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An unbearable urge to write By Bari Weiss Tags: Englander, Tmol Shilshom  I'm sitting in the coffee shop in Jerusalem's Nahalat Shiva neighborhood, where Nathan Englander wrote his first book of short stories. Though he doesn't name the Tmol Shilshom cafe in the last story of the collection -- the one in which the coffee cups fall out of the cupboards when a bomb explodes down the street -- the high-domed ceiling of the cafe is evidence enough that this is this place Englander had in mind. For five years, beginning in 1996, Englander came here almost every day from his apartment in Nahlaot and worked, seated at a small wooden table situated right behind the worn purple armchair where Jerusalem's great poet, Yehuda Amichai, used to love to sit. David Ehrlich, Tmol Shilshom's owner and presumably the basis for the character who comforts Englander in that last story, remembers him coming here to write day after day, despite the fact that he barely could afford the coffee. "Needless to say, he wasn't yet The Nathan Englander." Advertisement Judging by today's crowd, it's the anticipation of The Nathan Englander's return that inspires excited chatter: In a few weeks, the writer will return to his old stomping grounds to read from his new novel. Since the birth, at age 29, of The Nathan Englander with the collection "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" (1999), it's hard to ignore the pronouncements that have been made about him. Here was the greatest new talent of the 21st century! A Jewish wunderkind! A writer surely destined to join the ranks of Bellow and Roth. Now, almost a decade later with his first novel, last year's "The Ministry of Special Cases," recently available in paperback, he has largely reinforced such declarations. Set in Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s, the ambitious novel tells the story of a Jewish family when their only son is "disappeared," and at the same time, the story of a society torn apart by totalitarianism. Though he is too honest to deny that such praise doesn't feel good, for Englander to be called a great writer is ultimately beside the point. "There's only the work," he tells me. "It's only the act. If I'm painting my walls, I'm a painter. If I go to space, I'm an astronaut." In a phone conversation from his apartment on New York's Upper West Side punctuated by tongue-and-cheek Yiddishisms and Jewish geography, the act of writing -- the discipline of it -- is the only topic Englander is absolutely serious about. "I don't believe in writer's block. There is no such thing as a blank page. It takes me 10 years [to write a book] because I fill too many. I'll write a whole year and throw it out again and again and again. I don't care. You can call it compulsive, it's just what the work demands." Compulsive is one word. Religious is another. Let Englander keep talking, and his Jewish sensibility becomes more and more apparent. "I don't think writers have to be moral people. It doesn't matter if I spend my mornings killing hobos." But the act of writing itself, "It's a holy thing ... the idea of a makom kavua, the idea of a sacred time and space -- they function." Englander knows from makom kavua. He grew up religious in suburban Long Island where his parents -- an engineer and a mother -- sent him to an Orthodox Jewish day school. There, as he told The Atlantic Monthly in 1999, "I had a right-wing, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, fire-and-brimstone, free-thought-free, shtetl-mentality, substandard education. And so I began to look elsewhere, I began to read literature. Simple as that." Literature, and the freedom of a junior year abroad at the Hebrew University, led Englander away from the world of Orthodoxy. After graduating from SUNY Binghamton, and a brief stint working in a photography studio, Englander began the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1994, where he worked on his craft intensely for two years. Freedom in writing As with so many formerly Orthodox Jews, it seems that the discipline of a religious lifestyle just displaces itself -- in Englander's case, to writing. Englander portrays the world he knows; in "The Relief of Unbearable Urges," almost all of the stories are about religious Jews. Thankfully for his readers, the theme is not his personal angst, but the experience of other conflicted Jewish characters pushing against the constraints of their families, their religion, their political realities. There are stories about a religious man driven to visit a prostitute in Tel Aviv, folk from Chelm forced to masquerade as acrobats in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis, an American Hasid who dresses as Santa to support his family and shul. Beyond the plotlines, it is voice -- a word that comes up a lot when Englander talks -- that makes the stories in "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges" so memorable. Weeks after reading, you can still hear Pinchas Pelovits the young writer, or Ruchama the sheytl (wig) maker, inverting their sentences in the subtle way Yiddish speakers do. It's not just that Reb Kringle, dressed as Santa, calls the kid on his knee "boychik." It's that he asks the kid, "Tell me where's your mother." "That's how I hear things. That's like the rhythm of my teachers in yeshiva all those years." Englander's own voice is somewhat nasal, and the words come a mile a minute. He boasts that he's successfully corrupted various purebred American friends. "I had this very waspy, super-waspy, fancy blonde friend in grad school who said to me one day, ?I should wait all day for you to show up this late?'" But with "The Ministry of Special Cases," Englander had to go well beyond the world and the inflections from which he came. "'The Ministry' is written in English, but those people are speaking Spanish, but Jews always speak with their own inflections ... It took me years to realize ?this is what it sounds like.'" "I dedicated my whole life to this book for basically a decade." For Englander, the time was not spent researching in Argentina, he visited only once before writing the book, but in writing hard at least six days a week. "It's unbelievably intense, but for me, that is the supreme joy. I don't ever want to write a book that I know I can write. I don't want to write a safe book. I want to write stories that can't be written." In "The Ministry of Special Cases" he found a worthy challenge. At its heart, it is the tale of an Argentinian Jewish family. Kaddish Poznan is an hijo de puta, literally, "the son of a whore," who makes his living chiseling names from headstones in the cemetery of Jewish pimps and whores. He is paid in cash to do this erasing by now-successful descendants who are desperate to forget their disreputable lineage; like Kaddish, most are also sons of women who were unknowingly shackled into prostitution. Lillian, his wife, sells life insurance to Argentinian governmental officials and members of the social elite. When the government is overthrown by a military coup in 1976, their already unstable position is threatened by their son Pato, a university student whom they fear will become one of the disappeared because of his insistence on going to concerts and reading his books -- the stuff of radicals, according to the regime's perverse reasoning. Kaddish, in a desperate attempt to protect the family, decides to burn those of Pato's books that might be deemed subversive. But the sacrifice --Englander cleverly invokes a Biblical image of an animal sacrifice, a column of gray smoke rising to the heavens -- is not sufficient. Himself uneducated and unsure what Pato's books actually contain, Kaddish misses a few. When the government officials in suits come into the Poznan apartment and lift Pato out by his elbows, Kaddish and Lillian throw everything they have into fighting the machine bent on "disappearing" their son forever, including submitting their case to the Ministry of Special Cases. The ministry is a Kafka-esque bureaucracy: Numbers are doled out to those in line at random, necessary forms are impossible to come by, and if you turn down the wrong hallway, you may well witness a clerk beating a person to death. (Think of the anguish induced by a visit to Israel's Interior Ministry and multiply it a hundredfold.) On the one hand, this is a book that can be read as a family drama -- the emotional and psychological sentiments are entirely real. But like a Yiddish tale, it also can be understood symbolically, as a kind of political parable. For one, there is the ongoing issue of the nose. Kaddish, Lillian and Pato are all endowed with unmistakably "Jewish" noses, in a city where most Jews would like to hide any evidence of their Semitism. At one point in the book, Dr. Mazursky, a top-notch plastic surgeon, barters with Kaddish; he'll provide shiny, new noses if Kaddish will erase the names from the headstones of his less-than-aristocratic relatives: Pinkus, Toothless, Happy and Pinkus 'Toothless' Mazursky. (Like so much in the book, the names rely on black humor.) It's a kind of mutual cosmetic surgery he proposes, aimed at solidifying their assimilation. The doctor appeals to Kaddish: "'Happiness is contained in the nose. Like a diamond, it only crystallizes under pressure. In so much space'... 'happiness cannot form. This is why Jews, as people, are dysthymics. In those ample noses, happiness moves around like a firefly in a jar. In must be contained more exactly. One must keep it in place. Like a butterly pinned to velvet, happiness run through. We can cure you, Poznan. We can liberate the man trapped inside the Jew.'" For Englander, the nose is simply a way of expressing the issue of Jewish self-perception. "There's no real such concept as a Jewish nose, it's a concept we self-perpetuate. I was interested in stuff that comes from the outside, and comes inside, and then we self-perpetuate. So this idea of the Jewish nose as part of identity fascinates me as an adopted thing." Though Kaddish and Lillian go through with the rhinoplasty, it ultimately betrays them. When a desperate Lillian searches her reflection for her son's image in his absence, her now-goyish nose reveals no sign of Pato. There is also indicting commentary about the structure and efficacy of the Jewish community. When Lillian, having exhausted all other options, turns to the head of United Congregations of Argentine Jewry for help in tracking down Pato, she finds the latter-day equivalent of a feudal European court Jew instead of a real advocate. In one of the book's most powerful dialogues, she accuses him of the worst kind of diplomacy: "'You work with them, Feigenblum. You channel the grand tradition of Jewish diplomacy. Never acknowledge catastrophe until it's done.' "'That's a preposterous accusation.' "'Afterward you'll raise up a tall building around it. You'll enlist a great Jewish after-the-fact army to fight with all of hell's fury over how it is to be remembered.' "'This is a fantasy.' "'You'll deal with the very same officials,' Lillian said. 'You'll fight bravely over how many of our dead they'll agree to list on the monument.' Lillian gritted her teeth. ?What it means, Feigenblum, is that I want my son, my Pato, home alive. Not in the Museum of the Jewish Disappeared.'" Englander is insistent that he did not set out to sway readers in a specific political direction. "If I was writing it with a political stance, it would have corrupted the work." The obligation of the writer, "is to the story, anything else is corrupting." Still, he is highly aware that "The Ministry of Special Cases" is a political novel, even if his job is to create characters rather than judge them. This doesn't mean Englander doesn't have political views. He opposes people who say that the possible is impossible, "who talk about what can't happen" in Israel, who argue that "the peace process was doomed." "People wanted peace, I lived there, people wanted peace." But as a writer, he believes his own politics should remain an entirely different beast from his writing. (It's different for writers like Orwell, he says, for whom politics "are his very soul.") What's surprising is that having written a book about Argentina, Englander now acknowledges that this book is in fact largely about Israel. "I didn't see it when I was writing it. I didn't see how much this book was an Israel metaphor for me." He sees Buenos Aires, in particular, as highly connected to Jerusalem. "What people from Buenos Aires and Jerusalem have in common is that things go bad so often, and they complain all the time, but no one is more dedicated. It's like: 'And I would let the street drink my blood.'" Back in 1996, that was the attitude that inspired Englander to move to Israel. "That's how I moved to Jerusalem, like, 'I am here forever.'" So, what made him leave? Why did he feel the need to return to galus? Like most things, he ties the answer to this question back to fiction -- that there are a thousand ways to read something, a thousand ways to tell a story. "It's like I could give you a million reasons ... The easiest is -- because I wanted to. I thrive in New York. I love New York." He also notes that the end of his time in Israel was hard, the second intifada in full force. But the writing community isn't bound geographically, and so he remains connected to Israeli writers he loves. "I used to say I love the Russians. Now it's become for me, if I love you, you're a Russian writer." In Englander's world, to be called "Russian" is the highest praise. "Do I like Etgar's [Keret] writing? Yeah, he's Russian now." And he remains amazed by the almost prophetic status Israeli writers hold in society: "David Grossman might as well be James Taylor." Englander is thrilled to be coming back to Jerusalem, to read in Tmol Shilshom, to see David Erlich, to hang out with the friends he still has here, and with writers he loves, not to mention the "various forms of kubeh soup" he will inhale. This year since the publication of "The Ministry of Special Cases" has been a whirlwind. While touring for the book, he's been translating the Haggadah on his plane rides, a project he's working on with Jonathan Safran Foer ("I feel like my parents are behind this one.") Traveling and reading all over the world has been fun, "but I just feel flipped lately," he says. Englander is dying to get back to work on his next novel (details undisclosed). He'll write this next one from the back table at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan's Morningside Heights, around the corner from Columbia University. "It's like a woman in every port, I have a cafe in every city." Bari Weiss, a writer living in Jerusalem, is a 2007-2008 Dorot Fellow Bookmark to del.icio.us   A top priority Barack Obama: We will keep Israel's security a priority. Tale of a key Cartoon film on Nakba describes Jews as 'enemies of homeland'.

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