Review: Eternal Life

Eternal Life by Dara Horn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There’s a great passage in the Reform Jewish High Holiday prayer book that asks the question – and I paraphrase language that’s really beautiful – whether we would choose to live forever if the price were that we would never have a new generation to follow us. In this novel, Dara Horn asks the question in different fashion: would we want eternal life if it meant birthing generation after generation with the certainty that we would live to see them dies.

As with everything Horn writes (and I think I’ve read most of her novels by this point) there’s a lot of thought behind it. She’s interrogating some of the deepest axioms of the Jewish experience: why do we value peoplehood so much even though none of us can trace that peoplehood through an unbroken line, or, what does it mean to value a tradition based on Temple worship when, as we know from history, our Rabbinic tradition supplanted it through a combination of violence and philosophy.

Our protagonist, Rachel, is a reimagining of the Wandering Jew; she is “cursed” to live without dying because of a bargain she made in the Temple to spare the life of her son, Yohanan. Over time we learn – though Horn drops hints throughout – that Yohannon is no ordinary figure. History knows him as Yohanan ben Zakkai (though, in Horn’s imagination he is actually the grandson of the Temple’s High Priest) and he is, essentially, the founder of Rabbinic Judaism. He’s the sage who escapes Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem – the siege that would end with the destruction of the Temple – in a coffin so that he could establish the first great Rabbinic academy at Yavneh. Rachel has, inadvertently, given up her own death so that Judaism will also never die.

So, in at least some respects, Rachel is a kind of Rip van Winkle. She is (with the exception of her recurring lover Elazar) the only person who can remember a Judaism radically different from the one we know today. She knows the power of the Temple – after all, it was the High Priest who caused her to live forever – and she knows the ephemeral nature of all life that has followed. As a result, she has a jaundiced view of the faith around her. She’s hardly Orthodox in her opinions, yet she can’t seem to throw off what she inherits of her tradition. Horn isn’t entirely clear about it, but it appears that each of Rachel’s fifty or sixty families (she’ll appear as a young woman, marry, and then live with a family for a couple generations) is Jewish. That is, she’s bound to a tradition she doesn’t quite embrace. She is a literal duplication of the Matriarchal Rachel who is ever weeping for her children, who watches them experience a world that ever threatens them.

Anyway, all of that is how this novel “thinks.” Horn, a fine scholar before she was a novelist, is always good at using fiction to frame larger questions. Beyond that, though, while she is often a fine stylist, she’s simply less good at some of the technical work of making a novel sing. She can develop character and setting very well, but I think she misses the larger subtlety of what time and era can do to someone. As much as I enjoy most of this, I can’t help being frustrated that the flashback conversations of two millennia ago sound an awful lot like the family conversations of today. For all the discontinuity she explores, she imagines every Jewish family sounding a lot like every other Jewish family; Rachel’s mother of 2000 years ago scolds her the same way her son of the 21st Century scolds his own daughter. I’d like, that is, to get a deeper sense of how the very concept of the individual has changed, at the ways a radically changed culture have changed the ways we value and even define the self.

That’s a fairly small concern next to the larger pleasure of this ambitious and thoughtful work, though. I’m glad to have Horn’s voice as such a prominent one in contemporary Jewish-American fiction, and I’ll be ready for the next one she rolls out too.


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