by Dara Horn
There were approximately 130,000 Jews living in the United States in 1860, a significant portion of whom were of Spanish-Jewish descent and had come to North America from the Caribbean and Latin America as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and a larger portion of whom were of German-Jewish descent and had arrived in the United States in the early nineteenth century. By 1860 they were dispersed throughout the nation, with the largest Jewish community in New York and the second largest in New Orleans. These Americans were as divided as the rest of the country over the issues surrounding the Civil War, usually but not always along geographic lines. At Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, the oldest German-Jewish congregation in New York City, the nationally prominent rabbi at the time of the Civil War, Dr. Morris Raphall, was known for his pro-slavery stance. His Jewish opponents on the national level included, among many others, Rabbi David Einhorn, an outspoken abolitionist in the pro-Southern city of Baltimore. (New York’s B’nai Jeshurun is a large and vibrant congregation today—and known for its progressive politics.)
Many scenes in this novel are drawn directly from historical events. Perhaps the least well known of these is the expulsion of the Jews from conquered areas of the South. Northern general Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order Number 11 from his headquarters in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on December 17, 1862, the text of which is reproduced verbatim in the novel. This order expelled the Jews from the Department of the Tennessee, an administrative territory covering areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi, for the ostensible reason that the Jews “as a class” were war profiteers. It resulted not only in the forced evacuation of Jewish families within twenty-four hours, but also in the imprisonment of those who refused to comply, as well as instances of property seizure. The order was overturned by President Lincoln three weeks later, when a delegation representing thirty-five Jewish families expelled from Paducah, Kentucky, visited the White House to plead to return to their homes.
Other incidents in the novel drawn from historical sources include the description of the slave auction, whose details come from interviews with ex-slaves that were collected by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. The dialogue involving Dorrie and Dabney in the aforementioned scene is taken almost verbatim (along with its dialect) from an 1859 article in the New York Herald, written by an undercover correspondent who attended the auction of Pierce Butler’s slaves in Savannah, Georgia. The details of espionage in the novel, such as the types of codes used by the North and the South, are also well documented, as is the Legal League, a network of African-American spies who worked for the North by providing information on Southern troop movements and also by maintaining an ancillary underground railroad used by Northern spies (both white and black) to move between North and South.
I am most grateful to the many writers and scholars, living and dead, whose works provided me with the historical background for this book. First among these are Bertram Korn, author of the pioneering study American Jewry and the Civil War; Eli Evans, author of the masterful biography Judah Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate; and Robert Rosen, author of the comprehensive and fascinating The Jewish Confederates, from all of which I drew extensively. I also used Jacob Rader Marcus’s Memoirs of American Jews, itself an indispensable resource, and occasionally consulted American Jewish newspapers from the period, including the Jewish Messenger and the Israelite. Concerning espionage, I drew from sources including Edwin C. Fishel’s The Secret War for the Union, Alan Axelrod’s The War Between the Spies, Larry Eggleston’s Women of the Civil War, David Kahn’s The Codebreakers, which offers very technical explanations of certain Civil War ciphers, and Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assasination of Lincoln by William Tidwell and James O. Hall. The last of these is quite controversial for its unabashedly speculative probing of potential links between the Confederate spy network and the murder of Abraham Lincoln. (For a viewpoint quite opposite Tidwell and Hall’s, see Beware the People Weeping and other works by Thomas Turner.) For general information on the war and the period I have relied upon works such as Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, as well as the U. S. government’s compendium of war documentation, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. For the fall of Richmond I drew from Jay Winik’s April 1865, in addition to several contemporaneous articles from the Richmond Whig, the only local newspaper whose offices were not destroyed during the city’s self-destruction; for the December 1862 raid on Holly Springs, I relied on the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. On the culture of German-Jewish immigrants and their children, I used Studies in Judaica Americana, a volume of academic essays on the subject, as well as the less academic (and less informed on Jewish cultural matters) “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York by Steven Birmingham, a book best enjoyed as American business history. I also drew from A Century of Judaism in New York, the celebratory 1925 volume published on the occasion of the centennial of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.
These citations represent only the tiniest fraction of the vast resources available to any reader interested in this period. While I have tried to remain loyal to my fact-checking past, I can only hope that true Civil War buffs will do me the great honor of respecting my imagination as well.
MY MORE PERSONAL DEBTS in this book are both small and large. I am grateful to the editors of Granta, in whose Spring 2007 issue I was privileged to publish an early version of part of this book, and to former Granta editor Matt Weiland for his generous comments at that time. Dr. Nathan Winter, my family’s teacher of generations, has continued to inspire me from the world to come through his extensive library, in which I first came across Bertram Korn’s book and many other relevant works of history. I owe my initial interest in Jewish history in New Orleans to those who welcomed me to the New Orleans Jewish Community Center’s book fair in 2002 and directed me to the old Jewish cemetery. I owe the riddle concerning the opposite of meat to Benjamin Lebwohl, and I also acknowledge the inspiration of my cousin Ross Linker, who, at our Passover seder when he was five years old, offered a memorably literal interpretation of the biblical phrase “Pour out Thy wrath.”
As always, I owe tremendous debts to my agent, Gary Morris, and my editor, Alane Salierno Mason, for their immense generosity, sensitive criticism, and enthusiasm toward my work. And as always, I am even more grateful to my “in-house” editors: my siblings, Jordana, Zachary, and Ariel, all three of whom are professional writers or artists, and particularly Ariel and her husband, Donny, who allowed me to write this book in their apartment; my parents, Susan and Matthew Horn, who patiently awaited each serially published chapter with comments and encouragement; and my husband, Brendan Schulman, whose work as a careful reader inspired many elements of the story, and who knows the meaning of devotion.
And last, I am honored to thank those who have served as the greatest impediments to the completion of this novel: Maya and Ari, my dark-haired girl and my blond-haired boy. As I finish this book, I have had the privilege of hearing Maya recite the traditional Four Questions at the Passover seder, beginning with the Hebrew words “How is this night different from all other nights?” I hope her father and I will be blessed to hear our children asking these and many other questions on many Passovers to come—and, someday, to know that they understand the answers. This book is for them.