Episode 16: Dara Horn
On Being the Lorax at Her Seder Table
Dara Horn’s Five Books:
Mr. Mani by A B Yehoshua
Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem
The Last Consolation Vanished by Zalmen Gradowski
Journey to the Land of No by Roya Hakakian
One Little Goat by Dara Horn
For feedback or author recommendations please email us at team@fivebookspod.org
Find us online at www.fivebookspod.org
The Five Books has the advisory and promotional support of the Jewish Book Council. Jewish Book Council is a nonprofit dedicated to amplifying and celebrating Jewish literature and supporting authors and readers. Stay up to date on the latest in Jewish literature! https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/events/celebrate
The Five Books is fiscally sponsored by FJC, a 501c3 public charity.
Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels The World to Come, All Other Nights, and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Her latest book is the graphic novel One Little Goat.
At the Passover seder, an out-of-control family cannot find their afikoman and as a result, they are trapped at a seder that cannot end. Six months in, a wisecracking talking goat shows up at their door with bad news: Thousands of years of previous seders have accumulated underneath their seder, and their afikoman is stuck in one of them. Now the family’s “wise child” must travel down with the goat through centuries of previous Passovers to find it– and to discover the questions he needs to start asking.
Dara Horn is also the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards, among many other honors. Horn received her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, studying Yiddish and Hebrew. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard.
-
The Five Books: Dara Horn on Being the Lorax at Her Seder Table
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Dara Horn about her new graphic novel about a Passover Seder called One Little Goat.Dara Horn:
This came from an idea I had since I was a child of sitting in a seder and feeling like there were all these seders underneath my seder. Because I feel like the Seder is this portal to the past.Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books, including the novels The World to Come, All Other Nights, and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Dara is also the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards, among many other honors.
The first thing that I always was fascinated with since I was a child is time. It's sort of this larger question of how do we live as mortals in a world that outlasts us. I was really fascinated by the ways that Jewish life seemed to be filled with people who were trying to answer that question.
In our riveting conversation, we'll talk about the Jewish concept of time, what we get wrong about antisemitism right now, and the outsized legacy of Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem.
This is a book that changed the way I think about Ashkenazi Jewish history. It changed the way I think about what books can do. And it made me realize how belittling so much of what we think of was when we think about the history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
I'm recording this as I prepare to host a crowd for Passover, and I find myself coming back to Dara's insights about the holiday and the way the Seder functions as a portal to the past. I hope the discussion resonates for you and maybe even makes it to your Seder table conversation.
Welcome to The Five Books, Dara. I'm really excited to talk to you. I really appreciated seeing the books that you chose for our conversation today because having read your fiction and your book, People Love Dead Jews, these were all books that you selected that you've referenced in your writing, that are alive in your fiction. So I appreciated that these are all books that have actively resonated for you throughout your life and your writing career.
We're talking today about your latest work of middle grade fiction, a graphic novel called One Little Goat, which is also a really concise and wry distillation of Jewish history and Jewish values, which is no small feat for a graphic novel, especially one that's accessible to kids. I just thought it was just a fantastic addition to the Jewish pantheon of books. So thank you for being here and thank you for sharing One Little Goat with us.
Thank you so much for having me, and this is — I love the format of this podcast. This is so unique and it's a, like what a wonderful opportunity to really dive into just you know, not just this book, but how books relate to each other.
Yeah, thank you. So first give us a little intro to One Little Goat and what it's about.
Sure, so One Little Goat is about a family at a seder where they cannot find the afikomen, this piece of matzah that's hidden during the seder that you actually have to, are required to find in order to complete the meal. And because no one can find this afikomen, the seder can't end and this family is trapped at their seder for six months. And the food keeps regenerating on the table and no one can leave. And six months in, there's a knock on the door.
The oldest child goes to answer the door and it's a talking goat who says, “I'm the scapegoat. I'm the reason for everyone's problems. I know where your afikomen is and I can help you find it.” And the kid's like, great, where is it? And the goat says, no, no, no, not where, when. And then the goat explains that over the past six months while they've been trapped at this never ending seder, thousands of years of previous seders have accumulated underneath their seder. And they now have to travel down into those thousands of years of previous seders in order to find the afikomen and bring their seder to an end. So it ends up being kind of a journey through Jewish history.
It's so much fun. I love all the time skipping, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, as we talk about all the other books. You have published many op-eds and articles and pieces about antisemitism, culminating in your critically acclaimed book, People Love Dead Jews. I've heard you describe yourself as the Lorax of antisemitism.
It was actually one of my sisters who called me that, yes.
Okay. So I was hoping you could just dive into a little what you mean by that or what she meant by that.
Sure. Well, so, I mean, I published this book called People Love Dead Jews in 2021. It's a collection of essays about... I hadn't even really seen it as a book about antisemitism when I was writing it. I saw it as a book about the role that dead Jews play in the non-Jewish world's imagination. And I traveled around the world sort of looking at this problem. I look at Holocaust commemoration, I look at what the travel industry calls Jewish heritage sites. Also looking at responses to attacks on American Jews in the years leading up to when I published the book in ‘21. And, you know, I didn't really see this as a personal book. I saw this as really just sort of, here's a problem that I've noticed in my writing and in my scholarship and as a travel writer, as a journalist.
What happened after that book came out was, it was like this flood gates opened. I was just overwhelmed with responses from Jewish readers. And these were readers from every possible walk of life, religious people, secular people, old people, young people, people from many different parts of the United States and the world who were all sending me exactly the same message or telling me exactly the same thing, which was, “I felt uncomfortable my whole life, I never understood why. This book articulated this for me. Thank you.” And then they said, “I never told anybody this before, but. And then they would tell me these horror stories from their own lives of their own experiences with antisemitism. And then they're like, thanks for writing your book. And then they'd be like, can you help? And I just felt slammed by this. I suddenly had become like this emotional receptacle for the whole Jewish community's angst. And that was before October 7th, 2023.
And since then, this basically became institutionalized. People looking to me to solve these problems for them. I was part of this antisemitism advisory group to the now former president of Harvard — didn't take my advice or anyone else's. I ended up testifying in Congress as part of the congressional investigation of Harvard. Prior to that, I had been involved in the Biden administration with the White House Task Force Combating Antisemitism. It just sort of, like, suddenly this became this bizarre situation where, and you know, people will come to me with whatever kind of crisis or problem they're dealing with about this issue. And, you know, I really would just want to say to them, you know, you're really coming to me with this. Like literally my next book is about a talking goat. It's, like, kind of shocking the kinds of problems people come to me with. And I am working on another book about this now. I mean, I founded a nonprofit also to address this problem. So yeah, so I'm trying to address this, but I mean, yeah, this is like way above my pay grade.
Book One: a Jewish Book from Childhood — Mr. Mani by Aleph Bet Yehoshua.
Aleph Bet Yehoshua's Mr. Mani is about five generations of a Sephardic family in Jerusalem. This family basically has a suicidal gene. And what moved me about this book is that the book is written backwards. And you see how it affects the way I write my own books, especially this book. The opening chapter takes place in what was then the present day, which is, you know, the late 80s, and then with one generation of the family. And then the next chapter takes place a generation earlier in the 1940s and the chapter before that takes place in 1918. The chapter before that takes place in 1898 and the chapter before that takes place in 1848. And you travel down through time through this family. And it's almost like the family is like an archeological tel, like a, you know, with layers of civilization that you're breaking through as you read through the book.
You know, it is explicitly what you do in One Little Goat of going backwards through time. So what is it about that backwards look that appeals to you?
I think that it's — the way we experience the past within the present is not through this timeline in order, but it's through the people we meet who are initially only people that we are alive at the same time as. So the people who are one or two generations older than us. And that's far as we're able to look back in terms of our personal interactions. And then I think that we understand the past through each of those people, whether it's our ancestors or whether it's like a chain of people who are teaching each other or learning from each other or reading each other's work. To me, that's very much what we're enacting also at the Passover Seder. There's sort of this burrowing through time back to the exodus from Egypt, which we're all supposed to imagine that we personally experienced. And so it's like there's this idea that the Jewish historian, Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi has this book called Zahor, which means to remember, where he talks about history versus memory. And he says that there's this Jewish concept of time, which doesn't really involve history, which is like, you know, telling events in order. It involves memory, which is, as he puts it, instead of the past being a series of events you contemplate at a distance, the past is a series of situations into which one is existentially drawn.
We actually had a conversation with Yehuda Kurtzer who talked about the book Zahor as one of his books. So it's a nice reference back. And there's so much in there that we get to talk about with all of these books that you selected, including this idea of the tel, which I know has been, you know, an idea you've been drawn to. I'm interested that you read this book, you said when you were 14, I know you have a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard in Hebrew and Yiddish. So I'm curious what pulled you in that direction already from a young age.
I was looking for something that I wasn't finding. When I was growing up, I was really fascinated by, I mean, the, well, okay, the first thing that I'm — always was fascinated with since I was a child is time. I regard time as my topic as a writer. It's sort of this larger question of how do we live as mortals in a world that outlasts us? And to me, this is sort of, you know, and I wasn't articulating it that way as a child, obviously, I was thinking more like getting into bed at the end of the day and thinking, you know, this day that just ended is gone. Now, where did it go? And thinking that there needed to be a place where these past moments were stored. I was really fascinated by the ways that Jewish life seemed to be filled with people who were trying to answer that question. And that question of, you know, these days, the past, where did they go? And I saw that in my family's Jewish practice. I mean, I saw it at, certainly at the Seder, right, where you're expected to be reenacting this moment from the past. But it's true, like it sort of saturates Jewish life, right? There's this idea that we all are standing at Sinai. You know, you keep reading the same book over and over again. And those practices, you know, sort of, I was just fascinated by the tools of literature and tradition as a way of defeating this problem of time.
So those were the, and I, like I said, I would not have been able to articulate it that way as a kid. And so as a kid, I was sort of, I didn't know how to articulate it so what I would say is like, “I'm interested in learning more about Jewish literature,” right? Or “I want to read more Jewish books.” And you know, when you're, you know, 13 years old in 1990 in New Jersey, and you say, I want to read Jewish books, people hand you like a book by Philip Roth, which was just, just not what I was looking for.
It's got its own merits, but not what I was looking for. And I just felt like everything that was sort of, know, quote “Jewish literature” that was written in English, it just wasn't, it wasn't anything that was engaging with this like vast civilization, right? It was sort of just writing, people like Philip Roth were really writing about Judaism as a social identity, right? Or something like that. It was more about, you know, American assimilation, those kinds of questions, which are interesting questions, they weren't what interested me at that time.
And that was what started drawing me to Israeli literature was because I was looking for that deeper engagement with this longer and vaster civilization. And that was, and I, so I first started finding that in Hebrew. I mean, I started finding it by learning Hebrew, by reading Hebrew literature. It started with, I think with Agnon, who's the only Hebrew writer who ever won the Nobel Prize, but his writing is, you know, he writes deliberately in like a, you know, Mishnaic Hebrew, like an ancient Hebrew, and he's playing around with all these kinds of references. And I just started reading a lot of Israeli literature. And that later then brought me, when I was in college, that brought me to Yiddish literature.
So yeah, that was the path. I mean, look, it comes from my family. Also, my mother has a PhD in Jewish studies. So it's not like this came from nowhere, but this, you know, this particular interest in this particular problem of the way we understand time and historical consciousness. I was looking for it and I wasn't finding it in American Jewish literature for the most part that was written in English. And that absence was also something that inspired me in my own writing because I was sort of trying to fill in what I saw being missing.
And you write about some of your very robust Jewish education that took place outside of school. I was wondering if you could tell us a little more about what that looked like for you.
Yes. Well, so yeah, my mother has a PhD in Jewish studies and actually her PhD is in Jewish education. And so it might surprise you to learn that we, I mean my, me and my three siblings, we didn't attend Jewish schools, but we did sort of do absolutely everything else. And so what that looked like when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties was summer camp. I mean, I went to a camp Ramah for many years. It was, I went to like a synagogue religious school. Then I started going when I was in, like, after my bat mitzvah in middle school, there was a program at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. They had a weekend program for teenagers that I used to attend on Sundays. It was like an extra day of school. It was from nine to two or something, which was taught by the rabbinical students. So that was studying rabbinic texts. I remember reading modern Hebrew poetry in those classes. I realized I wasn't going to learn a language one day a week. So this actually just came from me, I started taking Hebrew language classes at the local Jewish Community Center and I started doing that when I was 15 in high school. It was a class that met four hours a week. It was like eight to 10, couple nights a week. And I did this while I was a very busy high school student. And I didn't realize that when you take a, you know, adult education class at the JCC, everyone in the class was retired. I mean, I was the only person in the class who wasn't retired and I was 15. So I was doing that. I spent a couple summers in Israel with different summer programs. So yeah, a lot of different things that were like outside of school.
Yeah. I just want to go back to Mr. Mani. Yehoshua called this book “Intergenerational Psychoanalysis.” And I was just curious, you've written lots of books based on significant amounts of research. I just wanted to kind of dig into that intergenerational psychoanalysis a little bit and how you relate to that both in this book and in your own writing.
Yes. Well, so, Yehoshua, actually, it's funny for personal reasons, I think he does a lot of the structure of his book is psychoanalysis because I think his wife was a psychoanalyst. So I think that that was a reason that that form appealed to him. His books tend to be written in this conversational form. Like, that's — the way you would be talking to a therapist about your problems or something. And that book also is written, it's written as like these one way conversations where in each chapter you meet a person who encountered a member of this family. But in terms of the intergenerational psychoanalysis, to me, it's less about psychoanalysis per se than about this inherited experiences that don't have to be inherited. You know, it doesn't have to be through parents. It can be through teachers and students. It can be from writer to reader. So I don't believe that this has to be something that is biological or something like that.
But I think that there is something about, you know, that there's this experience that happened in the past that is affecting you. And even if it didn't happen to you, it has its impact on you. And I don't think you have to believe in anything woo woo to understand what that means. You don't have to believe in anything supernatural. You also don't have to sort of go a genetic or biological route to understand this because I think that like that is the way civilizations work, right?
There’s, generations lay this groundwork for, of what they want their children, whether biological or their students or the people who come after them, what you want those people to inherit. You're setting that up for them and you're setting that up based on your own experience. And part of it can be avoiding something that you don't want to repeat or it can be, you know, here's something that I did have that I loved that I want you to have too. You know, I think the psychoanalysis part comes in maybe when there's something like, you know, what Freud called this repetition compulsion, right? Where you're repeating something that you don't want to repeat that's a traumatic experience. And yeah, Freud does make a cameo in the book One Little Goat. So it's sort of an inside joke.
Yeah, and that relates to what you were talking about from Professor Yerushalmi's book also of just seeing yourself in the past. And I'm wondering how you relate to that personally, that idea of experiencing history through going backwards.
You know, to me it was something growing up I found it grounding and comforting because I think that as an American Jew, you're living in this bifurcated world where there's this sort of foundational mythology in American life, which is that the past doesn't matter, right? It's like, it doesn't matter where you came from, it doesn't matter who your parents were, who your grandparents were, whatever. What matters is what you do, what the opportunities this country gives you. And that's what we call the American dream. You know, we are constantly building new things and we're building a Walmart on an Indian burial ground or whatever. That's sort of the ethos of this country. And it's not to say that that's true, but that is the way that Americans like to think about their culture and societies about moving forward. And I've always sort of felt caught between that sort of demand of Americans and this Jewish culture that has actually exactly the opposite founding message. Right? It's the opposite founding message. It's actually saying that you were standing at Sinai, you know, you came out of Egypt. It's like, you know, actually the most important things in your life happened thousands of years before you were born and there's nothing you can do about it. Right? I mean, and this is like a very, you know, there's a very stark contrast here that I think is the source of a lot of cognitive dissonance for American Jews.
And in terms of my personal experience, I will just say that, like, there's an uncanniness, I think, to what a lot of American Jews have experienced in recent years, and particularly since October 7th, 2023, with the sort of meteoric rise of antisemitism in the United States. That has been something that's been very shocking to a lot of American Jews. And I think it's been something that you know, people who are raised with any kind of traditional background in Judaism, you look at things like how in the Passover Seder, there's this passage where it says, you know, in every generation people rise up to destroy the Jews and then, you know, God rescues us from their hands. Most of us, when we were learning those kinds of stories and that framing, we thought of it as like, this is learning about the past. We weren't thinking about this as like preparation for the future. And now it's like, you sort of realize that it was preparation for the future, and that that is the way this tradition has always seen the past, has been as preparation for the future.
As someone who has immersed yourself in this past, does it feel surprising to you what's happened in the last year and a half?
I mean, I think everybody was surprised by the ferocity of it, but not really. I mean, because I had already been seeing all this because of my role as the antisemitism Lorax, sadly. I mean, it's funny, like with all the campus stuff, which I, you know, I had a front row seat to that because of my role on this Harvard committee. What's funny about that is that I had already published a piece in 2022 about campus antisemitism because I had been experiencing this and had been sent all these stories and I had been speaking on college campuses where I had been hearing these horror stories from students. That was true before October 7th for me because I had this, like, front row seat. In that sense, none of those things were terribly surprising to me, but it was just an acceleration of it.
Book Two: A Jewish Book from Adulthood — Tevye the Dairyman by Sholem Aleichem.
You think you're familiar, but you aren't because you're familiar with a Broadway musical called Fiddler on the Roof. This is the original book that is the basis for that musical. It's really not the same. I'm gonna give you one example: Tevye doesn't live in a shtetl. Tevye doesn't live in a shtetl! Tevye lives in a very small resort village that is where wealthy people from Kiev come as like their summer home. It's like the Hamptons for Kiev. He's the only Jewish family for miles and miles and miles around. That's why he has so much trouble finding people to marry his daughters. If he lived in a shtetl, this wouldn't be a problem.
So, I mean, that's like one example of many, many examples I could give you, but this is an amazing book that is because it's, and I don't know of any other book in any language that's written this way. It's written in real time. It is a book that's published over the course of 25 years serially. It's also written like Alef Bet Yehoshua's book as a conversation where Tevye is speaking to the author Sholem Aleichem. The first episode comes out in the 1890s when the character Tevye is a young man with young children. And then at the very end, the last chapter, his wife's already dead, his last daughter is at home. Actually, there's been many other deaths I could go into, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that is not in that musical.
This is a book that...changed the way I think about Ashkenazi Jewish history. It changed the way I think about what books can do. And it made me realize how belittling so much of what we think of it was when we think about the history of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Tell me more about that.
How belittling it is? I mean, we literally turn this into a song and dance number, first of all, which, you know, I don't have a problem with that in and of itself, but the fact that that's the only thing people know. It's an incredibly sophisticated piece of literature that works on like 10 different levels. You almost have to know four languages even to understand the humor in this book. And it's what I've noticed is that I think that, I think that there's a post-Holocaust approach that American Jews take to Eastern European Jewish life where they think of these people as these like sad sack losers who, you know, didn't know any better and, you know, weren't able to save themselves. And because they had this like, they were like these like sad, like, you know, simple pious people who weren't nearly as sophisticated as us.
These people were our intellectual superiors, incredibly sophisticated literary tradition and, you know, Tevye in this book, I mean, he's supposed to be an ignorant person. He's an uneducated person, but he's — the humor that's woven into it is like nine layers deep. And it's like, you have to know, certainly the Hebrew Bible, you have to know the Tanakh, you have to understand like these like Talmudic references. You have to understand references to the Sidur, right? To the Jewish liturgy. But you also have to recognize like, like, kind of jokes that he's making about Russian literature, jokes he's making about Ukrainian literature, right? I mean, there's like all these pieces to it. They're like so profound. ultimately what's most profound about it is that this is a meditation on this theological problem, which is, you know, the problem of, the problem of suffering and the way people think about suffering. And this is where I think that our perspective as American readers is really distorted honestly by Christianity.
I think as English language readers, we come to this expectation of literature as being something that is supposed to be redemptive, right? It's like the main character is supposed to be saved, right? If that doesn't happen, the main character is supposed to have an epiphany. If that doesn't happen, the main character is supposed to have like a moment of grace. These are all really Christian terms. None of that stuff happens in Yiddish literature. Like, no one's ever saved, obviously. No one ever has a moment of grace. No one ever has an epiphany. Like it's just instead these characters just keep on enduring. mean, it's this masterclass in resilience. And with, what Sholem Aleichem does in this book is it takes you through this, like, history of the Jews in the Russian Empire. And it goes from the 1890s until the last episode, he writes this like in, I think it's in 1913 or 14, you know, because he dies during the first World War. But I mean, it takes you through like the first Russian Revolution, the first Russian Constitution, and each of the daughter's marriages is a confrontation with a different one of these political challenges to Russian Jews. I could go on with this. I've taught this before, as you can tell, I give lectures about this. So maybe I'll stop now, but there's a lot of, there's so many pieces to it that are so misunderstood.
I think we're all gonna look at the play and all of the adaptations much differently after.
Yes, yes. I want to say it is a great play. I mean, I have nothing against the play, but it's just the problem is that, you know, the play in isolation from all of Yiddish literature, that this is like, you know, the Old World. Like, no, that's not what this is.
Book Three: A book that changed your worldview — The Last Consolation Vanished by Zalman Gradowski.
So in the same way that Tevye the Dairyman, it's sort of like I read that book and I was like, oh my God, what I thought I knew about Eastern European Jewish life is just not at all, not at all what I thought I knew. So this is a book that actually just came out in English in the past year or two. It's called The Last Consolation Vanished by Zalman Gradowski. I wrote a lot in People Love Dead Jews, I've written since then, about this need that we have in English to sort of see literature as this redemptive thing. And I've critiqued this a lot in terms of the way people think about Holocaust literature. I have a whole chapter in my last book about Anne Frank and this misunderstanding of her work where people think, she said that “I still believe in spite of everything that people are really good at heart.” And it's like, “well, look, even this girl who died in the Holocaust thinks people are good at heart.” It's like, well, no. Anne Frank wrote that line about people being good at heart three weeks before she met people who weren't. So it's like, if this is what you're reading about the Holocaust, you're not reading, it's not a book about the Holocaust.
The Last Consolation Vanished is a book about the Holocaust. And if you think you've read a book about any books about the Holocaust, you're wrong if you haven't read this book. Zalman Gradowski, it's actually very similar to Anne Frank in that this is a young person who's writing about his experiences during the Holocaust and his work is discovered after his death. The difference is that Zalman Gradowski was writing his documents in Auschwitz, where he was a member of the, what the Nazis called the Sonderkommando. These were Jewish prisoners whose job at Auschwitz was to escort other Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers and then remove their bodies and burn them, and this is what they — he did this all day, every day for two years.
And he is actually a superhero. He organized the revolt at Auschwitz, where they succeeded in blowing up one of the crematoria. This revolt, of course, lasted one day, during which, of course, he was killed.
But he had written these documents — the Sonderkommando actually were given sort of additional privileges, so to speak, that other prisoners did not have because the Nazis needed them to be in shape to be able to haul bodies. So they had, like, a little bit more downtime. Their quarters were located next to another set of Jewish prisoners whose job was to go through the plunder of all the possessions that Jewish prisoners had brought with them. And so he was able, from those people, to get paper and pen and metal canisters in which he buried, he buried these, like, around the periphery of the crematoria and they were found after the war. And he writes about the experience of escorting Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers and then burning their bodies.
And it's not a redemptive story. There's not like a deep, you know, there's not like a, I still believe in spite of everything that people are good at heart. He's like, we need to live for revenge. That's what he says. We need to live for revenge. He doesn't wonder about how this, why this is happening. He knows. He's like, “these fires were started by the barbarians of the world who wanted to drive the darkness away from their lives with its light.”
I mean, he understands sadism, which is the foundation of the Holocaust and all antisemitism is sadism. And that's what like no one in Holocaust education ever talks about any of these things. We have this, like, bullshit story about, you know, people are good at heart and look how many upstanders there are and how can we draw some nice lesson about humanity. If you're looking for nice lessons about humanity, this is not the place to look. So yeah, if you think you've ever read a book about the Holocaust, you're wrong. Go read this book, Last Consolation Vanished by Zalman Gradovsky.
Yeah, I want to ask you about the upstanders, which you've written about. You say that focusing on the upstanders encourages people to see themselves as exceptions instead of demanding that they change society itself. And maybe this gets into the nonprofit that you've started, but what does that look like to you to change society itself?
Well, so there's a couple pieces here. I just noticed, and this comes from, not from my books, but from an essay I wrote about Holocaust education for the Atlantic. I published this in April of 2023. I traveled around the country, not just visiting museums, but meeting people who create museums, meeting people who create curricula for schools, going to teacher conferences, meeting with educators, meeting with students. I traveled around the country doing this and it was really overwhelming how this message about this happy upstander thing was just so prevalent. Like, everybody — that was the main books that people were reading were books about — upstanders, for your listeners, is what we used to call righteous Gentiles. These were people who were non-Jewish who rescued Jews from the Holocaust and, you know, very important story to tell. Statistically, unfortunately, statistically insignificant. And also, it's a story that's very comfortable for non-Jewish readers, right, because they're reading about this exception. So in terms of changing the society itself, you would need to read about how the society functions, right? What is the dynamic of antisemitism run through sadism? What is the thought leadership in a society that leads them to give a permission structure to antisemitism?
You would have to understand those things. You also would have to understand the content of Jewish civilization because the Nazi project was not just about, like, murdering 6 million people who were just like you and me. The Nazi project was about erasing Jewish civilization. And that was the thing I most noticed in traveling around the country, learning how students are learning about the Holocaust was seeing that, you know, there are many places around the country where Holocaust education is required in schools, it's very emphasized. There's not any place in this country where anyone is required to learn in school who are Jews. That task has been entirely outsourced to TikTok and we're living with the results. And I just don't understand why we would erase Jews from school curricula, why we would erase Jews from our understanding of Western civilization. I mean, you really can't understand the history of Western civilization without understanding Judaism. So. That is part of what my nonprofit is working on.
I do also want to ask you, you know, you write about how everything that is not the Holocaust is not the Holocaust, that there's a very high bar when we talk about antisemitism, if it has to meet the criteria of the Holocaust. And I just want to ask you what you make of this current moment, what you see as the analog, everyone sort of choosing a different year that they see in the lead up to World War II. I'm curious if you see it that way or how you understand it.
No. So I think about the dynamics of antisemitism really differently. I think that there's a very consistent through line, which is the denial of Jewish experience and the promotion of the idea that Jews are the obstacle to whatever your society values most. That is a consistent throughline and it shifts with different societies in terms of what they value most. So I think that you can look at different moments in history where this activates.
And it tends to correlate to new media, to different kinds of media, because new media is like the wild west and you can say anything you want. And that's what makes it really easy to promote lies. And this is about lying about Jewish reality and lying about who Jews are. And so I don't go back and pick like a moment and say like, this is what's similar, but I will say that one of things that I do when I do these workshops for school teachers, which is what my new nonprofit is doing is it's teaching in K to 12 schools about foundations of Jewish civilization and dynamics of antisemitism. But the way we understand dynamics of antisemitism is this question of how Jews are positioned as though they are opposed to whatever your society values most. And to me, the most important parallels to look at are after World War II. So, you know, because all Holocaust education, it's really rooted in the idea that this ends in 1945, which is absurd for 20,000 reasons. But I look at the example of Soviet antisemitism, which took the form of anti-Zionism.
I mean, the whole idea that, we're not, you know, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. That is a line that is straight from the KGB. All of the slogans that we're hearing today are Soviet or originated with the KGB in the 1960s. Like Zionism is racism. Zionism is genocide. Zionism is apartheid. Zionism is colonialism. All of these things are, these are KGB talking points. And then the other piece that I think is really important to look at is the Islamic Republic of Iran's capture of the human rights non-governmental organization apparatus. And that is something that you could trace to 2001 to the Durban Conference, the UN Durban Conference in South Africa, the Conference Against Racism. It was the first post-Soviet conference on racism and human rights. The Iranian regime captured that conference. They drafted the NGO policy statement for the UN, which is a 70 page policy statement about human rights. And there's only one country mentioned in that document as a violator of human rights and it's Israel in a 70 page document about issues around the world. And this was a very deliberate effort by the Iranian regime to deflect from its own human rights abuses at home and its own non-governmental organizations, which were its franchises around the world, which are things like Hamas and Hezbollah.
So to me, those are the most important things for people to understand. I don't think you go back to the racist model of antisemitism. You go back to the anti-Zionist model of antisemitism that was already present actually in 1918 is when the Bolsheviks first start talking about how they're not antisemitic, they're only anti-Zionist.
Well, that's uplifting.
So is, so, so totally is. I'm so much fun, right? That's what my family says about me.
Absolutely.
Book Four: The Book you're Reading Now, Journey to the Land of No by Roya Hakakian.
And it's about her experience growing up as a Jewish young girl and Jewish young woman in Tehran. And it's about the Iranian revolution in 1979 and about how that impacted her life. And it's just mind blowing because, you know, it's like she goes to a Jewish high school and the regime takes over her high school. The, her principal of her Jewish high school is replaced with someone who is from this Islamic regime. And then also seeing how much the entire society suffers under this regime, it's just amazing. So yeah, was reading that leading up to Purim.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Book — One Little Goat by Dara Horn.
So as we've talked about a little bit, it feels like you distilled so many of the big themes that you write about and are preoccupied with into this format. And so I'm curious why you chose a children's book and why you chose a graphic novel.
So this idea came to me, I was on a road trip with my family and we had stopped at a comic book shop. I have four children, they had come out of this comic book shop with armloads of books and they started fighting over this book by this cartoonist, Theo Ellsworth. And I was just like, what are you all fighting about? And at some point I just sort of borrowed this book from them and I was just enchanted by this illustrations. I had had this idea about the Seder. I’d been wanting to figure out a way to write about this for many years. This came from an idea I had since I was a child of, you know, sitting in a Seder and feeling like there were all these Seders underneath my Seder.
Because I feel like the Seder is this, like, portal to the past. Because you're always sort of reenacting previous Seders that, you know, like every, even like when you're sitting at that Seder table, whatever that looks like for you, like that moment feels more similar to like the Seder the previous year than it does to like something that happened the previous week. Right? Cause you're like, Oh, here's all the same people sitting at the table or maybe it's different. And then you're thinking back, Oh, well, he used to be sitting here and now he's no longer with us or whatever it is. Right. Or, oh now she has, you know, a new partner who's joining us, whatever the, you know, the people are there. You're always thinking about it in relationship to other seders. And that was true. You know, I remember being at these large seders when I was growing up that were you know, with people at the Seder table who were Holocaust survivors, people at the Seder who were from the former Soviet Union and who were relating those experiences to the Passover story. And it just always seems so obvious to me.
But then I just, you know, I wanted to sort of figure out a way to do this. And I sort of had this idea of like, it would be better as a kids book, it would be better as a graphic novel. But I'm like, I don't know how to draw. So that's never happening. And then I just saw this person's illustrations and there was something about the way he was —first of all, hilarious the way he draws, but also just like the way he was turning like these abstract ideas into these like very, very detailed pen and ink drawings. And I just thought this would be amazing if he was able to do this book. And I'm like, I bet he could imagine this in a way that would be more beautiful than what I had pictured. And that is what he did.
It is a perfect marriage. It really works so beautifully. And again, you know, this idea of the tel that's come up in so much of your writing. One character in there is the great grandmother who we come to learn has lived through the Warsaw uprising and she keeps telling everyone “we're doing it all wrong.” That felt a little bit like your voice. I wonder if that was true.
Yes, well definitely in my family I'm the person who's always telling everyone else that they're doing it wrong. That's definitely my, unfortunately, my personality. So yeah, someday I aspire to someday be the 98 year old lady at the Seder who's telling everyone else that they're doing it wrong.
I mean more that she's a Cassandra, she sort of...
Well, yes, that's true too, yes. And when you meet this family at the beginning, they're all just like, you know, the familiar experience that we all have of like, you here's all my annoying relatives and they're all each annoying in their own special way. And so, yeah, she is only presented as like, you the 98 year old great grandma who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and who never says anything ever except “you're all doing it wrong.” But then, of course, we go back to her Seder in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, which is, you know, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began on Pesach on Passover. And of course, this is the first time when she's like, you know, at this seder at a bunker and she's like, “we're doing it wrong.” And then she leaves the bunker with a Molotov cocktail in her hand.
Yeah, obviously, One Little Goat is a reference to the Chad Gadya song, which is a lighthearted song of woe, I guess, of one thing that happens after the other after the other. So I'm curious. There's so many different interpretations of understanding what it's talking about. And I wonder which ones resonate for you.
Yes, so Chad Gadya is a pretty late addition to the Passover Seder in the Ashkenazi tradition that comes in around the Middle Ages, I think. And the truth is, it's probably just a drinking song. Like after you've had four cups of wine, it's like a lot of other drinking songs, it's just like a cumulative, you know, 99 bottles of beer on the wall or something like that. But there's one interpretation of it that I find really compelling, which is that this is a story about Jewish history.
Right? Because the story is, you know, there's one little goat my father bought for two zuzim and then came the cat that ate the goat and then the dog that bit the cat and then the stick that beat the dog, et cetera, until you get to the angel of death, God kills the angel of death. This interpretation suggests that the goat is the Jewish people, that my father bought for two zuzim, my father is God and the two zuzim, the two coins are the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. That this was, you know, this was the real, how we create the relationship between the Jewish people and God.
And that all of these different elements in the song, the animals and all those other things in the song are these empires that conquered the Jewish people. They also then conquer each other. So, and I think that I'm going to get it wrong, but I think the cat is the Babylonians who first conquer, you know, conquer Judea. And then there's the, the dog is the Persians who actually end up conquering the Babylonians, but then also conquer Judea. And then, you know, these other elements of the song are these various other empires. There's these Greek empires, Roman empire. Later, there's a Byzantine, Christian empires, there's Islamic empires. And I think that the time when the song was written, it goes up to the crusaders who massacred Jews in the Rhineland at the time of the crusades. And then the hope is that God kills the angel of death. So that there's this idea that there's this eternal element to Jewish history. I just think it's like there's this comic element to it also, right? Because it's so absurd, right? I mean, you see that absurdity, which the cartoonist Theo Ellsworth really captures with this goat and all these creatures that are chasing him. And yeah, the absurdity is something that I wean into a lot in this book. And there's a lot of moments that I think are actually very funny, even though it's a, you know, Passover is a pretty scary story, but we invite children into it. And there's also a lot of humor in it as well. And I think that that song kind of captures that kind of dynamic.
And it makes total sense, the analogue that that song would be for all of your work of the time periods collapsing. The other thing that I was going to ask you about, you know, they go back all the way to before the Bar Kokhba revolt, like sort of a last stand, which fails. And you've talked about both Bar Kokhba and Gradowski as sort of these both pointless and powerful last stands. In One Little Goat, though, there's this idea of hope, which isn't so prevalent in some of your other books. So I'm curious how you relate to that in both wanting to portray these events that don't end well and also this idea of hope.
Well, yeah, so there's a couple of moments in the book where the historical circumstances are such that it doesn't end well, as you say, right? So like, Warsaw ghetto uprising, obviously failed uprising, the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the year 135 CE for people aren't familiar with it. Another failed revolt that was even mentioned in the Haggadah when it's like the five rabbis who are spending all night discussing the Exodus from Egypt, these are Rabbi Akiva and his colleagues. These were rabbis during the time of the Mishnah and part of the Talmud where they were involved in this revolt against Rome. Akiva was a supporter of Bar Kokhba and his rebellion. And then these rabbis all end up being executed by the Romans. So yeah, another failed revolt. But I mean, that is when Akiva says to him, you know, that's what this night is all about is about hope. Every moment of the seder is about standing on the precipice of something where you don't know what's going to happen next. And that's actually the original seder.
The original seder is not after they come out of Egypt. The original Seder is the night before they leave Egypt, which is of course near the end of this book, it appears. That's the night of what the Torah calls the night of watching or the night of vigil. They're told to sacrifice a lamb. They put the blood of the sacrificial lamb on their door posts of their home so that the angel of death will pass over their homes. And then they're supposed to be eating this sacrificial lamb and they eat the matzah and the maror. And that's the first Seder. It's before the Exodus happens.
They don't know that it's going to work. They don't know that they're going to be freed. They don't know that they're going to survive. They're in this room waiting to see what happens. And I mean, I have to tell you this, like I thought about this, you know, as we were going back and forth with the drawings for this book with the illustrator, I remember seeing this drawing of these people in this night of watching and thinking, this is the safe room. Right. And thinking about, you know, people in Israel who are going to these bomb shelters on October 7th, and of course, since then, I mean, where you're like, you have to go into the safe room and you can't come out until the angel of death has passed. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if this revolt is going to survive. You don't know if you're going to win this war. You don't know what's going to happen. And what Rabbi Akiba introduces in this sort of story of Passover is this element of hope. And he turns out to be right because we are still telling this story 3,000 years later.
And that's what this boy says when he goes back in time and he meets his family and he says, you know, don't worry, you are, you are going to escape from Egypt. It's going to be amazing. This is going to become a holiday that we're still celebrating 3000 years from now. Like it's true. To me, that's like the sort of amazing cosmic aspect of Jewish history. You know, it's not about like, what's so interesting about Jewish history isn't this litany of horror. It's the resilience that comes out of that horror, right? Like even this rabbinic tradition, like even after the destruction of Jerusalem, even after the destruction of the sovereignty in this land, even after multiple failed revolts against Rome, that you still have this tradition that endures. And that isn't like a magical thing that happens. That happens through the hard work of parents and teachers conveying this to their children. I hope that this book is actually, this is a lot more fun than my other books. And I hope that people can lean into that aspect of hope and resilience. Cause to me, that is why Passover is such a joyful holiday is because it is about this triumph of hope over all realism.
I think that's very much what we all hope we're conveying in a Passover Seder with our families. So thank you so much for being here and for leaving us with that bit.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much for joining us today for the five books. Our guest today was Dara Horn discussing her new novel, One Little Goat. You can find a link to the book and all the others Dara discussed in our show notes. If you're curious to hear Dara talking in more depth about Tevye's daughters, we have a treat for you. Check your feed for a seven minute bonus episode titled “Dara Horn on Tevye the Dairyman.”
Each of the daughter's marriages is a confrontation with a different one of these political challenges to Russian Jews.
If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends and family and rate and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can also find us online at www.fivebookspod.org. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team@fivebookspod.org and you can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod.
I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council and Lauren Wien.
