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Dara Horn’s gonzo, time-traveling children’s Passover book wants people to love living Jews

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“All of my books are the same book,” said Dara Horn, the author of seven novels and the 2021 essay collection, “People Love Dead Jews,” which may be the most talked-about Jewish book of the past several years.

The subject, she said, is time — how Jews mark it, how they preserve it, how they understand where a moment goes once it is passed. Her 2006 debut, “A World to Come,” toggles between present-day New Jersey and 1920’s Russia. Her 2018 novel “Eternal Life,” meanwhile, is about an immortal woman, born in Jerusalem, who experiences countless lives over 2,000 years.

She took the title of her 2009 Civil War novel, “All Other Nights,” from the Passover Haggadah, which she calls a book about “the collapse of time,” expressed in its injunction that “in every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they left Egypt.”

It’s a verse that becomes literal in her latest book, the middle-grade graphic novel “One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe.” In it, a young boy escapes a seemingly endless family seder in the company of a talking goat, who drags him back through a “hole in interdimensional space-time” and to the seder tables of historically iconic Jews, including Sigmund Freud, the 16th-century philanthropist Doña Gracia Nasi and the Talmudic tag team known as Rav and Shmuel.

The book is both a history lesson, and a lesson about history.

“The seder is not just about the Exodus from Egypt. It’s also a commemoration of a commemoration of a commemoration,” said Horn, noting how the traditional Haggadah itself includes descriptions of at least two prior seders, the very first one in Egypt and one held in the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple. Quoting the late American historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Horn said Jewish culture makes a distinction between history and memory, and Jews are more interested in memory: investing a historical event with eternal, inheritable meaning.

“When I say I write about........

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