Dara Horn and Antisemitism

 Two Novels

Dara Horn is a fascinating author, and I’ve read several of her novels in the past, as well as her book of essays titled People Love Dead Jews. (Reviewed here.) Somehow I missed one earlier novel titled Eternal Life (published in 2018), but I have just now read it, and I find it compelling. All of her books are centered on Jewish characters in a very special way, intentionally different from most fiction that I read.

Eternal describes the life of a woman named Rachel, who was born at the end of the Second Temple era in Jerusalem (that is, in the first century of the common era). As a very young woman, Rachel made a vow that caused her to be unable to die. Therefore, at the beginning of the novel, she is an elderly woman who lives in modern America, though her memories span 2000 years.

The details of Rachel's early life in Jerusalem in the first century are beautifully presented. Her memory of the burning of the Temple by the Romans is especially vivid: it “did not burn, not at first. It melted. Silver and gold plating on its surfaces heated until the precious metals shivered and slid down the massive limestone walls, solid becoming liquid.” (p. 201) After witnessing the destruction of Jerusalem, Rachel escapes, and survives to be old, but she doesn't die. Rather, she continues to lead new lives over and over again. 

Eventually, eternal life seems to her to be more of a curse than it is a blessing. Through her repeated experience of being a young woman, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an old lady, and then starting over and repeating the same emotional and personal joys and sorrows, Rachel learns much, but feels a sense of futility: “Youth was no doubt wasted on the young, but only she knew how much of old age was wasted on those near death.” (p. 7)

Here is how Rachel sees eternal life: at first it seemed good, then not so much:

“I just thought I was lucky…. It wasn’t obvious, at least not right away. I still got hungry and thirsty every day like everyone else; I still had the same body, the same feelings. Years passed, and I even looked older, my face sagged, my skin loosened, my hair got lighter and thinner—maybe just from being exposed to the sun, or maybe it was more from suffering than from age, I don’t know. It was enough that no one who knew me noticed anything strange, and at first I didn’t either. But nothing else changed at all. Illnesses didn’t matter, injuries didn’t matter. Then there was a plague, whole neighborhoods were wiped out, but nothing happened to me…. And then years after that, the city was besieged and everyone starved, but for us it was irrelevant. When the city finally burned I saw that it wasn’t my imagination. I stepped through the fires and walked out the city gates.” (p. 27)

The main action of the novel take place in the early years of the 21st century; that is, now. Even cooking causes her to feel alienated by her extraordinarily long life. She prepares a Sabbath meal with dishes like kugel. Her 20th century family see it as old and traditional -- but it seems new to her. These dishes have only been invented for a few hundred years! 

"It wasn’t even possible to cook her childhood foods anymore. They required clay ovens, copper heating coils, inverted iron bowls over open fires, grains that no longer existed, animals whose parts were no longer for sale. Once, about seventy years ago, she had seen a jug of olive oil in a store, for the first time in over a century: ages had passed since she had lived anywhere near where olives grew, or near where anyone might buy them. Olive oil! She had felt a thrill when she bought it. But at home she had discovered that there was nothing to eat it with, and when she tasted it, the flavorless slick on her tongue bore no resemblance at all to what she remembered."  (pp. 82-83). 

Rachel makes an effort to find a way out of her predicament via modern technology -- but no spoilers! I was surprised at how suspenseful I found her story and that of both her past and of her current families.

A few years ago, I read Horn’s novel A Guide for the Perplexed, which is also historic fiction with magical realist leanings, and settings in three different historic eras. The unifying theme of the three parallel stories is memory. The unifying location is the Cairo Genizah, a storehouse of documents from the medieval era that was discovered in the late 19th century. The unifying philosophy comes from Maimonides' book A Guide for the Perplexed. Another unifying theme is the relationship of pairs of brothers or sisters; each of the three plot lines includes at least one and sometimes more than one set of siblings. There are similarities between the two novels, and both of them are very inventive and fun to read. (Though not everyone agrees with me that they are good to read!)

American Antisemitism as Dara Horn Observes It

From The Atlantic, April 3, 2023. (Article Here)

In the Atlantic this week, Dara Horn documents the constant barrage of minor antisemitic insults and comments that many Jewish people have recently been experiencing. She writes: “At a time when many people in other minority groups have become bold in publicizing the tiniest of slights, these American Jews instead expressed deep shame in sharing these stories with me, feeling that they had no right to complain. After all, as many of them told me, it wasn’t the Holocaust.”

The Atlantic article is mainly about Horn's view of the purpose and content of Holocaust museums and Holocaust education in American schools. She suggests several penetrating questions about how these efforts affect living people, and if they change anyone's attitudes or behaviors. Horn writes:

“American Holocaust education, in this museum and nearly everywhere else, never ends with Jews alive today. Instead it ends by segueing to other genocides, or to other minorities’ suffering. ...This erasure feels completely normal. Better than normal, even: noble, humane.

“But when one reaches the end of the exhibition on American slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., one does not then enter an exhibition highlighting the enslavement of other groups throughout world history, or a room full of interactive touchscreens about human trafficking today, asking that visitors become “upstanders” in fighting it. That approach would be an insult to Black history, ignoring Black people’s current experiences while turning their past oppression into nothing but a symbol for something else, something that actually matters. It is dehumanizing to be treated as a symbol. It is even more dehumanizing to be treated as a warning.”

Many and complicated issues arise in Horn's treatment of the many holocaust museums and their approach to Jewish life, Jewish history, and Jewish identity. Mostly, they do not deal with current issues of any kind, and in fact avoid discussing anything contemporary. Her observations about why and how they avoid facing the currents of antisemitism in our society and internationally are very penetrating. I recommend this article, but I don't want to try to summarize the entire document. Please read it!

Reviews © 2023 mae sander.