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An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey-based Ziskind family. Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister, Sara, forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was stolen from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists Sara to create a forgery to replace it. While trying to evade the police, Ben attempts to find the truth of how the painting got to the museum. From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia where Marc Chagall brought art to orphaned Jewish boys, to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn weaves a story of mystery, romance, folklore, history and theology into a spellbinding modern tale. Richly satisfying and utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"--not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now.… (more)
User reviews
When I began this story, I felt it best to write down the names of the characters and how they related to each other so as not to get confused. After a while, there didn't seem to be that many characters after all, so I tossed my notes aside.
For me, the story's high point was the very brief appearance of Marc Chagall, who in this tale as well as in real life, taught art to orphaned children in the Soviet Union. I was intrigued enough by his mention to stop reading for a bit and look up Chagall's biography in order to learn a bit more about this famous painter.
Throughout the book, themes such as art forgery, Yiddish literature, anti-Fascism, and the harsh treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union arose and centered around one particular family and one special painting. From my description of this book's content, you might believe that Horn's story would be unduly heavy reading. To the contrary. It's actually rather light and lyrical at times.
There were two things, however, that kept me from really liking this story. Avoiding spoilers, I'll only say that one particular plot point near the end did not seem believable to me (and, no, it was *not* the fantasy element). In addition, the ending itself was simply too long-winded. I like a book that makes you want to keep reading to see the outcome. Unfortunately, this book had a neverending ending, and what really happened at the close of this story still remained unanswered.
As the novel begins, Ben Ziskind, a lonely, 30-year-old divorced, skinny, legally blind genius has just stolen a Chagall painting from the Museum of Hebraic Art in New Jersey. Ben and his sister Sara, although twins, are quite different: Ben focuses on trivia – he writes questions for the quiz show American Genius. Sara is an artist and sees the world in broad patterns and colors that elude Ben. In fact, this book is all about what is seen versus what is hidden. One of the characters is even named The Hidden One ("Der Nister" in Yiddish). (This is the real-life Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitch, a friend of Chagall who hid many of his manuscripts behind Chagall’s canvasses, since writing on any subject but “socialist realism” was forbidden in Stalin’s Russia.)
Ben steals the painting because he recognizes it as belonging to his family. It was given to his grandfather Boris by Chagall himself.
Boris was orphaned at age ten by the pogroms that swept Russia from 1918-1921 killing over 150,000 Jews. Chagall and Kahanovitch were teachers at his orphanage. [In an Afterward, in which the author discusses the historical events that inform the plot, she observes that the orphanage at which Chagall and Der Nister taught was a veritable avant-garde artists’ colony. Practically all of them but Chagall would later be exterminated by Stalin.]
Chagall left for Europe, and freedom, but Der Nister and his family stayed in Russia. When Der Nister’s beloved daughter Hodele died, he wrote a letter to God that is a wonderful expression of his grief delivered in a veil of sarcasm:
"To the Eternal (may the name of your honored majesty be blessed forever and ever): Forgive me for interrupting your divine and important work. I hope you will grant me the gift of your mercy and be particularly forgiving of my interrupting you at this juncture in the history of our world. It is my humble assumption that you are presently involved in extremely essential, unfathomably life-sanctifying creative endeavors that we shall all (may it be your will) be privileged to witness in the near future, speedily and in our time – for I cannot otherwise explain your current absence from the face of the earth.”
Boris grew up and had his own family, and his daughter Rosalie married Daniel. They became the parents of Ben and Sara. Rosalie and Daniel are dead as the book begins, although their stories are told in subsequent chapters. The painting and the stories of Der Nister stuffed behind it were passed down through the generations.
Rosalie wrote and illustrated Jewish folk tales, although the stories were actually adapted from Der Nister and other Yiddish artists who had been murdered by Stalin. She wanted to make sure that their stories would not be “hidden” forever. The last picture book she published before she died was called “The World to Come.” As it turns out, “The World to Come” is also the name of the mandatory lecture series in Paradise attended by those not yet born. And “the world to come” is what Rosalie and Daniel, in Paradise, identify to their grandson-to-be as “the world, in the future, as you create it.”
So many of the choices made to create “the world to come” depend upon trust, another important theme of this narrative. It was certainly critical for Boris in Stalin’s Russia, and Daniel in Vietnam, and Ben, who tries to believe in new love. As the author suggests, “Trusting anyone is the most dangerous thing one can do, but it’s also one of the only things that make life worth living.”
Evaluation: I found this book to be lovely, engaging, thought-provoking, and hopeful in spite of the crosses the characters had to bear. The author writes with impressive craftsmanship and kept my interest up throughout. My one criticism is that the plot wasn't neatly tied up in a bow for me at the end.
Benjamin
One character, imbibing books almost as an addict would, is warned: "It's not healthy to drink all those books. You're going to be born addicted to those stories. And then you're going to go through life thirsty for things that don't exist." Maybe that's true. But the longing for the world to come embodies such a hopeful unreality: maybe not the world around us, but in our sights, something we can effect or at least look for present strands of it breaking through, to nourish. The tension between realism and hope is always especially difficult in Jewish lit with the Holocaust constantly in the background of every story. Yet hope and perseverence render this story gentle and sweet, an oasis of small dreams in the midst of all brutality.
We did read this for book club, & it did prompt some good discussion, mainly on the interpretation of the ending, on which we didn't agree. So that's something.
On the positive side, it has some good side stories and introduced me to some jew
Actually not the story itself - the multiple time lines and the connected stories of the people and the times are captivating. But the writing is so overwritten, so over complicated that it feels more like an exercise in style than a real novel. It felt as if Horn wrote a sentence, then realized that she missed to add a few metaphors so she added them. Then she added some more. And when she was done with the metaphors, she kept adding more and more pieces - literary connections and elements.
It all starts when a painting is stolen by a man that is usually not a criminal while being shown in the Museum of Jewish Art. The police is sure that one of the curators is responsible and she decides to find the truth on her own. And the story of loss and death and hope emerges - from the Jewish boy camps in Russia through the camps of the WWII and the world's craziness after that through Chernobyl and the changes of the 90s. A story of a family connected with the story of a painting - a story that makes old painful memories emerge. And all through it are the legends of the Jewish (or so they look like), the question of authorship and possession and the always important question of who owns a story.
It's one of those cases where I wish the author had done less - the story was captivating when I did not have to wade through the language. I suspect that I also missed a lot of references and nods. But even if I had not, I would not have liked the novel much more. And this novel could have been so much satisfying.
Ostensibly the protagonist of the novel is Benjamin Ziskind, an aging prodigy (now thirty) who, in a moment of recognition that prompts a rash act of liberation, walks out of a Chagall exhibit in New York with a small painting that he realizes used to hang in his recently deceased mother’s house. In his mind he is simply returning stolen property, but this painting’s history is much more. It is tied to a history of misery and despair for Benjamin’s recent ancestors and by association to the long history of suffering of Jewish people everywhere. The painting, we learn, had been given to Benjamin’s maternal grandfather, Boris, by Chagall himself when Chagall was teaching art at an orphanage near Malakhova. These are no ordinary orphans. They are all that remains of families destroyed during the wave of pogroms that swept through Russia in the 1920s. And Boris, whose Jewish name is also Benjamin, is one of the most tragic cases, having been rescued from an open grave in which he was hiding.
We also learn of Chagall’s friend at the orphanage, the writer known as ‘The Hidden One’, or Der Nister. His story is equally tragic. It mirrors that of a whole generation of Russian Jewish intellectuals and artists that was systematically destroyed under Stalin’s regime. Chagall ends up being just about the only one to die a natural death, having fled to Berlin in the 1920s and later further west.
But just as interesting is the story of the twin sister of Benjamin (the first Benjamin I mentioned). She is an artist like their mother had been. And she was present at the age of 12 when her mother “sold” the painting to a Russian museum whose buyer turns out to be none other than the man who was instrumental in her mother’s father’s (the other Benjamin) death.
Tragedy abounds. But not just tragedy. There is also much light and joy and numerous tales inspired by or lifted directly from Der Nister and his literary peers. These Yiddish stories feel both ancient and fresh. And they connect the characters of the surface plot with the larger story of life before birth, that is life with the angels, our preparation for, and our destination in the world to come. Curiously rich storytelling, gently recommended.
I already hated this novel when the absurdity was suddenly amplified at the end of the novel's second section. I won't discuss that. The final section is a magical realist dimension where Zuzu and Clarence can discuss the implications of bells and wings while sipping literature and ingesting art. That is simply sad.
The Chagall sections were engaging but so brief.
It was completely different than what I expected. In some moments dark and disturbing. Totally not my cup of tea. Plus, I wasn't in a mood for something serious.