Interview With Dara Horn, Author of One Little Goat

 

Welcome to Smack Dab, Dara. Tell Us More about One Little Goat.

One Little Goat is about a family at a Passover seder, a ceremonial dinner during which Jews retell the biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt. When no one can find the hidden piece of matzah that traditionally ends the meal, the seder cannot end– and they’re trapped at the seder for six months! (Can you tell I started writing this during Covid?)

Six months in, there’s a knock on the door, and the oldest child answers it. It’s a talking goat– the scapegoat, the one everyone blames for their problems. The goat explains that over those six months, thousands of years of previous seders have accumulated underneath this seder– and now they need to travel through those thousands of previous seders to find this piece of matzah and end their seder tonight. It turns into an edgy and unexpected journey through Jewish history.

Can you elaborate on how your childhood experiences with Passover seders influenced this book? (I love that line in your Author’s Note: “My life and memory were connected to a much larger life and memory.”)

A lot of literature for young readers is some form of portal fiction, where the young protagonist discovers some hole in the universe leading to a world much bigger than the familiar one. I think this is because children’s lives are very limited, and they are looking for that escape hatch into something bigger. What’s amazing about Passover is that it is designed to provide that escape hatch. It’s literally a story about freedom, and it’s also a holiday designed to help children see themselves as part of a long civilizational chain, in which they are making choices and commitments whose resonance is much larger than just their own lives. The Passover liturgy says that  “in every generation, each person is required to see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt.”

This book is shaped by two Passover seders I attended regularly as a child in the 1980s and 90s. First, the seders my parents hosted, in which my parents required me and my three siblings to write plays and skits and songs that brought the story to life every year. This was a creative experience that made me feel very invested in this story. The second seder we usually attended was hosted by friends of ours. It was a large intergenerational gathering of about fifty people seated at a long table, by age. At one end were the old people, including Holocaust survivors who had fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which began on Passover of 1943. The middle-aged participants included some Soviet Jewish refuseniks who had been persecuted as Jews in the USSR. These were two generations of living American Jews who had experienced liberation from anti-Jewish oppression. And then there were the kids, who were on the far end of the table talking about “The Simpsons.” 

I remember sitting at that seder and having the strange sensation that I was sitting in a lighted room on top of a tower of other lighted rooms, filled with all the seders that came before this one– including the seders that the old people had lived through when they were younger, and also all the seders that the old people at THEIR seders had lived through when they were younger, and on and on down to the night before the Exodus. It has stayed with me, this idea. 

You mention that this idea has been with you since childhood. How has it evolved over the years?

For my own four children, I’ve dialed up the creativity dramatically, and the seders I host  now involve things like a walk-through black-lit Egyptian tomb and a laser-swamp parting-of-the-sea. My children are costumed characters in this production, which is different every year, and now they write the scripts themselves. So this story is still central to my family’s life, but I have a parent’s perspective now on the story’s impact.

All of my adult books– which are all about Jewish culture and history in various ways– are about this idea of the past that lives within the present. But in recent years as the darker aspects of Jewish history have become more present in American Jewish life, I’ve also come to see the seder and its message of hope as vital and formative for children. The Passover story is actually really scary, and kids are right up front for it. It’s teaching children to use their own unique gifts and inner resources – part of the ceremony involves a discussion of different children’s personalities – to face whatever the world might present. It’s a kind of preparation for facing that darkness with courage. If I’d written this book years ago, I might not have included so much of that. But now I see it as the heart of the story– not just a young person conquering his own fears, which is a common theme in children’s books, but a young person tapping into this deep historical vein of integrity and courage.

Why a graphic novel?

A few years ago, a Jewish magazine approached me about writing a graphic novel for them, and I started thinking about this Passover seder idea. That project didn’t pan out, but about a year later, I was on a road trip with my family and we stopped in a comics shop. My kids came out with armloads of books, but they all were fighting over this one thick graphic novel, Capacity by Theo Ellsworth. I borrowed it from them and was just completely enchanted by his artwork. I loved the level of detail and the edginess of his style, and also how vividly he turned abstract ideas into stark and hilarious images. I cold-emailed him and pitched the idea, and wow, what an incredibly talented artist he is. His work on this book has blown me away.

What was the collaborative process like? I loved the format–I especially loved all the falling passages. Did you discuss the art with the illustrator?

When I wrote the manuscript I included a lot of “stage directions” suggesting what should happen visually. Theo would send me pencil sketches of a few pages at a time, and we’d go back and forth about what was working and what needed a tweak. Sometimes this involved tweaks to the artwork to better fit the story, but sometimes it also involved tweaks to the story to better fit the artwork. Theo’s visual imagination is of course orders of magnitude better than mine, and he consistently came up with visual ideas that I never would have thought of. 

I’d imagined all these seder rooms stacked on top of each other, for instance, but Theo turned that idea into this vast tunnel of doors, and then created this Alice-in-Wonderland situation where the main character opens the doors and sometimes his head fills the entire door and he’s looking at tiny people, and sometimes he’s tiny and the people are huge, and sometimes the door is a hatch in the ceiling or a trap door in the floor… it’s just so magnificently imaginative. In other instances, he took my ideas very literally— for instance, my “stage directions” called for a doorway made of toys, and then a descent involving “ladders, tunnels, slides” and the passage through a sea that parts as the protagonist jumps in (a reference to the Exodus story). But Theo made these ideas astronomically more hilarious and beautiful than I ever expected. His work is an absolute delight.

How do you envision this book contributing to a child's understanding of their own family history and traditions?

I think all children are looking for that access point to a life bigger than their own, and one access point is through their own family’s history and traditions. The main character in the book is from this vast tradition of thousands of years of Jews who made conscious choices about how to live as free people and how to transmit that liberation story to their children. Some of them make those choices in dramatic historical circumstances; for others, it’s about their private lives. For the main character, these are just his annoying older relatives. But then he goes back in time and meets them as children, and understands something deeper about what motivates them. And then that becomes a broader adventure going much further back in time. 

In Jewish life this intergenerational idea of freedom and responsibility is very explicitly discussed in really formal and consistent ways. But the truth is that you could tell this kind of story about any family, and about any tradition. We are all the beneficiaries of all the courageous choices of the people who came before us. 

Can you discuss the role of humor, particularly the sarcastic goat character, in addressing serious themes?

The goat is the scapegoat– in the Hebrew bible, the people’s sins are symbolically placed on this animal’s head in an annual ritual, which is where the English word comes from. Then this concept takes on a different meaning in Jewish history, as Jewish communities are routinely blamed for the wider society’s problems. 

The goat character in the book is an example of making a horrifying idea openly ridiculous, which is the source of a lot of Jewish humor. The goat in the book has fatalistically accepted that he’s always blamed for absolutely everything, and that acceptance is so blunt and absurd– the main character tells him, over and over, about things that aren’t his fault, “This is all your fault!” and the goat just says. “I know.” The goat likes to cope by hanging out at Sigmund Freud’s seder to clear his head– where of course they don’t meet Freud, but they do meet Freud’s mom, who says of Freud, “He never calls. He never writes.” Jewish history is so deeply absurd that humor is the only way to take it seriously.

What was it like translating your usual adult-oriented writing style to a format for younger readers?

So much more fun! I think I might have struggled with the register if it weren’t a graphic novel, because yes, I’m used to writing for adults. But the graphic novel style is already so playful and literal. There’s no room to muse at length about anything, and even abstract ideas become really immediate. It’s a great lesson in getting a story down to its essence.

Where can we find you online? 

Ha, I like that you think you can find me online! I’m not really on social media– a choice I made years ago for logistical reasons. (When my four kids were little, I found it too hard to maintain a social media presence, give my children my attention, and also do my professional work, so something had to go.) I now feel really lucky to have been able to establish myself as a writer before this was required– especially since I write about Jewish topics, and as all Jewish public figures know, being active online as a Jew means dealing with hate and threats all day long. (As it is, I occasionally get carted around in cop cars for speaking events!) At some point I’ll revisit this. I do like hearing from readers though! Readers can contact me at www.darahorn.com, where they can also find links to my other work. 

What’s next?

My last book in 2021, a nonfiction book about antisemitism called People Love Dead Jews, has basically eaten my life. Especially in the past year and a half, I have been dealing nonstop with this problem in channels that you would not expect for someone who just wrote a middle-grade graphic novel about a talking goat. (For instance, I served on the antisemitism advisory group for Harvard’s administration, and wound up as a witness in a congressional investigation) I didn’t realize that when you write a nonfiction book about a problem, people expect you to solve that problem!  I’ve now been thinking much more systematically about what works and what doesn’t in addressing antisemitism. So I’m now working on another nonfiction book about this, called (gulp) The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living.

I’m also trying to actually do something about this problem instead of only writing about it. I just founded a nonprofit venture called Mosaic Persuasion, whose purpose is to educate the broader American public about Jewish civilization, beginning in K-12 public and independent schools. The goal is to meaningfully address contemporary antisemitism (something that can’t be done by teaching about dead Jews in Europe) and to build the skills we all need to live in a pluralistic democracy. We are very new– we don’t even have a website yet!-- but we’ve already started doing teacher training workshops and are building out other channels, and we’re looking for more schools and groups to partner with. If you’re an educator of any kind (school, museum, nonprofit, interfaith, social-media, etc) and would like to be involved in this effort, please reach out to me at www.darahorn.com. 

At some point I hope to go back to writing novels! It’s a joy to have this book to brighten this dark moment.