America's Little Giant

MONTAGE often colliding in funny ways with her mod- there are references to ancient Hebrew em- the present day. Unlike a Jonathan Safran ern characters. “The great thing about get- bedded in the work—you can’t avoid it. So Foer or a Michael Chabon, she fills the void ting a doctorate was that no one expects you many figuresof speech are linked to ancient of “Jewish identity” with a deep knowledge to finish it!” she says. “Every time I would get sources and the commentaries on them.” of Jewish sources. stuck on my dissertation I would procras- Horn didn’t start writing fiction until the Horn’s interest in engaging imaginatively tinate by writing my novel, and vice versa, year after college, while on a miserably lone- with Jewish texts extends to her personal so I never felt like I was doing any work.” ly postgraduate fellowship at the Universi- religious practice. “We have a Passover Sed- Growing up, she sensed what she de- ty of Cambridge (“England just wasn’t my er that’s extremely epic, where we put up scribes as a thinness to scene,” she says, laughing). a pyramid in the living room, I wear a pha- American Jewish literature. She had always been terri- raoh costume and my husband wears a Mo- “In the 1980s and ’90s, when fied of the genre, until the ses costume, we have ‘plague drops’ where you told someone you were realization that “books don’t stuff falls out of the ceiling, we have a ‘hail interested in Jewish litera- come out of nothing”—that cannon’ that fires Ping-Pong balls into the ture, they’d hand you a book they’re in conversation with room, and we have a drone strike for the last by Philip Roth. This whole other books—gave her the plague,” she enthuses. “What’s important to generation of Jewish writers confidence to make up stories us,” she emphasizes, “is less about the ritual from the last century were re- of her own, to fill the gaps in aspects, or that you have to believe x, y, and ally writing more about the modern Jewish literature. z. What’s important to my family is being first-generation American “When I first started writ- invested and creatively engaged with this experience, the experience ing my novels, part of my mo- tradition, which is of a piece with what I’m of Judaism as a social identi- tivation—in the way that doing in my books.” ty. And I was like, ‘This is so you’re massively ambitious She aims to make the Jewish tradition not what I’m looking for.’” Those authors when you’re younger and then realize, ‘Oh, welcoming not just to a Jewish audience, dwelled on questions about assimilation that was dumb’—was to ‘fix’ this problem,” but to a broader readership. “Is everyone and authenticity; Horn was uninterested in she says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if going to understand every reference in that conversation (which she calls “annoy- we could have this in English? Contempo- there? No, but that’s not a problem. When ing”). Since her college and doctoral work, rary stories that bring alive these ancient I’m reading Salman Rushdie, I’m not sitting she has come to link this thinness to the dis- texts?” And so Horn’s 2006 novel The World here waiting for an explanation of why some appearance of Hebrew and Yiddish context to Come, written while she was avoiding her character is covering her hair. I don’t want from contemporary American Jewish writ- doctoral work, weaves the life and stories to read a book with footnotes—I want to ing. “When you’re reading modern Hebrew, of the Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister into be welcomed into a world.” she was called after her husband was elect- America’s Little Giant ed president in 1808) who made the role of first lady an influential and gracious posi- Revisiting the father of the Constitution in an era deeply divided by tion as one of the new capital’s most ebul- factionalism lient and popular hostesses. She founded a home for orphaned young girls while she by lincoln caplan and Madison lived in the White House, and as his widow and a beloved public figure, she was made an honorary member of Con- olley payne todd called her and three quarters, well proportioned, her gress, among other tributes, and chosen to soon-to-be husband, just before features pleasing though not remarkable in send the first person- she met him, “the great, little form except her mouth which was beauti- al telegraph message. D Madison.” She was about to turn ful in shape and expression.” He was three In James Madi- The Three Lives of James 26, a widow who had lost her first husband or four inches shorter, physically frail and son’s public career, Madison: Genius, Parti- and their baby son to yellow fever and had prone to severe migraines, and deeply intro- spanning four ex- san, President, by Noah been left with their toddler son and a small verted. He asked her to marry him because, ceptionally produc- Feldman ’92 (Random amount of money. James Madison Jr. was 43, quite unexpectedly after failing in one pre- tive decades, this House, $35.) a congressman from Virginia temporarily vious attempt at courtship and becoming a private passion of frustrated by politics, and a gentleman by bookish bachelor, he fell in love with her. his—what he called birth who would soon inherit more than 100 She accepted his proposal because he was “the sentiments of my heart”—is the most slaves and 4,000 acres. They met in 1794 in “the man who of all others I most admire.” visible evidence of the force that fueled him. Philadelphia, America’s temporary capital The marriage, she wrote, would provide As Noah Feldman, Frankfurter professor of while Washington, D.C., was being built. “everything that is soothing.” law, writes in his excellent, authoritative, In his estimation, she was “5 feet, 7 inches Dolley Madison was the presidentress (as and lucid reassessment of Madison, “Dol- 56 January - February 2018 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE ley frequently expressed opinions and emotions that Madison hid from view.” He was known as a dispassionate man of rea- son, systematic and mild- mannered, who preferred the company of ideas and lacked the need for at- tention many politicians have. Yet his profound sense of purpose made him a statesman of enor- mous impact. He imag- ined the United States as a unified nation rather than a confederation of republics with diverging interests in agriculture and trade, and helped shape that country. Madison is rightly known as the father of the United States Constitu- tion. (Jack Rakove, Ph.D. ’75, the Stanford histori- an and political scientist Portraits of James Madison, 1816, by John Vanderlyn and of Dolley Madison, 1804, by Gilbert Stuart whom Feldman acknowl- edges as “the master of Madison scholars,” the Federalist Party. After it morphed into carrying out the will of the people by law, called him “the Greatest Lawgiver of Moder- Jefferson’s and his Democratic-Republican not force. Officials would do that by devis- nity.”) From 1776, when he was only 25, until Party, they led it to national power. Finally, ing domestic and foreign policies and enact- 1791, he was: the primary dreamer, designer, he established America’s place in the world, ing them into law, and by collecting taxes to and drafter of the nation’s fundamental law; as secretary of state and, during the War of carry them out. The basic risk of this form one of the chief publicists in getting it ratified; 1812, as president. Feldman presents these of republicanism was that the majority—no and its principal modifier as the proposer and chapters as a story of Madison’s intellec- matter how virtuous, self-restrained, or God- drafter of the Bill of Rights. He embraced the tual, psychological, and political growth, fearing—would violate the rights of minori- First through Tenth Amendments to protect starting with his college years at Princeton. ties. Madison’s first solution was “enlarge- individuals from government infringement (It was “the only institution on the conti- ment.” He favored a nation large enough that and stave off a second constitutional conven- nent where a diligent student could acquire the interests and factions within it would tion, which he feared would rip the northern the foundations of a truly excellent educa- be less likely to overlap and, if they did, it and southern states apart. (Rakove wrote that tion,” Feldman advises, since Harvard and would not be easy for them to come together Madison had the “capacity to think like a his- Yale were then “parochial in their teach- and form a dangerous majority. His second torian and predict like a social scientist.”) He ing.”) This growth was reflected in a series solution was checks and balances. He fore- is less well known and secondarily recognized of surprising and major about-faces in his saw factions, whether political, economic, for his accomplishments between the ages of thinking about the needs of the new nation. religious, or otherwise, checking each other. 50 and 67, when he served as Thomas Jeffer- Nineteen years younger than George Wash- He envisioned branches of government ex- son’s secretary of state (1801 to 1809) and the ington, 16 years younger than John Adams, pressly designed to balance as well as check country’s fourth (and first war-time) presi- and eight years younger than Jefferson, who each other, so the government did not set dent (1809 to 1817).

Load more