Saxton Reads! & Reviews

   Please welcome Guest Blogger, Dara Horn, author of All Other Nights.

My newest novel, All Other Nights, is about Jewish spies during the American Civil War. The main character, Jacob Rappaport, is a 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. They then send down to New Orleans to assassinate his own uncle before the plot can progress. After this harrowing mission, his commanders have another "opportunity" for him, involving the daughter of a Virginia family friend. But this time Jacob’s task isn’t to murder the spy, but to marry her. Suffice it to say that this marriage doesn’t work out the way anyone expected.

I first began thinking about this subject while on a book tour in New Orleans years ago, during which I came across a Jewish cemetery. I was surprised to see graves there that dated to the early 1800s. When I began reading more, I discovered a wealth of information about Jewish communities during the Civil War, including many paradoxes that went against the typical ways we think of our country during that time. Ulysses Grant, for instance, the general from the supposedly more enlightened North, was the one who expelled the Jews from areas he conquered in the South. And in the institutionally racist South, the Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin, was Jewish; he was Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s closest confidant and also served as spymaster. Many real spies for both sides, both Jewish and non-Jewish, served as inspiration for the characters in the book. I became interested in the espionage stories because of the way they dramatized questions of loyalty. Such questions were very personal to American Jews at the time, who felt tremendously loyal and grateful to their country (whether North or South) but whose loyalty was not always rewarded. But loyalty is also what defines each person in every circumstance, then and now. Ultimately this is a story about freedom and its consequences, and what makes us free is our ability to choose our loyalties—to determine for ourselves who deserves our devotion, and why.

I think every historical novel is really about the time in which it is written, rather than the time in which it ostensibly takes place, and that is very true for this book. I was drawn to this subject because of how polarized the country has become in recent years, how impossible it has become to even have a conversation about current events without knowing in advance what the other person believes. So many of these divisions really do go back to the Civil War; when we talk about "red states" and "blue states," they usually follow the Mason-Dixon line and its legacies. We think of the Civil War as being fought over slavery, but the enduring divide in America is over something far more subtle: between the American ideal of valuing independence and the right of each family to maintain its property and traditions, and the equally American ideal of valuing social justice and progress at all costs. A similar divide exists in Jewish culture between conservative and progressive beliefs, each of which has a claim to being the heart of the tradition and neither of which really is. And this divide—in American life or anywhere else—will never really go away, because it exists within each person: the everlasting tension between the people we were born to be and the people we hope to become.