On the final pages of this book, the main character, Jacob
Rappaport sees his two-year-old daughter for the first time. His face is
disfigured from a munitions dump explosion. He lives in constant pain and can
only walk slowly with the aid of a cane. The city of Richmond, VA, is burning. A
plot against President Abraham Lincoln is ordered aborted – assuming that Jacob
can convince a volatile courier to ride north.
All Other Nights makes perfect sense looking back from the end of the book. But
the reader starting page one had better fasten her seatbelt; it’s going to be a
bumpy ride for suspension of disbelief.
The Jacob Rappaport of the book’s end is a wiser, stronger, more clear-sighted
man compared to his younger self. The Jacob Rappaport of the first chapter is
too weak to say no to a horribly unsuitable marriage; naïve enough to believe
that following orders to murder his uncle will lead to personal and Jewish glory
for the Union; and too unsophisticated to consider the unintended consequences
of his actions.
The young Jacob is unlikeable – so much so it’s tempting to put this book down
before Jacob has even climbed out of the barrel that hid him on the way to New
Orleans.
That is not to say that this isn’t a great summer book. It is. It has romance,
history, and thrilling tales of wartime spying. But most of all, it pulls away
the curtain on the roles of Jewish Americans during the Civil War.
More than 10,000 Jewish men fought in the Civil War, 70 percent of whom fought
for the Union. Given that some of the earliest Jewish settlers were Sephardic
Jews who settled in southern cities such as Charleston and Savannah, it’s not
surprising that nearly 3,000 Jewish men fought for the Confederacy.
While many of the Jewish immigrants who came to America in the decades prior to
the Civil War found it to be welcoming and much freer than the ghettos of
Ashkenaz, they also discovered the limits to that acceptance. One fascinating
portion of the book deals with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s expulsion of the Jews
from Tennessee, accusing them of war profiteering. (The decree was soon
rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln.)
This is Dara Horn’s third book, published in 2009. It took root when she was a
19-year-old fact checker for American Heritage magazine. Many of the characters
are based on actual people, including Judah Benjamin, who was the first Jew to
serve in the U.S. Senate. Representing Louisiana, he was pro-slavery, prompting
Sen. Benjamin Franklin Wade of Ohio to describe him as “a Hebrew with Egyptian
principles.” Judah Benjamin served as attorney general, Secretary of War and
Secretary of State for the Confederacy under Jefferson Davis.
She also draws on the true stories of a variety of women spies (for both the
Confederacy and the Union) for the creation of the Levy sisters. Muses for these
characters include the real Eugenia Levy Phillips; Rose Greenhow, whose father
had been murdered by a slave; Phoebe Pember, the head nurses for Richmond’s
Chimborazo Hospital, the largest in the South; and Ginnie and Lottie Moon,
inventive women with much in common with Horn’s fictional sisters, Lottie and
Eugenia Levy. |
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