Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander (born in 1970 in West Hempstead, Long Island, New York) [ - grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family and attended the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County before earning degrees from Binghamton University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In the 1990s he lived in Israel for approximately five years, an experience that later influenced some of his fiction. Englander first gained major attention with his debut story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), whose stories about Orthodox Jews were widely acclaimed. His awards include the PEN/Malamud Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.] His major books include:

Englander, Nathan, (For the Relief of Unbearable Urges [hc, Knopf, 1999]) 978-0375404924 [pb, Knopf/Doubleday, 2000] 978-0375704437

Englander, Nathan, (The Ministry of Special Cases [hc, Knopf, 2007] 978-0375404931 [pb, Knopf/Doubleday, 2008] 978-0375704444

Englander, Nathan, (What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank [hc, Knopf, 2012] 978-0307958709 [pb, Vintage, 2013] 978-0307949608

Englander, Nathan, (Dinner at the Center of the Earth [hc, Knopf, 2017] 978-1524732738 [pb, W & N (Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Orion), 2018] 978-1474607971

Englander, Nathan, (Kaddish.com [hc, Knopf, 2019]) 978-1524732752 [pb, Vintage, 2020] 978-0525434054

In addition to fiction, he translated portions of The New American Haggadah (2012, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) and co-translated Etgar Keret’s Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012, together with Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston), from the Hebrew. He has also written for the stage, adapting his story The Twenty-Seventh Man into a play that premiered at The Public Theater in 2012.

Among Englander’s works, The Ministry of Special Cases (2007) remains by far the most relevant to the theme of Jews and crime. It addresses the history of the Argentine Jewish underworld and prostitution networks; Jewish communal memory and shame; political repression during Argentina’s Dirty War; and the theme of state criminality. It is widely regarded as one of the most significant Jewish novels dealing with Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976–1983) and the phenomenon of the desaparecidos (“the disappeared”).

The novel is set in Buenos Aires in 1976, shortly after the military junta seizes power. The protagonist, Kaddish Poznan, is the son of a prostitute and a member of a marginalized Jewish subculture descended from the city’s notorious Jewish pimps and brothel owners. He earns a living by removing names from gravestones in a cemetery belonging to the old criminal and prostitution networks, helping respectable descendants erase embarrassing family histories. He lives with his wife Lillian and their university-age son Pato (Pablo), who is politically engaged and increasingly alienated from his father. When he is seized by security forces and becomes one of the “disappeared,” Kaddish and Lillian begin a desperate search through police stations, government offices, prisons, and finally the sinister “Ministry of Special Cases,” a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that embodies the state’s refusal even to acknowledge that victims exist. The novel follows the parents’ increasingly hopeless efforts to discover what happened to their son while confronting a regime that systematically erases people from public memory.

The novel is particularly relevant to the study of Jews and crime because Englander places Jewish identity at the center of a story about memory, shame, erasure, and state violence.

Key Jewish elements include:

• The history of the Jewish underworld in Argentina, especially the legacy of the prostitution and trafficking organization commonly known as the Zwi Migdal. Kaddish’s community descends from this stigmatized world.
• Questions of Jewish respectability and the desire to erase criminal ancestors from communal memory.
• The significance of Kaddish’s own name (“Kaddish” being the Jewish prayer for the dead), which reinforces the novel’s concern with mourning and remembrance.
• Debates over how Jews respond to persecution, bureaucracy, and powerlessness, themes that critics have linked to Kafka and Jewish historical experience.

Among contemporary Jewish novels, The Ministry of Special Cases is unusual because it connects Jewish criminal history (the Argentine Jewish underworld) with state criminality during the Dirty War. Kaddish is neither a detective nor a gangster, but a marginal figure whose livelihood depends upon literally erasing traces of Jewish criminal ancestors—making the novel one of the most sophisticated literary explorations of Jewish memory, shame, crime, and historical disappearance.

After The Ministry of Special Cases (2007), Nathan Englander largely moved away from crime as a central subject, but he continued to engage themes highly relevant to a “Jews and crime” framework—especially revenge, violence, terrorism, state power, moral transgression, historical injustice, and the boundary between victimhood and wrongdoing. A chronological overview:

1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012): This collection contains almost no conventional crime fiction, but several stories touch on criminality and violence in broader moral and historical senses. Most important is “How We Avenged the Blums.” The story concerns a group of Jewish boys in suburban America who seek revenge against a local antisemitic bully. Englander explores vigilantism, retaliation, and the temptation to answer hatred with violence. The story is comic, but it raises serious questions about Jewish powerlessness and Jewish revenge. Other stories involve Holocaust-era murder and betrayal, suspected Nazi collaborators, antisemitic violence, and the shifting categories of victim and perpetrator. This collection is less about criminals than about the ethics of vengeance and justice in Jewish historical experience. Critics have noted that questions of guilt, innocence, victimhood, and moral responsibility run throughout the collection.

2. Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017): This is Englander’s work that comes closest to political-crime fiction after The Ministry of Special Cases. The novel intertwines the stories of an Israeli prisoner held in secret confinement, an Israeli intelligence operative, Palestinian and Israeli political actors, and covert operations and betrayals connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unlike classic spy thrillers, however, the focus is not on solving crimes but on the moral ambiguity of power and conflict. Jewish characters are no longer marginal victims, as in much earlier Jewish literature, but participants in the exercise of state power. This marks an important evolution in Englander’s treatment of Jewish history and responsibility.

3. Kaddish.com (2019): This novel shifts almost completely away from crime. Its protagonist, Larry, hires a stranger online to recite the Kaddish prayer after his father’s death. The resulting deception creates a chain of lies and ethical failures. There is no criminal underworld here, but Englander remains interested in fraud, impersonation, moral misconduct, guilt and repentance. The novel is essentially a comic Jewish morality tale about ethical rather than criminal transgression.

A general survey of Englander’s works as a whole highlight the following patterns:

What distinguishes Englander from writers such as Jerome Charyn, Harlan Coben, or Andrew Bergman is that he rarely writes genre crime fiction. Instead, he uses crime-related subjects as vehicles for examining Jewish questions of memory and forgetting, justice and revenge, victimhood and power, guilt and atonement, communal shame and historical responsibility. [Google/AI]