Chapter One
Jews bury themselves the way they live, crowded together, encroaching on one
another’s space. The headstones were packed tight, the bodies underneath elbow
to elbow and head to toe. Kaddish led Pato through uneven rows over uneven
ground on the Benevolent Self side. He cupped his hand over the eye of the
flashlight to smother the light. His fingers glowed orange, red in between, as
he ran his fist along the face of a stone.
They were searching for Hezzi Two-Blades’ grave, and finding it didn’t take
long. His plot rose up sharply. His marker tipped back. It looked to Kaddish as
if the old man had tried to claw his way free. It also looked like Two-Blades’
daughter had only to wait another winter and she wouldn’t have needed to hire
Kaddish Poznan at all.
Marble, Kaddish had discovered, is chiseled into not for its strength but for
its softness. As with the rest of the marble in the graveyard of the Society of
the Benevolent Self, Hezzi’s marker was pocked and cracked, the letters wearing
away. Most of the others were cut from granite. If nature and pollution didn’t
get to those, the local hooligans would. In the past, Kaddish had scrubbed away
swastikas and cemented back broken stones. He tested the strength of the one
over Two-Blades’ grave. “Like taking a swing at a loose tooth,” Kaddish said. “I
don’t even know why we bother-a little longer and no sign of this place will
remain.”
But Kaddish and Pato both knew why they bothered. They understood very well why
the families turned to them with such urgency now. It was 1976 in Argentina.
They lived with uncertainty and looming chaos. In Buenos Aires they’d long
suffered kidnap and ransom. There was terror from all quarters and murder on the
rise. There was also then a growing sense of danger. It was no time to stand
out, not for Gentile or Jew. And the Jews, almost to a person, felt that being
Jewish was already plenty different enough.
Kaddish’s clients were the ones who had what to lose, the respectable,
successful segment of their community that didn’t have in its families such a
reputable past. In quieter times it had been enough to ignore and deny. When the
last of the generation of the Benevolent Self had gone silent, when all the
plots on their side were full, the descendants waited what they thought was a
decent amount of time for an indecent bunch and sealed up that graveyard for
good.
When he went to visit his mother’s grave and found the gate locked, Kaddish
turned to the other children of the Benevolent Self for the key. They denied
involvement. They were surprised to learn of the cemetery’s existence. And when
Kaddish pointed out that their parents were buried there, they proved equally
unable to recall their own parents’ names.
Harsh a stance as this was, it was born of a terrible shame.
Not only was the Society of the Benevolent Self a scandal in Buenos Aires, at
its height in the 1920s it was a disgrace beyond measure for every Argentine
Jew. Which of their detractors didn’t enjoy in his morning paper a good picture
of an alfonse in handcuffs, a Caftan member in a lineup-who didn’t feel his
reviling justified at the sight of the famous Jewish pimps of Buenos Aires
accompanied by their pouty-lipped Jewish whores? But this was long over in 1950,
when Kaddish found himself locked outside the gate. That terrible industry as a
Jewish business was by then twenty years shut down. The buildings that belonged
to the Society of the Benevolent Self were long sold off, the pimps’ shul
abandoned. There was only one holding that couldn’t possibly fall into disuse.
Disrepair, yes. And derelict, too. But, like a riddle, what’s the only thing man
can build that is guaranteed perpetual use? The dead use a graveyard forever.
That cemetery was also the only institution established by the pimps and whores
of Buenos Aires that was built with a concession from the upstanding Jews.
Hard-hearted as those Jews were when it came to the Benevolent Self, they
couldn’t turn them away in death. The board of the fledgling United Jewish
Congregations of Argentina was convened and an impasse reached. No Jew should
have to be buried as a Gentile, God help them. But neither should the fine Jews
of Buenos Aires have to lie among whores. They shared their quandary with Talmud
Harry, who, as leader of the Benevolent Self, sat at the head of a board of his
own. “You lie with them living,” Harry said, “why not cuddle up when they’re
dead?”
Eventually it was agreed. A wall to match the one surrounding the graveyard
would be built toward the back and a second cemetery formed that was really part
of the first-technically but not halachically, which is how Jews solve
every problem that comes their way.
The existing wall was a modest two meters, a functional barrier meant to set off
a sacred space. The establishment of a Jewish cemetery in a city obsessed with
its dead signaled a level of acceptance of which the United Congregations had
only dreamed. They wanted to show their ease in its design.
But being accepted one day doesn’t mean one will be welcome the next-the Jews
of Buenos Aires couldn’t resist planning for dark times. So atop that modest
wall was affixed another two meters of wrought-iron fence, each bar with a
fleur-de-lis on its end. All those points and barbs four meters up gave that
wall an unwelcoming, unclimbable, pants-ripping feel. They allowed themselves
one hint at grandeur in the form of a columned entryway capped with a dome.
Before any balance was achieved among the Jews themselves, this was the one they
struck with the outside world.
Two sets of board members stood watching the new wall go up. The westernized
Liberator’s shul rabbi had declined to attend. It was the young old-country
rabbi who paced nervously, making sure certain standards were met and horrified
to find himself presiding.
When the mortar had dried, the governors of the United Congregations returned
for the installation of the fence. They were surprised to find the pimps
assembled on their side. It was a sight those upstanding Jews had hoped never to
see again. A line of famed Benevolent Self toughs stood before them, including a
still-robust Hezzi Two-Blades, Coconut Burstein, and Hayim-Moshe “One-Eye”
Weiss. Towering over Talmud Harry was the very large, very legendary Shlomo the
Pin.
“The wall is plenty high enough,” Talmud Harry said. “A fence is an insult that
need not be made.” The Jews of the United Congregations didn’t think it was an
insult; they thought it would match nicely with the fencing all around. A number
of ugly threats were already implicit. There was nothing much Harry needed to
add. He pointed at the wall and said only, “This is as separate as it gets.”
Their faces went long. They turned to the rabbi, but he couldn’t support them. A
solid two-meter wall was a separation by any standard: It would suffice for
mechitza or sukkah or to pen a goring ox. While the finer points
were being argued, Talmud Harry gave the nod. A jittery Two-Blades began to
reach, and Shlomo the Pin rolled the fingers of his right hand into a tight
cudgel-like fist. Feigenblum, the first president of the United Congregations
and father to the second, saw this out of the corner of his eye. He took it as
an excellent moment to declare the young rabbi’s word binding, and a speedy
departure was made.
The pimps didn’t want to be second-class any more than their brothers who’d
demanded a wall in between. When they put up the façade to their cemetery they
commissioned a replica-but one meter higher-of the grand domed entrance that
welcomed mourners into the United Congregations side.
Thank God again that it was settled. It allowed Talmud Harry to die in peace and
be spared the sight of his own sons, lawyers both, facing Kaddish in the living
rooms of their big houses and denying whence they came. It was the same when
meeting with One-Eye’s daughter and the son of Henya the Mute. All that these
children had was fought for and paid for the Benevolent Self way.
It was Lila Finkel-whose mother, Bryna the Vagina, was said to have an incisive
perspicacity as well as a cunt of pure gold-who took it upon herself to set
Kaddish straight. “Take a breath,” she said. Kaddish took one. “Do you smell it
in the air?” she asked. Kaddish thought he might. “That’s what good fortune
smells like, Poznan. It’s the season of our prosperity and it’s never come this
way before.”
It was the heyday of Evita, of the liberated worker and her shirtless ones.
Factories were rising up under Perón, and Lila drew for Kaddish a picture of the
middle class rising with them and making room for the Jews. All she asked was
that he join them in looking forward. No reason to dwell on ugly memories soon
forgotten. Kaddish wasn’t convinced, and Lila’s patience began to wear. “Think,”
she said, and gave a good solid tap to her temple. “Which man is better
off”-another riddle-“the one without a future or the one without a past?
That’s why the wall went up. So that one day the Jews might join together, so we
could stand in the United Congregations Cemetery out of joy, not sadness, and
all of us, looking toward that wall, might together forget what’s on the other
side.”
Except that, for Kaddish Poznan, the future looked no brighter than the past.
He’d not yet met and married Lillian; it was before the birth of his son.
Without his mother Favorita’s grave to visit, Kaddish had no one at all.
“So what?” Lila said. “In every people’s history there are times best forgotten.
This is ours, Poznan. Let it go.”
Among the children who didn’t acknowledge their parents’ existence, someone else
aside from Lila had been unnerved by what Kaddish said. When he went back to the
cemetery bent on getting in, Kaddish found a chain had been added to the gate, a
sloppy weld applied, and, for good measure, tar used to gum up the keyholes in
both locks. He gave it a kick that echoed off the dome and sent a pigeon
swooping down from above. Kaddish thought about what Lila said and went around
to the United Congregations side. He crossed through its always-open gate, he
walked through its manicured grounds, and reaching it-reaching up, Kaddish
scraped his shoes against brick as he pulled himself to the top of that wall.
Perched there and taking in the Benevolent Self, Kaddish wondered if there’d
ever been a wall built that someone hadn’t managed to cross. This one wasn’t
much of a challenge. It wasn’t meant to stop the living but to separate the
dead.
As a solution it was fine with Kaddish and, as word spread, with the rest of the
Jewish community from both sides of the wall. Kaddish was occasionally spotted
climbing over to the Benevolent Self or dropping back down between United
Congregations plots. No one acknowledged he was there. If they could forget
every last person buried in that ruffians’ graveyard, it wasn’t difficult to add
one more. From then on, it was as if he wasn’t. The Jews forgot Kaddish Poznan
too.
This is how it stayed for a very long time. It was how Kaddish was treated after
he fell in love with Lillian and when she, God bless her, fell in love right
back. The Jews of Buenos Aires made room for her in their forgetting-no small
matter, considering her family aligned itself on the United Congregations side.
(Pity also the parents. What to do with a daughter who insists on marrying an
hijo de puta? Why did Lillian have to find herself the only Jew proud to
be a son of a whore?) This is how the situation remained for them when Evita
died two years later, and in five, when Perón was driven off. Kaddish’s visits
to his mother’s grave became ever more frequent after Pato was born. His mother
was the family’s single unbroken link to a past.
Not even Kaddish’s name was family given; it was the young rabbi who’d picked it
and, no more than a half kindness, it was the most the upstanding Jews had ever
shown. Sickly, weakly, and grasping at survival, Kaddish barely lived through
his first week. His mother-a faithful woman-begged that the rabbi be summoned
to Talmud Harry’s to save him. The rabbi wouldn’t cross the threshold. Standing
in the sunlight out on Cashew Street, he peered into the vestibule at the infant
in Favorita’s arms. His judgment was instant. “Let his name be Kaddish to ward
off the angel of death. A trick and a blessing. Let this child be the mourner
instead of the mourned.” Assuming no fathering beyond the physical (and
commercial) act, the rabbi gave Kaddish the last name that goes with the
legend-it’s from Poznan we know that a man’s offspring through a prostitute
will come to no good. Favorita repeated the name: Kaddish Poznan. She held out
Kaddish and gave him a turn, as if trying it on for size. The rabbi didn’t smile
or take leave. He simply stepped out into the gutter, feeling he’d done right by
the child. Let the name Kaddish save him. And if the boy is righteous, let him
get out of the other one on his own.
Had Kaddish known the origins of his name, he wouldn’t have felt cursed. He was
happy with his family. He believed in a bright future for his son. And as creaky
as his knees were when he climbed that wall, as lightly and with as little
oomph as he tried to land, he hadn’t given up on his own self either. If
she’d acknowledged him in the intervening twenty-five years, Kaddish would have
told Lila Finkel she was partly right. Hard as life got, there was something to
living it with a little hope. Maybe that was why Kaddish never needed his fellow
Jews any more than they needed him.
This was the balance maintained through the Montoneros and the ERP and after
Onganía was overthrown. During those two decades, the community prospered and
attained status. And Kaddish was convinced he’d have prospered most of all had
any of his schemes worked out.
The Jews didn’t feel any great need to take stock when Perón returned to power.
It surely didn’t make them think about Kaddish Poznan’s treatment all those
years. The community did give a collective twitch when, during Perón’s welcome
home, there was a small massacre in the welcoming crowd. There were some in Once
and Villa Crespo who bounced their knees nervously throughout Perón’s short
reign and two brothers in two big houses in Palermo who began to bite their
nails in earnest when he died.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Ministry of Special Cases
by Nathan Englander
Copyright © 2007 by Nathan Englander .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2007
Nathan Englander
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-375-40493-1
