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 From last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Questions for Nathan Englander:
For a first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases” seems unusually inventive, avoiding the familiar account of adolescent angst and giving little sense of your own history as an Orthodox Jew educated at a yeshiva in suburban Long Island. It’s true. In terms of personal experience, my only other option was to set this novel at the Roosevelt Field mall. But it would still be about the same thing — community and identity and injustice. It would still be about Kaddish.
You’re referring to your protagonist, Kaddish Poznan, a man who erases the inscriptions on tombstones for a living and is named for the Jewish prayer of mourning. Isn’t that a little heavy? I thought about it for a long time. I knew how loaded this name was. There is a long Jewish tradition of using symbolic names to trick the angel of death.
Read the rest here. You may remember his collection of short stories published in 1999, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, where an Orthodox Jew is granted permission to see a prostitute by his rabbi after his wife took a vow of celibacy. Nathan comes to the Y for the Unterberg Poetry Center Reading Series with Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn and most recently, You Don’t Love Me Yet) on April 25.
[Nathan Englander and Jonathan Lethem: 4/25/07]
Related: Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road serial in the Times mag. He will read and be interviewed by Laura Miller, co-founder of Salon.com, on May 1 at the Y. More Reading Series info here.
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