By Paul Carrier
Applying a new frame of reference to the past can be both exciting and humbling. The former because of what we can learn. The latter because we are reminded how little we know.
So it is with All Other Nights by Dara Horn, a novel set during the Civil War. I always thought I had a reasonably good working knowledge of the war between the states, and yet All Other Nights, a spellbinding read, taught me how wrong I was.
The novel explores the war from the vantage points of various Jewish families, north and south, providing an intriguing perspective on a conflict that writers usually explore by focusing on other social groups - Brahmin abolitionists, Southern plantation owners, rank-and-file soldiers, slaves and ex-slaves.
What Horn has created is a stunning and inspiring love story wrapped in the trappings of an action-packed yarn about the war, replete with espionage, murder, intrigue, betrayal and redemption. Her canvas is as large as the war itself and as intimate as the workings of the human heart.
Jacob Rappaport of New York, a Union soldier turned spy, experiences the war like a kite buffeted by a strong wind. In the few years covered by the novel, the plot takes so many twists that you marvel at Horn’s ability to cram so much into such a relatively short span of time.
All Other Nights gallops along like a cavalryman’s runaway horse, as Rappaport races through escapades in several states, north and south. In the course of his adventures, we are asked to reflect on the concept of free will, and the fact that we always have choices in life, even when a chain of events may appear to be beyond our control.
Above all else, the novel is a story of devotion, loss and longing, as Rappaport, inadvertently separated from his wife when he hurriedly leaves the Confederacy to avoid capture, later learns that she has died. He hatches a dangerous scheme that requires him to deceive the highest levels of the Confederate government as he tries to determine if reports of his wife's death are true.
Through it all, we never lose sight of the fact that All Other Nights offers a Jewish take on the war.
We learn of a rabbi in New York who urges his congregation to support slavery as the war approaches. That is no novelist’s fancy. The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference says rabbis were openly divided on the issue of slavery, with some opposing it while others claimed it was, as the Desk Reference puts it, “biblically sanctioned.”
We are treated to a fictionalized portrayal of the quite real Judah Benjamin, a Jewish lawyer and politician who served in the U.S. Senate before the war and later held three Cabinet posts in the Confederate government - attorney general, secretary of war and, when we meet him in the novel, secretary of state.
And we are reminded (or, if you’re like me, learn for the first time) that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant had all of the Jews expelled from the large area under his control as he tried to capture Vicksburg, Mississippi. President Lincoln later rescinded Grant’s order, but not before it plays a role in the quick-moving plot of All Other Nights.
Jews represented less than 1 percent of the American population in 1860. Yet, as Benjamin’s role in the Confederate government makes clear, they were prominent on both sides of the conflict. There were large Jewish populations in such northern cities as New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Baltimore, and significant concentrations in Charleston and New Orleans as well.
In the end, the marvelously varied and idiosyncratic cast of characters in All Other Nights, and the book's roller-coaster ride of a plot, make it clear that love and hatred, as well as honor and degradation, transcend religion and ethnicity. Especially in a tale as well-told as this one.
