More Book Notes: Dara Horn's In the Image

If this is Saturday, it must be time for another musing about a book I've read recently, since I'm avoiding

1. Tedious fiddling with footnotes for the book I'm writing, 

2. Sweeping the front porch and walkway, where the maple tree in the front yard is dropping early spring gunk with an abandon verging on madness, 

3. Starting a pot of beans for chili, as I've promised Steve I'll do, 

4. Finally writing those two sympathy cards I've put off for over a week, 

5. Finally organizing the stacks of books I'm using for the footnoting, 

6. Vacuuming, dusting, doing a thorough bathroom cleaning,

7. Responding, way too slowly, to the many welcome comments here in the past few days, 

8. Catching up on a nightmare list of emails (nightmare, because long, and my catching up is long deferred), 

9. Annotating that recipe for pumpkin bread and getting it to my aunt, 

10. Responding to a wonderful call and wonderful voicemail message yesterday, and thanking several readers of Bilgrimage for their wonderful support, etc., etc.

So, Saturday: you know the routine, because it's probably much the same at your house.  And so, as Steve often says, let's pretend we did all the things on the list but do something more enjoyable (a Catholic upbringing, even a purposeful Germanic one, finds it somewhat easier to slough off duties than an earnest Protestant one).  Let's talk about books instead of chores . . . .  

Here's a recent book I read with quite a bit of zest: Dara Horn's debut novel In the Image.  I had already discovered Horn, and cottoned to her work, when I read her All Other Nights last year.

And what's not to like about a Civil War novel that tells the story of the war from the vantage point of a Jewish family with mixed Union and Confederate sympathies, and which includes a plot to assassinate Judah P. Benjamin, as well as a family of quirky, sly daughters spying for the South, one of whom speaks only in palindromes and anagrams?  The zany, detailed sense of alternative history that runs through Horn's work: that's part of what grabs my attention.

And the sense that everyone counts, that no story is ever utterly lost: that, too, attracts me in a way I can't resist, because this has long been a foundational theme of my own thinking.  And it's foundational to her first novel In the Image, which weaves together tragic stories from old-world shtetls with equally tragic ones in the new world, along with tales of tefillin chucked into New York Harbor by people starting a new life, and who imagine that tragedy and heritage and otherness and difference can be sloughed off like old skin . . .  but who imagine wrongly.

And so one of the tasks of the novel is to weave together the stories which demonstrate that who we were in the past--as a people, as individuals--is always intrinsically connected to who we are in the present.  Since as Faulkner (who read the Jewish scriptures almost as obsessively as a Talmudic scholar does) famously said, "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."

And I suspect that what Faulkner may have found so compelling in even the driest and most abstruse books of Jewish scripture (who reads 2 Samuel, after all, to do anything but skip over the details, the long, obsessive list of dead names; who reads 2 Samuel to find the title and inspiration for a novel?!) is the novelistic sense, the strong sense of narrative line--the sense that everyone has a story and every story counts--that runs through all of the books of the "old" testament.  

And through much of Jewish literature, which has no choice except to struggle with the facticity of unmerited human suffering and tragedy, since that's what Christian civilization has dished out for the Jewish people for centuries now.  Something that should be occupying the attention of Christians all around the world now, as we grapple with the bewildering, illuminating stories of the Jewish and Christian scriptures that, in our view, all lead up to a single story of unmerited, redemptive suffering which proves that even the most insignificant and wasted life of all can count in the eyes of a God who sees things rather differently than we humans see . . . . (And with that perspective how did we ever imagine we were really understanding the meaning of the paschal story when we prayed triumphalistically for the conversion of the Jews on the very day we read the story of the crucifixion?)

It's this affirmation that stories count, that every story counts, which draws me to writers steeped in their Jewish heritage like Dara Horn.  It's the sense of strong narrative lines, of our moral obligation to tease out those lines in the lives of forebears (and contemporaries) treated by the powerful forces of their day as if their lives have no merit or meaning at all: this is what draws me to read Dara Horn or Daniel Mendelsohn or Jonathan Safran Foer or Michael Chabon or Joanna Hershon or Lev Grossman, whose Codex intrigued me earlier this year for the very same reasons that I found In the Image intriguing.

So many stories.  So little time.  And such a weight of history on the shoulders of Christians, a weight of guilt for the way in which we have treated the Jewish people over the entire course of Christian history--a theme that, I repeat, ought to be central to our meditation as we make our way through Lent each year.  Because nothing about the paschal stories makes any sense at all unless we face our historic guilt vis-a-vis the people in whose midst Jesus was born, and begin atoning for it--and listening to and making the voices of our brothers and sisters in the Abrahamic tradition count.

And listening to and making them count first of all, perhaps, by ceasing to read the stories of the Jewish scriptures, which have a right to stand on their own, as prefigurations of our story, of the Christian story . . . .