All Other Nights
A Novel by Dara Horn
Reading Group Guide
I. About the Author
II. Reading Group Questions:
III. An Interview with Dara Horn
What attracted you to the idea of setting a book in the Civil War?
I think that every historical novel is really much
more about the time in which it is written than the time in which it takes
place, and that is very true for this book. The Civil War attracted me because
of how polarized
In 2002, after my first novel was published, I was
invited to speak in
It was this tension between the
need to prove one’s loyalty to one’s home and a sense of closeness to people
on the other side that I found fascinating. Civil War fiction is usually written
from an uncompromising point of view—most often sympathetic to the South. I
wanted to write something that showed the cruelty and the humanity of both
sides, and in the Jewish community of the time I found a way to express it.
Do you think of yourself as someone with strong political views?
I am a political moderate, which makes me an
endangered species. I am generally able to disagree with someone’s point of
view without also believing that they are the incarnation of evil. For this
reason I’m particularly fascinated by situations where two sides demonize each
other—especially when there is a certain legitimacy to each side.
To me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the Civil War was that most
people who fought and died for the South didn’t own slaves. Instead they saw
themselves as defending their homes and defending an agrarian, traditionalist,
independence-minded culture that they rightly saw as threatened by the way in
which industry and technology had already changed the North. Most novels about
the Civil War take a very particular approach to who the “good guys” and the
“bad guys” are, whether novels nostalgic for the old South or novels that
explore the evils of slavery. In my writing, I am more drawn to situations where
the boundaries between good and evil don’t run between people, but within
them.
Your previous novels were quite openly engaged with the theological
dimension of religion. Does that have any role in this book?
It’s true that the supernatural is explicit in my
previous books in a way that isn’t apparent in this novel. But I do feel that
there is a theological dimension to the book in the ethical dilemmas the
characters confront and in the ways the characters change. The title “All
Other Nights” refers to the Passover liturgy, when the youngest person present
asks the question, “How is this night different from all other nights?” But
the question behind that question is more difficult to answer: Are we—or do we
have to be—the same people from one night to the next? Do people ever really
change? Or, to put it in religious terms, is repentance possible?
Nineteenth-century Americans often referred to God as “
Are the characters in the novel based on real people?
There are several real historical figures who appear in the book. The
most prominent of these is Judah Benjamin. We think of the Civil War South as
being institutionally bigoted, and of course it was—which is why it is
striking that Benjamin was Jewish. Benjamin was a prominent lawyer who was a
Other characters in the book are also inspired by real people, including
both Jewish and non-Jewish spies for the North and the South. Some of these
simply provided fun facts—there was one female Southern spy who had the
ability to dislocate her own jaw at will, for instance, and who was engaged to
sixteen men at the same time. But one of the more compelling figures to inspire
these characters was Eugenia Levy Phillips. She was a Southern Jewish woman who
spied for the Confederacy and was imprisoned twice by Union forces—once in the
home of fellow spy Rose Greenhow and once in a boxcar in the
What lies behind your decision to mix genuine historical figures and
fictional characters in your work, rather than writing “pure” history or
“pure” fiction?
The kind of fiction I tend to like best is usually the kind rooted in
reality, allowing the reader to imagine his or her way into a life lived by
someone else. One particularly voyeuristic way to achieve this is to write about
someone who actually existed. In some ways, these real-life characters become a
kind of historical detail in the book, like riding crops and gas lamps—with
the effect of making the story’s setting more vivid and making the invented
characters seem all the more real in the process.
But as an academic with a tremendous respect for the
unanswerable questions in historical research, I am also terribly cautious about
the way I include real people in fiction. I’ve never tried to write something
from the point of view of a historical figure, for instance, because I think it
would be very arrogant to pretend to know the thoughts of someone who really did
once have his own thoughts and consciousness. Instead I introduce these people
through the fictional characters who encounter them, and much of what comes
through of these figures’ personalities is filtered through the fictional
character’s point of view—just as our view of these real people is colored
by our own perspectives when we try to learn about their lives from historical
sources. The challenge of trying to bring these people to life in fiction, in
ways that would be impossible if I were writing conventional history, is to
serve the story while trying to be fair to the reality of these people’s
lives.
While, as I’ve said, many of the characters in the book are composites
or inspired by real-life historical figures, only three are “borrowed” from
history with the known details of their real lives left intact: Judah Benjamin
(the Confederate secretary of state), Edwin Booth (a renowned New York actor who
was the brother of Lincoln’s assassin), and John Surratt (a Confederate
courier who was arrested for his alleged involvement in Lincoln’s murder,
though he avoided conviction). Of course, there is some security in depicting
people long dead, but less than you’d expect. My previous novel, The World
to Come, also featured real-life figures: the painter Marc Chagall and the
Yiddish writer Der Nister, both safely dead. But that was when I discovered the
phenomenon of the Angry Heir. (Chagall’s granddaughter liked the book, though
I did hear from others who were less thrilled.) I look forward to hearing from
more enraged descendants this time, especially those who have had over a century
for their grievances to fester. I hope they’ll believe me that I meant no
disrespect.
There is a lot of emphasis in the novel on the ability or inability to say
no. What got you thinking about that?
I was interested in exploring the ways in which freedom is a mental
rather than a physical state. One character in the book, Caleb Johnson, is a
slave who secretly works for the North as an agent for the Legal League, a
network of African American spies that maintained an ancillary underground
railroad for both black and white agents employed by the Northern government.
(The Legal League really did exist. I based Caleb’s character in part on John
Scobell, a renowned African American spy who posed as a slave, as well as on
other African American agents from the period.) When Caleb takes Jacob in at one
point in the novel, it becomes clear that Caleb has made his own choices about
what to devote himself to, and as a result he is far more of a free person than
Jacob is. Throughout the book, Jacob makes choices without realizing that all
along he had the freedom to do otherwise.
People frequently give up their mental liberty in
exchange for any number of things—pride, status, ambition, love, or any other
desire—to fulfill the expectations of others, often without being aware of
what they have lost. Freedom isn’t about having no obligations, but about the
ability to choose one’s obligations.
I love your dedication to your children as “the cause.” Yet, given
that this novel has strong political themes and for each side the “cause” is
political, it also makes me question: If our children are the only “cause,”
or a given “cause” is held as emotionally close as our children, can
anything ever be achieved, or resolved, in politics?
In the book, one of the characters claims that “raising children is one
of the only things one can do with one’s life,” because, as he puts it,
“You can devote yourself to a cause, but what cause could be worth more than a
child?” I do think that devotion to a cause is something that only people
without children usually have the luxury of expressing. People who are parents
have something else in their lives that will almost always matter more to them.
But people with children are also more likely to have something else that people
without children are somewhat less likely to have, which is empathy for other
people’s children. Large social changes tend to happen only when enough people
see the problem at hand as something that affects their own children—or when
enough people are motivated to care about other people’s children.
What were the particular satisfactions (or frustrations) of writing this
novel?
My two previous novels are written from many different perspectives, with
scenes taking place at various points in history, and never in chronological
order. For me this was always an easier way to write a book—to follow whatever
character’s point of view was most intriguing, or use whatever historical
period seemed most relevant to the themes of the story that emerged. As I began
writing this book, though, I wondered if it would be possible for me to write a
more traditionally structured novel: to write from just one character’s point
of view, with the events happening chronologically. That is, with no tricks.
Many contemporary novels (aspects of my previous books included) tend to
rely on tricks—on jumping around in time or perspective, or telling stories in
a manner far more complicated than necessary. This can be valuable, but only to
a point. Ultimately the reader needs a story and characters worth caring about
for their own sake, and not merely for the styles or techniques used to present
them. It was very refreshing for me to write this book almost as a
nineteenth-century novel, complete with all the shameless action-adventure plot
twists that nineteenth-century readers would have expected—the book includes a
shoot-out at a wedding, a kidnapping plot, a prison break (or three), and so on.
It was a lot of fun, but it also forced me to focus on what matters most in
writing a novel: making the plot and the characters compelling.
There are several different kinds of codes and puzzles in the book—is
that a particular fascination for you?
The great thing about Civil War ciphers and codes, for the general
reader, is that they are on a human scale. After the 1930s, military codes
became machine-generated, but ciphers prior to that were really just created by
clever people, and were breakable by clever people too. That makes them a lot
more fun for readers who don’t have a supercomputer in their garage.
The codes used by the North and the South are especially fun in this way.
The Northern ciphers changed continuously but were always based on a
word-reordering system, where the words of a message were restructured according
to particular patterns and then certain crucial words were replaced with
substitutes. This makes the coded messages seem easy to translate, but they are
actually quite difficult to crack—so much so that when Southerners intercepted
coded Northern messages, they had to resort to publishing them in the newspapers
and asking the general public for help in decoding them. No one ever cracked the
code. But the main Southern cipher was based on a two-layered alphabet
substitution system—which makes the coded messages look completely
indecipherable, but which is actually quite easy to break once you know how the
letters are being substituted. (There are more detailed explanations of both
ciphers at the end of this guide.)
Some of the codes in the book are simply there for nonhistorical fun.
Rose, the youngest of the spy sisters, speaks in palindromes and anagrams, a
talent she uses when ciphering real messages. These codes and puzzles interest
me because people almost always speak in some sort of code. In the novel and in
real life, an enormous percentage of daily conversation consists of both outward
and hidden meanings, and the way something is said is almost always more
important that the words themselves.
Your first two books ranged around the world, from suburban
I’ve been fortunate to travel a lot in my life;
I’ve been to about fifty countries around the world, and that is something
that has deeply influenced my novels. Now that I have three children aged three
and under, I spend a lot more time closer to home. But I feel lucky to be able
to draw from my experiences in other countries and cultures, even while
writing a book set in my native country—because while this book takes place in
America, it is a very different America from the one that anyone alive today has
ever lived in. I don’t know where my next book might go—at the moment I’ve
only written the first fifty pages that I’m sure to throw away—but it will
likely involve another country, even if it’s only this country in the past.
IV. A Note on Codes and Ciphers
WISE
ASSASSINATE IN ORDERED HIM HIS CIVIL IN FOR TONIGHT IS NIGHTS YOKE THE QUESTION
FOR IS UNCLE TO ASIA MINT TO ON COMMANDERS WAR THE JACOB DIFFERENT FROM
RAPPAPORT WHISKEY IT HAVE PASSOVER MURDER WHO DARA PLOTTING OWN HE ANSWERED A
DURING JEWISH OTHER HOW ALL A WALNUT IS ALREADY 1862 HIS IS HORN.
(First
two sentences of book description, in
THE
The
cipher used by the
The
first word in the ciphered message, “WISE,” indicates that the words have
been arranged in six columns of nine lines each, and that the route for reading
them correctly is up the third column, down the second, up the fourth, down the
fifth, up the first, and then down the sixth. Here are the words rearranged
according to this route, with substitute words decoded. (The last two words,
“Dara” and “Horn,” are of course meaningless.)
1
2
3
4
5
6
How
is
tonight
different
from
all
other
nights?
For
Jacob
Rappaport,
a
(YOKE)
(WHISKEY) (WALNUT)
Jewish
soldier
in
the
Union
Army
during
the
Civil
War,
it
is
a
question
his
commanders have
already
answered
for
him:
on
Passover,
1862,
he
is
ordered
to
murder
his
(MINT)
own
uncle
in
(
plotting
to
assassinate
While
the use of normal words makes this code seem easier to crack than the
alphabetically based Confederate code, it was in fact far more difficult to
decipher and far more efficient than the Southern one. Although the cipher’s
coding booklet fell into enemy hands on several occasions, and although many
message were intercepted, the South never managed to decipher any version of
this code. In fact, Southern desperation to decode this cipher was so intense
that intercepted Northern messages were published in Southern newspapers, with
an appeal to the public to try to crack the code. No one ever did.
* * *
(First
two sentences of book description, in Confederate cipher)
THE
CONFEDERATE CIPHER SYSTEM
While
several local ciphers were used on a small scale in the South, the primary
cipher used by the Confederacy during the Civil War was the Vigenere Tableau,
also known as the
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
a
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
b
b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a
c
c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b
d
d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c
e
e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d
f
f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e
g
g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f
h
h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g
i
i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h
j
j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i
k
k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j
l
l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k
m
m n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l
n
n o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m
o
o p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n
p
p q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
q
q r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p
r
r s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q
s
s t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r
t
t u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s
u
u v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t
v
v w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u
w
w x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v
x
x y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w
y
y z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x
z
z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y
Much
to the South’s detriment, only three key phrases were used with this Square
throughout the war: “complete victory,” “
Message:
h o w, i s, t o n i g h t, d i f f e r e n t, f r o m, a l l, o t h e r, n i g h
t s
Key:
c o m, e r, e t r i b u t, i o n c o m e r e, t r i b, u t i, o n c o m,
e r e t r i
Cipher:
j c i, m i, x h e q h b m, l w s h s d i e x, y i w n, u e t, c g j s d,
r z k a k a
Deciphering
the message entailed reversing the process by finding the cipher letter on the
left-hand side of the Square and the key-phrase letter on the top side of the
Square, and recording the letter at their junction. Some agents eased this
process by separating words with commas or other punctuation—a choice that
ultimately made the code much easier to crack when such messages fell into enemy
hands.
Despite
the South’s distinct advantage in many matters of espionage during the Civil
War, this cipher system proved to be inefficient and often ineffective, since
the slightest error (which anyone trying it will find difficult to avoid) can
render a message illegible. One Confederate major, after trying for twelve hours
to decipher a message containing an error, actually rode his horse around the
Union formations on the battlefield to reach the the general who had sent the
message and ask him in person what he was trying to say. The North soon was able
to reverse-engineer this cipher and use it to their advantage.
Sources:
William R. Plum, The Military Telegraph
During the Civil War in the