Tag Archive: All Other Nights
All Other Nights: A Novel tells the story of Jacob Rapport, a young Jew from Manhattan who runs away from home and joins the Union Army to escape his parents’ choice of fiancée. A New Yorker primed to climb the ranks of his father’s business might not seem the most likely candidate for a successful Civil War soldier, but Jacob displays a knack for doing what he’s told, and is eventually called on for some very high-stakes missions. Such as? Well, when Jacob’s superiors discover that he has relatives in New Orleans, including an uncle involved in a plot to assassinate President Lincoln, Jacob is recruited for his first task as a spy: to cross enemy lines disguised as a Confederate soldier and to murder his own uncle.
Jacob’s success at this heartbreaking mission proves his loyalty to the Union cause, and qualifies him for another challenge—this time to seduce and marry the daughter of one of his father’s Virginia business partners, a suspected Confederate spy. In this novel, author Dana Horn achieves a balance between compelling storytelling and deeper truths surrounding our personal and political identities.
We at Wonders & Marvels have three (3) copies of All Other Nights as our giveaway. To enter, simply answer in response to this question by 11:59 p.m. EST April 4, 2010:
Real or fictional, who is your favorite spy?
Good luck! (Sorry, at this time, books can only be shipped in the U.S.)
By Dara Horn
The old American South ranks high on the historical list of institutionally bigoted societies – which is why most people are surprised to learn that the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, whose face was even featured on the Confederate two-dollar bill, was a Jewish man named Judah Benjamin. But what is even more astonishing than a Jewish man’s prominence in Confederate politics was his outlandish escape from the Confederacy at the war’s end. It’s a story that makes 19th-century dime novels seem realistic.
Judah Benjamin was one of those rare people who are described, depending on the speaker’s beliefs, as either ambitious, brilliant, craven, lucky, or blessed. Born in 1811 in the Caribbean to impoverished Jewish parents whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492, Benjamin moved with his family to the Carolinas at the age of two.
A child prodigy, he was admitted to Yale Law School at the age of 14—and if you’re wondering how on earth anyone could be admitted to Yale Law School at the age of 14, well, the people at Yale must have been wondering too, because he was expelled from Yale Law School at the age of 16. His lack of a law degree, and the persistent public anti-semitism that dogged him all his life, did not stop him from becoming a successful attorney in New Orleans, or from being elected to the United States Senate, where he represented Louisiana, or from becoming a contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court just before Louisiana’s secession from the Union. Within the Confederacy, he had a similarly meteoric career, becoming the Confederate president’s most trusted adviser and spymaster while simultaneously serving as Secretary of State.
Yet with the Confederacy’s collapse, his indestructibility rose from mere persistence into the realm of the supernatural. As the Southern capital burned and the Confederate cabinet fled their Yankee pursuers, Benjamin recited poetry and philosophy to cheer his despairing colleagues. When Lincoln was assassinated and Northerners began to call for Confederate leaders’ executions, the cabinet refugees split up—and Benjamin’s miraculous odyssey began.
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