Englander debuts second act

RYAN NADEL

Nathan Englander looked carefully at the menu. "Is the fish good?" he asked, not waiting for an answer. He talked quickly, almost frantically, of the cities he has already been to and where he is going next. "San Francisco, Seattle, what about a burger?" He closed the menu. "I'll order the salmon," he said conclusively. The waitress arrived and he looked up at her as one of his notorious curls fell into his face. "I'll have the crab cakes, please," he said, a half-smile punctuating the humor he saw in the moment.

It is this humor and irony in Englander's writing that propelled him to the forefront of the literary world eight years ago, when he published his collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, to rave reviews. After stepping into the spotlight almost a decade ago, Englander was in town last week to promote his highly anticipated first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, with a reading and discussion at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.

"There was enormous pressure from the success of the first book, but it's not as bad as [the] pressure coming from an enormous failure," Englander said.

He has put pressure on himself since the age of 16. "I knew since high school that's it all I wanted to do," he mused. "The first freeing thing was recognizing that writing is an act ... and I gave up on the idea of being a writer and just wrote."

Born in 1970, Englander grew up in the Orthodox community of Long Island, N.Y. However, as evidenced by the crab cakes at lunch, he has since distanced himself from an observant lifestyle. He attended Binghamton University and later the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He then moved to Jerusalem – where he wrote the collection of short stories – and now lives in New York's Upper West Side.

Englander described his dedication to his craft as total and complete. But he is quick to note this extreme dedication has been honed over time. "To sit and write all day is not something natural to me," he confessed. "My natural inclination is to lie on the couch and watch TV. I'm just a normal kid from suburbia."

To Englander, writing is a process that demands he remove himself from the equation. "One of the things that has helped me write is to ignore myself," he said. "I don't matter in the process ... if I'm tired – so what? I write."

It is this commitment to his work that empowered Englander to devote 10 years to his novel. "It's what the book needed," he said of the work, which tells the story of a Jewish family in Buenos Aires in 1976 caught in the strife of the so-called "Dirty War."

The story focuses on Kaddish Poznan, an Argentine Jew, the son of a prostitute, who makes his living by covertly destroying the tombstones that mark the resting place of the pimps and whores of Buenos Aires. The descendents of this shunned group pay top dollar for Kaddish to forever clear their family names of ill repute.

Kaddish's son, Pato, is a reluctant aide to his father. Pato views the work as a desecration, while Kaddish believes he is simply preventing further damage. "It is work that needs to be done in a world that runs on shame. Guilty feelings or no, they'd have smashed this place to rubble," Kaddish says to his son. The intellectual and idealistic Pato is eventually kidnapped by the military junta. It is through the search for their son that Kaddish and his wife, Lillian, learn to appreciate Pato's passions and embrace the life he tried to create.

One of the fundamental aspects of the book is the theme of identity, and specifically the Jewish perception of identity. "Why do we define ourselves so much by labels and names?" asked Englander. "We perpetrate the idea that a certain name or label has a definite meaning, when really, names reflect our perception of things when the reality is perhaps different."

For Englander, stories are like giant formulae with infinite variables, "but there's a right and wrong and things take their own form." His painstaking devotion to his stories is almost excessive and Englander recognizes that, "there's a fine line between obsessiveness and madness – the madman never finishes, but for me, at some point, it's done," he said.

And yet now, he said, "I'm ready to get back home and start working again. I've got a novel and a million stories floating around. I know I'm done with the last book when the next one pops into my head."

Ryan Nadel is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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