Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

In 1998, a publisher asked Dara Horn if she wanted to expand a magazine article she had written into a book about the Civil War.

“I was very flattered,” Horn said during a recent interview, “but decided not to do it because I was not willing to spend three years of my life researching the Civil War.

“Now, 10 years later, I have,” she added with a laugh.

The result is Horn’s historical novel, “All Other Nights,” out in paperback this month. Set during the Civil War, the story focuses on a young Jewish Union soldier torn between his allegiance to his country and his allegiance to his family. Passover figures prominently in the story, as does the “on all other nights …” Haggadah query.

“I think all historical novels are really about the time in which they’re written rather than the time they supposedly take place,” said Horn, a Harvard University graduate who focused her doctoral research on Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

“In 1998, the Civil War didn’t interest me. But by 2006 [when she started writing “All Other Nights”], the subject was very resonant because of how polarized the country had become.”

“All Other Nights” begins with the novel’s protagonist, Jacob Rappaport, hidden in a barrel on a ship heading to New Orleans. His Union commanders have asked the 19-year-old to poison his uncle, a Rebel supporter is allegedly planning to kill President Abraham Lincoln.

Jacob obliges. After seeing his devotion to the Union cause, his commanders to ask him to go undercover and marry a young Virginia woman spying for the Confederacy. He is to turn her in when he compiles enough evidence.

But then he falls in love. And thus begins the novel’s central conflict: What deserves Jacob’s loyalty: his country, or his family?

“All the details are historically accurate, though the plot is not particularly realistic,” she said.

Several characters in the book are real historical figures, and many are composites of real people. The most prominent of these is Judah Benjamin, a Jewish man who was born in the British West Indies and immigrated to the United States as a young boy. Benjamin rose from poverty to become a Harvard-educated lawyer, a senator and the Confederacy’s secretary of state.

Jacob encounters Judah twice during the book. The second time, Judah tells Jacob that people can never change. That leads Jacob to wonder: Does this make repentance impossible?

“It’s an open debate — can people change? Can Jacob be forgiven for the choices he’s made and the things he’s done?” Horn said. “The book shows that freedom requires a real act of imagination to see the possibilities of life beyond the expectations of those around you. Tonight doesn’t have to be the same as all other nights.”

Horn, who was born in 1977, grew up in New Jersey with four siblings. Her parents used to take the family on trips to places such as Cambodia or Peru, and each time, the kids occupied themselves by  keeping a journal or sketchbook. In fact, her first published work was an article for Hadassah Magazine based on a journal entry.

Horn, who lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children, said the Jacob of the book is based on Jacob the patriarch. She liked that biblical Jacob started out as a reprehensible guy who evolves into someone who is a worthy father to both a family and to a nation.

Horn also was intrigued by Jewish life in the South during the Civil War, and thus the book is rich with allusions to Jewish ritual and prayer. Yet the prose remains accessible to a non-Jewish reader.

“I study Jewish languages in my academic work, and in my novels my goal is to write English as if it were a Jewish language,” she said. “What I mean by that is to bring resonances of Jewish literary tradition into English for English readers.” 

“All Other Nights” by Dara Horn (363 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, $14.95 paperback)