The Buenos Aires of Nathan Englander's harrowing and brilliant first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, is a city of disappearances. Names are effaced from gravestones, unseemly family histories are denied, plastic surgery distorts familial resemblances. Students are imprisoned; some may become victims of the vuelos de la muerte, or "death flights"—the tortured dissidents sedated and thrown from planes into the estuary that runs past the city into the Atlantic Ocean. Pato, the sweet-natured but rebellious teenage son of Kaddish and Lillian Poznan, is taken from their home one evening by a group of armed men, in front of his father's eyes. In an instant, Pato becomes one of the city's desaparecidos. Kaddish and Lillian can find no trace of their lost child and rapidly become invisible to their neighbors and fellow
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