Dara Horn - Life and Work
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.8 • 658 Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2015
⏱️ 110 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dara Horn has won acclaim for her imaginative novels and for the richness of their Jewish foundations. As part of the 2014 Summer Fellowship, Horn sat down to discuss Yiddish literature, American Judaism, her writing process, reactions to her work (from Jews and non-Jews alike), and her life as the mother of four children. In one of the most fascinating parts of the interview, Horn describes the relationship between the Jewish tradition and her own work at length. She tries "to write in English as if English were a Jewish language." By this she means that the language of her stories is drawn from Judaism's sources. By using Yiddish stories, Biblical parables, Hebrew idioms, and much else, she helps to furnish an authentic American Jewish culture.
The event was recorded on August 6, 2014.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the taxonomy of Tikva gatherings, this is the life and work type of gathering. |
| 0:12.6 | Genus, this is the species there horn. |
| 0:16.8 | We had the species Mosheh albertoll last week. |
| 0:28.9 | The point of tonight is to get to know Dara where her biography meets her, her vocation as a novelist and as a thinker. |
| 0:34.0 | So I won't spend a lot of time on introduction, but I will spend a little time on introduction. |
| 0:40.5 | There has a PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University. |
| 0:44.9 | Her mentor there and someone who she's told me is the reason that she got interested in Jewish literature and Yiddish literature |
| 0:52.2 | and became a novelist. |
| 0:54.3 | I think you've said even was Ruth Weiss, who you met earlier in the program. |
| 1:00.6 | There has several published works which I'm going to list off to, and not just because I feel |
| 1:05.7 | obliged to do so, but because they really are fantastic, and every one of them has something |
| 1:09.8 | tremendous to recommend it. |
| 1:12.5 | Her first novel that she published was called In the Image, which she published when she was 25 years old, which is unbelievable. |
| 1:19.1 | It was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in 2003. |
| 1:23.2 | Her second novel, she published three years later, so I guess you were 28-ish, called The World to Come. |
| 1:31.3 | That's the one I have here, and that I'll read a couple of passages from to set up a couple of my questions. |
| 1:37.6 | That also won the National Jewish Book Award. |
| 1:40.5 | They got tired of giving you the National Jewish Book Award. |
| 1:43.1 | So then her next novel published when she was 31, in 2009, was called All of Their Nights. |
| 1:49.4 | And we can talk about it. |
| 1:52.1 | It covers some themes, I think, that are really relevant to some of the stuff where we've studied. |
| 1:56.0 | All of her novels do, but about America and Judaism. |
... |
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