A Guide for the Perplexed

When my children were born and as they were growing up I took pictures of every
event in their lives and recorded every milestone in a book so that nothing would be
lost to faulty memory.  It has become a fascination with people in my baby boom generation to trace our roots.  We are looking for the story of our family’s past, our connection to our history.

In Dara Horn’s new book, A Guide for  the Perplexed she takes this concept of people recording every aspect of their lives and expands it.  Her protagonist Josie Ashkenazi, a software prodigy, has invented an application that records everything everybody does in their day to day life.  She calls the computer program, the Genizah. This includes not only the important events that we are afraid we will someday forget, but every mundane activity.
In one example in the book, she has recorded every activity she and her daughter do so that in the morning when her young daughter cannot find her shoes, they just need to play the recording and see where she left them the night before.

The book takes on three different journeys based on this obsession with preserving the past.  First, we are introduced to her sister Judith, who works for Josie’s company.  In a modern version of Jacob and Esau, the jealous sister arranges a trip for Josie to fly to Egypt and sell this computer program to the Alexandria Library.  Josie is abducted and presumed dead by the family she left behind in America.  Judith then steals her sister’s husband and daughter.

Layered over this story line we learn the story of Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor,
who goes to Palestine to retrieve medieval archive, the Genizah, hidden in a Cairo synagogue.  He brings back bags of papers that have been thrown in an attic in the old synagogue for centuries.  The best known genizah, a synagogue store room for documents that for religious reasons cannot be destroyed.  He takes on two assistants and they read through the mundane history of congregants from a millennium ago.  The marriage certificates, the divorce decrees, the letters of people long gone.

Among the papers Horn imagines the papers of Moses Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher and physician.  His actual book, “the Guide for the Perplexed” explores the relationship between faith and reason.  In the room, Horn creates the fiction that Schechter finds
the draft copies of this famous book and copies of letters he exchanged with his brother.

The three journeys are connected as Josie reads Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed” in her prison cell and Schecter finds the manuscripts in Cairo.  Josie wrestles with the value of memory and the possibility of not really being in control of life.  Maimonides says, “We choose what is worthy of our memory.  We should probably be grateful that we can’t remember everything as G-d does, because if we did, we would find it impossible to forgive anyone”.  Schecter comes to similar conclusions as he realizes sometimes it is not it is not always best to remember every detail of the past.  The Rambam struggled with the paradox of destiny versus freewill and in Dara Horn’s A Guide To The Perplexed all the characters are struggling to see if they are in control of their lives or if there is a higher power that has the final say.

Dara Horn has written three other novels, In The Image, and The World To Come and All Other Nights.  She has won many awards including  2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. She has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence College, and City University of New York, and lectured across North America and Israel. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and four children.