My original aim in writing Landsman was to delve into, above all else, the involvement of Jewish soldiery for the South during the U.S. Civil War.  Beyond that, though, I found as I plotted the novel that as a work of historical fiction, especially one set during such a tumultuous time, there was so much more to explore narratively.  Landsman thus quickly grew into a tale of antebellum New Orleans’ seductive gangland element as well, a tender epistolary courtship between two young lovers, and an interrogation of one guilt-ridden soldier’s search for faith and familial atonement.  At root, the moral complexities of one minority fighting – indeed killing and dying – so that another might remain enslaved, proved too altogether human a subject for me to ignore.

The book’s title has two distinct meanings, both of which are important to a full understanding of the story.  The first, pronounced landz´men, implies one who lives and works on land.  The second and preferred pronunciation, länts´mən, suggests a fellow Jew who comes from the same district or town, especially in Eastern Europe.  The novel’s protagonist, Elias Abrams, is the embodiment of each definition.

I arrived at the idea through old-fashioned epiphany.  A couple years ago, I discovered in Tony Horwitz’s investigation of Civil War re-enactors, Confederates in the Attic, that over three thousand Jews fought for the Confederacy, a fact that had simply never occurred to me.  I was thunderstruck in the most clichéd of ways; I knew right then I’d need to write about it.  I was unaware, however, that Landsman would eventually come to reflect the perfect confluence of my style as a writer (which tends to be a bit voluptuous in its prose, and thus appropriate for a period piece), my personal biography (that of a Jew raised in the South), and my devotion to classical American, particularly Jewish-American, literature (give me Roth and Malamud’s exploration of humanity’s moral vagaries any day).

Last year, halfway through the writing of the book (which took me roughly eighteen months, I think, to get it into the shape presentable for my agent to send it off to Counterpoint), I returned to Louisiana, where I was raised.  There, I walked the streets of New Orleans, interviewed the rabbi of the temple mentioned in my novel, and generally just imbibed the whole feel of the setting.  I journeyed out to Napoleonville, LA, to get a sense of the landscape of the novel’s plantation element.  The research – in that I earned my undergraduate degree in history and doctorate in English – was remarkably fun, all things considered.  The amount one can learn writing a book – it’s astonishing.  Among the many texts I consulted in attempting to make this work as historically accurate as possible, I am particularly indebted to Herbert Asbury’s The French Quarter, Elliott Ashkenazi’s The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840—1875 and The Civil War Diaries of Clara Solomon, Edward C. Bearss’ & Willie H. Tunnard’s A Southern Record: The Story of the Third Louisiana Infantry, C.S.A., Bertram W. Korn’s American Jewry and the Civil War, Irwin Lachoff’s & Catherine C. Kahn’s The Jewish Community of New Orleans, Francis Peyre Porcher’s Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, Medical, Economical, and Agricultural, Sally Kittredge Reeves’ translation of Jacques-Felix Lelièvre’s Nouveau Jardinier de la Louisiane (New Louisiana Gardener), Robert N. Rosen’s The Jewish Confederates, John Stravinsky’s compilation, Read ‘Em and Weep: A Bedside Poker Companion, Louis Voss’ “The System of Redemption in the State of Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly, Alan Wellikoff’s  The Civil War Supply Catalogue, and Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy.  Furthermore, the number of e-mail correspondences I’ve struck up blindly with scholars throughout the world, the amount of intellectual generosity I’ve confronted about whatever minutiae needed clarification at the moment, has humbled and thrilled me.  If I’m not learning when I write, if I’m not interesting myself in the process, then it quickly becomes stale and a bit too self-involved a journey for me.

Although I’ve never known war myself, in Landsman I also wanted to offer an account of its atrocities, to complement the degradations of which men are capable.  So much literature about war is sanitized; mine, I should state, is not.  In this, permit me to mention that in its use of graphic content, in language, violence, and sexuality, I meant to legitimize Landsman, not to gratuitously bloat it.  My ultimate ambition is that the novel work to humanize an aspect of the American Jewish experience of which few people are aware.  I wanted to neither celebrate nor demonize Jewish participation in the Southern cause, but to show it as understandable.  Ultimately, I hope Landsman serves to take the Southern, Civil War-era Jew beyond the province of villain, victim, or saint, and to place him squarely where he belongs: into the realm of flaw and decency of which we’re all understandably a part.