Looking for a good book this summer? I enjoyed Dara Horn’s novel, All Other Nights, so much that I contacted her about a blog interview. You can read the first chapter online (click here).
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Dara:
If ever there is a book aimed at me, All Other Nights is it. Your book brilliantly combines the Civil War reflection on atonement, forgiveness, racism, suspense, cryptography and family relationships. Splendid.
Let me say this going in. I despise and loathe spoilers. Having discovered one of my favorite books in recent years, I am determined in interviewing the author to not give anything away, lest I diminish it for readers. Indeed, I am so committed to this that I am threatening to edit your answers, Dara, if I feel like you give anything away.
That warning in place, here are the questions.
First, tell us a little about yourself and your background.
I may be one of the last people you’d expect to write a novel set in the Civil War. I don’t live in the South or own a collection of historic muskets, though I am now the proud owner of a Confederate two-dollar bill. (And I am surely the only woman in America who received that particular gift for Mother’s Day.) I was raised in a religiously committed Jewish family in the same New Jersey town where I am now raising my own children. And while I am certainly an experienced researcher, my Ph.D. is in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, unrelated to American history. My previous two novels, In the Image and The World to Come, both dealt with aspects of Jewish history and explored themes from the Hebrew Bible and religious tradition.
Even without a single historic musket to my name, I was able to draw on my areas of scholarship in writing All Other Nights. All Other Nights is a novel of Civil War espionage with characters based on real historic figures. But it is also a story of the American Jewish community at the time of the Civil War, which allowed me to include material from Jewish history. And more universally, it is a story that explores biblical ideas of freedom, repentance and free will, in both explicit and subtle ways. The story of Jacob Rappaport, the Union spy who is the book’s main character, was inspired by several actual spies from the period, but I also modeled him on the patriarch Jacob from the book of Genesis, following that figure’s dramatic development from a liar, pushover and all-around moral degenerate into a fully-formed moral human being.
You are the mother of young children. When do you possibly find time to write? Are you a night person or a morning person?
I have three children under the age of four, including a newborn. My husband has a more conventional job, and we have often noted that no one ever asks him, “How do you find time to go to work when you have young children at home?” Balancing work and family is a challenge for everyone. I am very fortunate to be established enough as a writer by now that I can treat it as a job: When I am working on a novel, I am writing for four or five hours a day for about a year and a half, and I do have a babysitter during that time. I am naturally a night person, and my first novel, published before I had children, was mostly written in the late afternoons and evenings, since I was busy with graduate studies during the day. But while I still work in the evenings sometimes, my writing time is mostly based on the babysitter’s schedule!
You write from a Jewish perspective. Passover is central in your book. Personally, do you have a favorite moment in the Passover?
Passover is my favorite holiday because it is celebrated primarily at home, among family, through a very ritualized meal with a liturgy that has been set for centuries. Because of that, the historical resonance of the exodus from Egypt is compounded with the personal resonance of how the family changes from year to year as people pass away, new friends or spouses or children join the table, and children become adults. The novel’s title, All Other Nights, refers to the opening question that the youngest person at the table recites near the beginning of the Passover service: “How is this night different from all other nights?” The question is meant to emphasize the rituals that recall the exodus from Egypt, but it also reminds us of a deeper message: the freedom we celebrate at Passover is not merely a physical but also a mental state. Being truly free, in the Jewish tradition, is not about escaping from obligations, but freely choosing one’s obligations. This requires the imagination to see how each of us can change from one night to the next.
The main character in this novel, Jacob Rappaport, is a Jewish soldier in the Union army whose commanders discover that he has relatives in New Orleans—including an uncle involved in a plot to kill Lincoln. He is then ordered to assassinate his uncle, at the Passover seder, before the plot can progress. His choices in responding to this impossible demand haunt him for the remainder of the book, but they also raise the larger question of whether a person is defined by his past deeds or whether change and repentance are possible. For most of us these decisions are not so dramatic. But each of us every day makes the decision whether to act as a slave—to ambition, to money, to status, to lust, to glory—or to act as a free person, one who chooses his own obligations and commits his life to the service of something more meaningful. In celebrating Passover, Jewish people are reminded each year to ask themselves: in my daily choices, am I honoring the freedom that God has given me? Am I the person tonight that I want to be in the future?
One of my favorite moments every Passover is watching the youngest child recite these questions. They are sung to a traditional melody in ancient Hebrew, so it is a great moment of pride for young children the first time they are able to do it. Last Passover, shortly before she turned three, my oldest child was able to recite them for the first time. She also began to learn about the meaning of the holiday as well—or so I thought. A few weeks before the holiday, she said to me, “Mommy, Passover is going to be my birthday.” When I told her that her birthday in fact was in July, she insisted, “No, Mommy, Passover is going to be my birthday, because on Passover I’m going to be free.” When I explained to her that Passover celebrates how all the Jews are now free, she pointed to her baby brother and said, “But not him, because he’s only going to be one!” Freedom is certainly something we appreciate more as we grow older—especially older than three.
I think people underestimate the ability of fiction to shape culture? Is part of your objective in writing a book like All Other Nights to influence and deepen how people think? In a few sentences, how so?
I do believe in the power of literature to shape the way we think. All Other Nights can be read as an entertaining spy novel, but to me the more interesting story is the shaping of a person’s moral development. The idea that people have the capacity to change is a very powerful one, and in dramatizing this idea, I hope that the book will remind readers of the astounding capacity each of us possesses to become someone other than the person we were the night before.
As a follow-up to the previous, thank you for helping me be more aware of some of the Anti-Semitism that took place during the Civil War. I had no idea, for instance, about Grant’s General Order No. 11 in which he expelled Jews from areas under the jurisdiction of the Union Army.
This historical event is something that has taken many readers of the book by surprise, but yes, it really is true that all Jewish families were expelled from areas of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi by the conquering Northern general Ulysses S. Grant in December of 1862. Without any pretense toward fact, the order accused them of being war profiteers and demanded their evacuation within twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, from the point of view of Jewish history, this was hardly a unique event. But what was unique about it was that three weeks later, a delegation representing 35 Jewish families who had been expelled from Paducah, Kentucky went to meet with President Lincoln, who overturned the order and allowed them to return to their homes. (Japanese Americans during the Second World War should only have been so lucky.) To me, this is much more remarkable than the initial expulsion. The overturning of this cruel order was truly unique in Jewish history—and more typical of the America toward which American Jews are immensely grateful, since America (North and South) was the first country in modern history to allow Jews to live in freedom.
Your book considers the complexities of atonement and broken relationships. Dennis Prager argued in a Wall Street Journal article that people in our country have often been shallow in how they think and speak about forgiveness. With my book, Unpacking Forgiveness, I went on record saying we need to think more carefully about the relationship between forgiveness and justice. Do you think we have often been guilty of presenting questions of forgiveness in trite and superficial ways?
Here’s what Prager said:
The bodies of the three teen-age girls shot dead last December by a fellow student at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., were not yet cold before some of their schoolmates hung a sign announcing, “We forgive you, Mike!” They were referring to Michael Carneal, 14, the killer.
This immediate and automatic forgiveness is not surprising. Over the past generation, many Christians have adopted the idea that they should forgive everyone who commits evil against anyone, no matter how great and cruel and whether or not the evildoer repents.
The number of examples is almost as large as the number of heinous crimes. Last August, for instance, the preacher at a Martha’s Vineyard church service attended by the vacationing President Clinton announced that the duty of all Christians was to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who murdered 168 Americans. “Can each of you look at a picture of Timothy McVeigh and forgive him?” the Rev. John Miller asked. “I have, and I invite you to do the same.”
Though I am a Jew, I believe that a vibrant Christianity is essential if America’s moral decline is to be reversed. And despite theological differences, Christianity and Judaism have served as the bedrock of American civilization. And I am appalled and frightened by this feel-good doctrine of automatic forgiveness.
I very much agree with the idea that forgiveness is often given too freely, and by people not entitled to offer it. The characters in my novel struggle with the limitations of forgiveness after committing crimes that may qualify as unforgivable. Jewish law is extremely specific about how forgiveness should be offered and earned. One is obligated to forgive a person who repents and requests forgiveness three times or more, for instance; one should not claim to forgive without actually doing so, and one is allowed to request a waiting period to ensure that one’s forgiveness is sincere; one is encouraged but not required to forgive those who do not ask for forgiveness; one is encouraged but not required to forgive those who have slandered us (since the damage outlasts the apology); and most relevantly to the examples above, one cannot forgive a crime or sin committed against someone else. This means that a murderer really can never be forgiven, since only the victim would have been able to offer forgiveness. Judaism is premised on the sanctity of human life above all else, so the murder of an innocent person is never a forgivable offense. The situation I created in the book is sufficiently ambiguous in terms of whether the victim was in fact an innocent person, and I deliberately set up this situation to test the boundaries of what can and cannot be forgiven—and to demonstrate the absolute impossibility of forgiveness, even for lesser crimes, without the lifelong labor of repentance. But the existence of the possibility of atonement and redemption, even if it is only an unrealized possibility, is what inspires these characters to rise above their circumstances and to use their freedom to become fully human.
Could we hope for another Civil War book from you? Or, are you on to something different? Do you know what is next?
My novels tend to start with fifty pages that I end up throwing away. I regret to say that I am currently working on what will surely become those very fifty pages. Ask me in a year and I ought to have a better answer.
