” seems at first to be a quintessentially Englanderian fantastic creation: Kaddish Poznan, son of a prostitute and member of a seemingly fictional underground Jewish community, the Society for the Benevolent Self, whose wacky characters have such names as Talmud Harry and Toothless Mazursky. Kaddish hires himself out to the community’s descendants — like Mazursky’s son, a doctor who plays a pivotal role in the book — erasing their family names from their ancestors’ tombstones, and thus any trace of the now-wealthy families’ dubious origins.
Fiction, right? Not entirely. Actually, as recounted in such studies as Isabel Vincent’s “Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas” (William Morrow, 2005), there was a real Society for the Benevolent Self: a mutual-aid society known as Chesed Shel Emet (The Benevolent Society of Truth), set up by women who were forced into prostitution by Jewish criminal gangs between 1860 and 1939. During this period, thousands of Jewish girls were sold into slavery by such gangs as Warsaw’s notorious Zwi Migdal, with Buenos Aires being the primary trading post between Eastern Europe and South America. According to Vincent, the Zwi Migdal cartel earned $50 million a year at its height. And by 1913, Argentina had more than 3,000 brothels, an uncounted number of which were run by Jews.
Not the most honorable chapter in our people’s history — and for that reason, one that has been deliberately effaced, like the gravestones that Kaddish vandalizes. Like Englander’s fictionalized version, the Society of Truth even had to run its own cemetery, as the mainstream communities in Buenos Aires shunned these victims of the sex trade for their “sin,” and marginalized their children, as well (hijo de puta, ben zona and other euphemisms for “son of a whore” are insults in many languages). The Society closed in 1968, and most Jews have been happy to forget it ever existed.
Kaddish’s erasure of memory is an obvious (some might say too obvious) foreshadowing of the Argentine junta’s attempts to uproot any history of the “disappeared.” But it also greatly complicates what would otherwise be a simple good-guy/bad-guy polarity in the novel. Granted, excommunication and ostracism are not the same as torture and murder, but our own ignorance of this chapter of Jewish history makes us all — not merely the “bad guys” of the junta, or the Argentine Jews in the book — complicit in a form of willful cultural amnesia. Indeed, some early reviews of “The Ministry of Special Cases” have assumed that Englander simply invented the Society for the Benevolent Self, treating it as a fictional creation as he did the rabbi in his “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” who prescribes visits to a prostitute to a man unable to obtain sexual release.
But these prostitutes were real, not fictional. They had names, like Rebecca Freedman, the woman who founded the Society in Buenos Aires. Or Rachel Liberman, whose family forced her into prostitution but who fought back, earning her freedom and agitating for prosecution of the Jewish pimps. Many more names have been erased — disappeared, if you will. But as Englander’s novel reminds us, there is no such thing as a perfect erasure — or a perfect victim.
Jay Michaelson is the chief editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture.
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I would still pursue all the officers responsibe for the deaths of Argentinian jewish citizens who were singled out for just being jewish. all officers found guilty should without recourse be sentenced to death by firing squad, which at least is quick. Those officers are nothing but old Nazis, mazny were paid by Nazis who were still alive and considered upstanding citizens of 'The Argentine'. The 1994 bombing of the Jewish community building in Buenos-Aires was backed up with the full knowledge of the Iranian government in collusion with some elements in the Argentinian policeforce and the military. Many of these people who caused the deaths of so many defenceless jews must be brought to justice, tried & when found guilty executed also by firing squad.
I agree. But I would go one stage further. I would also execute those members of the Israeli Embassy, headed by its Ambassador Ron Nergad, who deliberately turned a blind eye to the plight of Jews in the torture chambers of the Junta. And all those other Zionist officials who placed relations with the Junta, including its arms contracts, above the Jews who the 'Jewish State' professes to be concerned about. http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2009/11/murder-of-3000-argentina-jews-and.html
That is the real scandal. That the Zionist misleadership of the Argentinian Jewish community, headed by Daia, betrayed the anti-fascist Jews of Argentina, to say nothing of thousands of other non-Jews who perished at the hands of the fascists. Up to 10% and according to others up to 13% of the 30,000 who 'disappeared' were Jewish. The heroes are the Mothers of the Jewish Disappeared and their non-Jewish equivalents.
Zionism proved that it is a living lie. It kills Palestinians and behaves as a collaborator when it comes to Jews in the Diaspora (though never failing to call on them for support in its wars with the Palestinians).
I am disgusted by Tony Greenstein's addition. While I agree that the Israeli Embassy, if it indeed did what this clearly anti-semitic (Jew?) states can be censured, it cannot be compared to the murderous behaviour of Palestinian extremists who exterminate their own as readily as they try to exterminate Jews in the Holy Land. Zionism is flawed, but it is a yearning most of Jews who have suffered anti-semitism have experienced, and which many have made good by doing Aliyah. I know since I grew up in Argentina, was persecuted, and found solace in both my faith, and my hope for Zion. Leon
Leon Rogson is disgusted but can never go beyond his rage to say why. There is no dispute about what happened in Argentina or the attitude of Israel. It is a fact that Israel was a major, if not the largest, arms supplier to the Argentinian junta during the period. It worked, then as now, closely with the United States. Left-wingers were to be despised. Jacob Timmerman, no leftist, was outraged at Israel's behaviour. But saving Jews was never what Israel was about. A Jewish State lives on, Jews die. Yes that was Ben Gurion's creed.
There is therefore no comparison between the racist caricature of Rogson in terms of Palestinians and the Judenrat collaborators of the Argentinian Zionist groups. Jews also killed their 'own' - that was what the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto did to Jewish collaborators and Zionists were prominent among them. The heads of the Jewish police and assorted scum. ZOB killed all those it could. Hence why Palestinians target their collaborators. But Palestinians don't 'exterminate' their own. Provide the proof Rogson or shut up.
You may have grown up in Argentina Leon Rogson but you learnt nothing of what happened and drawn no lessons about the racism you spout.
I did state I was disgusted with the Israeli embassy for not standing up for the JEWS in Argentina. I spouted no racism, just additional disgust at those who compare inciting to murder with those who may, unfortunately keep silent when they see it. One is a crime of commission, the other, at worst one of keeping silence when shouting is what is required. Leon
No the Israeli Embassy was in league with the Argentinian junta, supplying them with weapons and activey endeavouring to keep them out of Israel, lose their visa applications. They should be treated as the resistance treated Jewish collaborators in the Warsaw Ghetto whose behaviour was no different (most being Zionists of course).
A bullet for Zionist traitors is a fitting response to their having sold out fellow Jews whilst purporting to represent them