By Dara Horn: A new "graphic novel" that has just been published and is now available. Just in time for Pesach!
Yes, Abq Jew has written about Dara Horn amd her books several times, including -
- October 2023's The Story Continues
- March 2023's Remembering Varian Fry
- February 2023's Thinking About Anne Frank
- July 2015's ELI Talk: The Problem of Eicha
Dara has two sisters, Ariel and Jordana,, may they live long and prosper, who are also writers, and who have been written up in The New York Times. The three sisters also have a brother who is not a writer (go figure).
Emily Schneider is not one of Dara Horn's sisters. She is, however, a writer and educator living in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Forward, Tablet, Jewcy, and Family Reading at The Hornbook.
Ms Schneider also review books for the Jewish Book Council. She recently spoke with acclaimed author Dara Horn about her new graphic novel, One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe. Here is a taste:
Portal to Passover: A Conversation with Dara Horn
Emily Schneider: Dara, I’m going to start by asking you what may be an obvious question. You have a very successful and acclaimed career as a novelist and a public intellectual writing about a range of subjects. What motivated you to write One Little Goat, a graphic novel of interest and concern to both children and adults?
Dara Horn: I actually first thought of this idea a number of years ago. I was on a road trip with my family in California, with my four children, and we stopped at a comic book shop. My kids are all into this kind of thing.
And one book that they came home with was a very, very thick graphic novel by this cartoonist, Theo Ellsworth. They were fighting over this book throughout the whole trip! I borrowed this book from them, and I was just enchanted by the artwork.
And at that point, an idea I’d had for a graphic novel sort of came roaring back to me. I could see how it could come to life, now that I saw an artist whose work I really appreciated.
And I looked this artist up; I knew nothing about him. He’s a pretty acclaimed indie comics artist. Theo Ellsworth, lives in Montana. He’s probably not Jewish. This is a kind of deep in the weeds idea for someone who doesn’t know much about Passover.
I cold-emailed him, said, “Hi, I love your work. I’m a writer. Here’s an idea. It’s a little hard to explain.” And he was totally game. But the deeper question that you’re asking is,
Why would I do this when I’m really writing for adults my whole career?
This is an idea I’ve been thinking about since I was a child. I’ve always been fascinated by the seder and how it is much more similar to other seders than it is to other days of the year.
When you’re at the seder table, it’s much more similar to being at a seder table ten years ago than it is to something that happened the week before. And it feels much more connected through time than space.
This is something I’ve been fascinated by since I was a kid — the idea of Jewish life and texts being a portal to a past that we really shouldn’t have access to is something that I’ve written about in all of my books. All of my books are some version of this. This is simply the most direct version.
ES: You begin your journey into Pesach, the festival of freedom, by reconsidering a myth. This is a holiday Jews throughout the world are celebrating. It’s so imbued with meaning for everyone, across a broad range of religious observance.
So it must be an unalloyed joy for children, right?
DH: Yes, and also because it’s a holiday that’s ostensibly supposed to be centering children.
ES: That is really at the center of your book. For many kids, it could be tedious, repetitive, a little bit opaque, even though, as you said, children have a starring role.
DH: Yes, this holiday’s celebrating freedom, but you are stuck at that table for a very long time. This is a dynamic that I’m very familiar with because my whole family’s life has been built to protect children from it. I’m the host of my family seder.
I’m one of four children, and, in the seder that I grew up in, my parents avoided this boredom by having us be very involved in a creative way. We would have to write songs and skits, acting out the different parts of the story. It was different every single year.
We would work on this whole show that we would put on at different points in the seder. The story of Abraham smashing the idols would be Mesopotamian Idol, a parody of American Idol.
It was always something based on whatever was trending in pop culture at that time.
Now, I also have four children. My parents have a total of fourteen grandchildren. So it’s a large seder I host, with a lot of young people. I had to make a decision.
Either I can read every single page of the Haggadah, or I can have my children enjoy Pesach.
That involves a ridiculous amount of creativity, and that’s what we’ve done. Our seder is very traditional in that we do read every page of the Haggadah. It’s very untraditional in that we use technology. We have all these different settings that you move through and you meet different characters in the Pesach story.
In one room, the angel of death pops out of a closet and slays the Pharaoh’s son. In another room, we have a blue lasers and fog machine that fills the space with a blue fog, but only up to waist height. It creates this wave-like look on the surface. And as you walk through it, it parts in front of you.
Everybody in our seder is personally experiencing coming out of Egypt. Some of these ideas I got from classical Jewish sources. Everybody’s very invested and the other most important part is the kids have roles in our Seder. And it’s become a competition every year of who can make it newer, more interesting, funnier.
My daughter’s the wandering Aramean; she comes and she has a scroll that she wraps around the entire room that has the passage we all read out loud together. We have light-up Had Gadya animals that my husband made by soldering a bunch of LED lights together. So it’s like a Vegas seder!
Every year we make a movie out of these pieces and recreate the Pesach story. We divide up the story into the different family pods. This group of siblings is assigned to do the burning bush or some other piece of the tale. And then the final product is screened.
No one knows what the other people have done, but everybody feels very invested in their part.
