All Other Nights by Dara Horn

All Other Nights was called to my attention by a friend who strongly recommended it. It didn’t sound promising—a book about a Jewish spy during the Civil War—but when I picked up a copy and started reading, I couldn’t put it down.

Jacob Rappaport is the 19-year-old son of a wealthy New York merchant. He is a dutiful son, but when his father arranges a marriage of convenience for him, he panics and enlists in the Union Army. It is 1861 and the Civil War is just beginning. Although he has repudiated his father, it turns out that his father’s family and business connections will be important to his military career.

Jacob adjusts well to the life of a soldier. Then his superior officers discover that he is related to a man in New Orleans who is known to be contemplating the assassination of Lincoln, and they recruit him as a spy and assassin. Jacob accepts the assignment, too unsure of himself and his opinions to do anything other than comply.

The novel progresses as a bildungsroman. Jacob starts out as a naïve young man focused on his military assignments:

“If he had been a braver man, or a wiser man, he might have asked God what he was doing, or why he was doing it, or whether the dead around him [he had paused in a cemetery], eternally burdened with their own remorse, envied him the chance to choose. But instead he looked at the sun and merely saw that the hour was growing late, and that it was time to continue to do as he was told.”

But time passes and his attitude changes. Working as an undercover agent in Richmond, he looks with horror at the practice of slavery, and with disbelief at family and family connections who seem to accept that world without qualms. The underlying theme in this novel is the potential conflict between family obligations and patriotism. As Jacob grows in experience he tries to use what he learns to resolve these issues for himself.

The characters are very colorful, and many of the situations quite moving. For instance, the night before his wedding, Jacob talks with Mr. Isaacs, a friend of his bride’s family, who tells him that this is not his first war. “Wars come and go, young man. They come and go, and you come and go with them. It’s like the weather, like a storm or drought. All you can do is take shelter and wait for them to pass.” Jacob, however, is not so passive, and participates actively in the war’s progress, but increasingly tortured by the unanswerable question of whether he is doing the right thing. You could have said no, he is told on several occasions, but it is made clear that circumstances did not necessarily give him that freedom.

Readers will enjoy the convolutions of this book. The spying is enhanced with secret codes, romance, and vivid descriptions of life in the South as the war progresses. You will be pleased to meet the four Levy sisters. Lottie, the eldest, is capable of a genuine rebel yell. Eugenie, the next, is a magician. Phoebe, the third, is an expert whittler. And Rose, the youngest, is a master of the palindrome. But you will never forget the Starvation Ball, nor the evacuation of Richmond in 1865.

In an Author’s Note at the end of the book, Dara Horn talks about her extensive research and points out the many characters and events in her story that are taken from her sources. Readers will be surprised to meet Judah Benjamin, a prominent and talented Jewish statesman who became right-hand man to Jefferson Davis. And they will no doubt be even more surprised to discover that General Grant expelled all the Jews from the Department of the Tennessee, an order that Lincoln rescinded three weeks later.

An extraordinary young writer who received several prizes for each of her previous novels, Horn has been named one of Granta Magazine’s Best Young American Novelists. This is her third novel.

Reviewed by Charlene Posner

All Other Nights by Dara Horn
W. W. Norton & Company, 2009
Cloth, 363 pp., $24.95
ISBN-10: 0393064921