Murder (and Marriage) During the Civil War

All Other Nights By Dara Horn W.W. Norton and Co. 2009, $24.95, pp. 384

This has been a vintage year for Civil War buffs. Among the rash of Abraham Lincoln biographies is Charles Bracelen Flood’s seminal 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History. For fans of Margaret Mitchell’s novel and all-time favorite film Gone With the Wind, critic and essayist Molly Haskell’s Frankly, My Dear provides fresh and frequently startling insights into the production of the book and film as well as reasons for their enduring appeal.

Just when you think you’ve read it all and there may be no other story or reflection of the Civil War that does not seem either repetitious or derivative, along comes Dara Horn’s All Other Nights, a novel that is engaging, enlightening and entertaining—three e’s for excellent!

Horn’s story provides a fictional adventure of the most divisive, destructive war in our nation’s history, and she spins her tale from a Jewish perspective. The major characters of her narrative include Jewish merchants, soldiers, spies, orphans, a magician, a whittler, an 11-year-old word-puzzle genius, and Judah P. Benjamin, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ closest adviser and confidant. Scenes shift from New York to New Orleans to Richmond and include encounters set in remote and less familiar terrain.

The hero of this Odyssean journey is introduced in a stunning first sentence that provides omens as well as clues as to what is to follow: “Inside a barrel in the bottom of a boat with a canteen of water wedged between his legs and a packet of poison concealed in his pocket, Jacob Rappaport felt a knot tightening in his stomach—not because he was about to do something dangerous, but because he was about to do something wrong.”

Nineteen-year-old Jacob is on his way to New Orleans to exploit his family relationship and gain access to the home of his uncle Harris Hyams, a loyal Southern secessionist suspected of a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Jacob’s mission, defined by his Union commander, is to kill his uncle “before the plot can progress.”

Once out of the barrel, Jacob is on his way. Since the days of the Last Supper, it may be unique in the history of Seders that a guest attends the celebration with the intention of betraying the host. As the youngest person at the table, Jacob is invited by his uncle to ask the Four Questions. “With a crack in his voice, he began to sing the traditional words, trying not to imagine what they might mean: ‘How is this night different from all other nights?’” Though tormented by self-doubt and moral misgivings, Jacob elects to deliver the dose of poison to his uncle’s cup of Passover wine.

Pleased with Jacob’s success as Union spy and hit-man, Jacob’s superior officers award him an equally challenging test of loyalty and conscience. “Rappaport, are you familiar with the Levy family of New Babylon, Virginia?” Before the interview is concluded, Jacob has acknowledged that Philip Mordecai Levy was indeed a former business associate of his father. But it is not the merchant prince whom the Union intelligence officers have targeted for their daring agent. It is Eugenia (Jeannie), one of four Levy sisters, whom they believe is at the helm of a Confederate spy ring.

When Jacob announces that under no circumstances will he “assassinate a woman,” the General in command tells him, “We don’t want you to murder her…. We want you to marry her.”

The story of Jacob’s courtship and eventual marriage to the beautiful, enigmatic magician Jeannie is spiced with intrigue, passion and, eventually, a violent confrontation at their wedding. The father of the bride shoots and kills an armed intruder, William Wilhelm Williams, Jeannie’s former suitor and a Confederate army officer.

It may be indicative of Dara Horn’s feelings that Williams, along with the Union officers who command Jacob, is portrayed less sympathetically than her galaxy of Jewish extras. Among my favorites is Solomon Isaacs, a widower whom Jacob concludes is “…one of those old Jewish men…who grow harder and sturdier as they get older, becoming more solid, their remorse and sadness steadying them, rooting them like trees.”

Isaacs advises Jacob to be patient with his wife, and in one of the novel’s provocative soliloquies tells him, “Christian men think that when they marry, they are buying a slave—someone to love them, honor them, obey them.… You are the slave, not she. Remember that. You have to let her rule you, guide you. It’s the secret of every happy Jewish family for the past 3,000 years. There is nothing more manly in the world than serving her. You will be the better for it, and so will your children.”

Among the virtues of the novel is that this seemingly definitive pronouncement is tested and dramatized by the war and a diverse cast of female characters who, to varying degrees, much like the heroine Jeannie, are more reminiscent of Olympian goddesses than Jewish princesses. Conflicting values, provocative insights and complex characters are subtly woven into this remarkably ingenious and unpredictable saga of a nation whose races and families are ravaged by the Civil War. Dara Horn has composed a classic page-turner that invites her readers to consider nuances of history, relationships and morality along with what happens next.

Sidney Offit is a writer, teacher and curator of the George Polk Journalism Awards. His most recent book is a memoir, Friends, Writers and Other Countrymen.