Horn is a novelist devoted to Jewish themes. Her previous novel, “The World to Come,’’ was also a story of Jews in dark times, haunted by the past and tormented by the present. Beginning with its title (which echoes one of the Four Questions from the Passover liturgy), “All Other Nights’’ is a Passover story, and the images Horn draws on, the metaphors she reaches for, are Jewish ones. The novel is slow to develop, but its ultimate success stems from its religious underpinnings. Its symbolic withdrawals are underwritten by the gold of the biblical narrative. Those resonances - the parallels Horn draws between those slaves and these, between the redeemer of the Old Testament and His manifold successors - give the novel a richness and vigor often lacking in contemporary fiction about this country’s bloodiest war.
For Jacob Rappaport, son of a New York entrepreneur caught behind enemy lines on a mission to uncover a Confederate spy, freedom from bondage is hardly a metaphor to be trotted out once a year with the unleavened bread. Himself freed from the indentured servitude of a loveless marriage by enlistment, Jacob’s experience of the South is of a vast sleight-of-hand trick: “The delusion was grand, glorious, and they were all part of it.’’ The South’s master apologists turn slavery into freedom, and the oppressors into the oppressed. Judah Benjamin, Jefferson Davis’s right-hand man, shows up at Jacob’s uncle’s Passover Seder to draw an implicit parallel between the Jewish people and the Confederacy, referring to one of the most famous passages in the Haggadah text: “Every time they rise up to destroy us, Providence rescues us from their hands.’’
