Accomplished Jewish studies scholar and author Dara Horn received her PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006, studying Hebrew and Yiddish.
Before that, at 25, she published her first novel, In the Image, which received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. She was chosen by Granta magazine as one of 20 “Best Young American Novelists” in 2007. Her fourth and latest novel, A Guide for the Perplexed, was selected as one of Booklist‘s Best Books of 2013 and was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Horn spoke to The CJN in advance of her Feb. 10 lecture at Holy Blossom Temple about some of the concepts explored in her latest novel, including memory, history and mortality.
Can you tell me about the book and the ideas in your lecture?
My most recent novel is the story of a software developer who creates an app that records everything that its users do. But there is also a historical component that is about the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, which was this massive trove of about 190,000 medieval documents that were discovered in a storeroom of a 1,000-year-old synagogue in Cairo. It was discovered by the scholar Solomon Schechter in the late 19th century, and the reason I put these ideas together was because as a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by how memory works. This goes back to my childhood, when I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could write down everything that ever happened to you and never lose any of this time that is leaving us out of our lives every day?
Now, thanks to social media, my childhood dream has come true and turned into a nightmare where every idiotic thing I do is recorded forever and ever.
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Normally, a geniza is for documents that had God’s name on them, because they can’t be thrown away, but this community in Cairo, they saved everything that had Hebrew letters on it. So you can imagine, this wasn’t just Torah scrolls. This was things like a sales receipt, love letters, children’s homework, business inventory, medical prescriptions. What’s amazing is that some of them were these valuable documents – valuable because they were written by someone famous. Maimonides’ drafts of his original Guide for the Perplexed were found there, and Maimonides was actually a character in the novel, because part of book goes back to the time of Maimonides, and he is a character in it.
This was not an archive, this was a medieval Facebook. It was crammed with so much mundane junk that you could reconstruct an entire world from it. So this question of this data storage then and now – what we save and why we save it –one of the things I was exploring through this book was this question of what memory means in modern times.
What are some of the concepts in your book that relate to the way we remember and document moments?
The contemporary plot of the book is actually a rewrite of the Joseph story from the Torah, but with women characters instead of men. A lot of it is about this woman’s relationship with her sister.
A lot of it is about the dynamic between the sisters, which relates back to the question of data and memory, because siblings are kind of this ultimate test of how we remember the past.
That dynamic is what gives the theological dimension to the Joseph story in the Torah, because when Joseph reunites with his brothers at the end of the story, he says to them, “Don’t be angry at yourselves that you sold me to into slavery, because it was to save your lives and God sent me ahead of you.” He is basically rewriting the history – and it was true, because he being in Egypt was the reason they were able to survive the famine, because he does this food-rationing program. But it’s also true that he is looking back at this negative family history and understanding it in a new way.
A lot of the book is about the question of memory versus history, how the way we choose to remember the past and how we understand the past and how we define ourselves through the past and our understanding of the past.
Will social media platforms that allow people to record every moment of their lives change the way we document history and how we decide that something is noteworthy?
Because of the advent of social media, it changes who becomes, and who we consider, as important in our society.
A museum will typically only display about 10 per cent of the works that it owns, because there is only so much space on the wall. What a curator’s job to do is to select works from that enormous collection and to frame them and exhibit them in a way that tells a certain kind of story. In different times, those stories are going to be different, even if we’re looking at the same material. The way we understand the past is going to change our beliefs and the decisions we make about how we choose to understand that past.
Will our modern obsession with documenting all the mundane aspects of our lives help or hurt the human experience and the way we remember the past?
What I find is that there is usually a generational divide where older people say, “Well this is too much, and we have to make decisions about what we keep, what we save,” while younger people are much more cavalier about it and say, “Oh we just take seven million pictures and save everything on my phone and don’t even bother printing them off and selecting them.”
The reason why older people would have greater discomfort with it is because older readers are more likely to have the experience of packing up a deceased parents’ house or downsizing or packing up a child’s room after they’ve grown up and moved out.
The reality is, we have to contain our ancestors. Genetically, we contain our ancestors. That is the obligation that mortality imposes upon us, this requirement that we curate our ancestors lives.
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Young people are also immersed in a more fleeting time of life, where changes are more constant. “I just graduated from college and now I’m moving on to my first job.” Everything is much more compressed, whereas an older person is more likely to be living in the same place for a longer time, having more stable relationships. Also young parents, and I am one – I have four small children – are very aware of the fleetingness of their children’s lives.
A lot of this is a fear of mortality. So much of what we post online are these fleeting things. Whether it’s something as casual as here is a lunch that is about to get eaten, or something like a baby who is going to grow up, this is an attempt to fight mortality.
This interview has been edited and condensed for style and clarity.