Die kommende Welt

by Dara Horn

Paperback, 2007

Status

Available

Publication

Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag (2007)

Description

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

LibraryThing member SqueakyChu
What is "the world to come"? If you're not sure, Dara Horn is willing to take you there in the pages of her book. Beware, though, as in order to reach that place, you must first weave your way through tangents of family intrigue, historical fiction, and fantasy as well as loop back and forth in
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time.

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.
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LibraryThing member franoscar
This is a well-written story that follows a little Chagall painting through its passage in the world. The author is a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature & she draws on that hugely, including several retellings of stories. She tells about children relocated to an orphan camp after pogroms
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during the Russian Civil War, about Chagall & about a writer called Der Nister who stayed in the SU and didn't prosper; and about the roundups & killings of Jews in the early 1950's. The US part is less eventful. There is a section about the war in Vietnam that borrows a lot from standard cliches. As does the end with the huge bomb at the Jewish museum.
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LibraryThing member priamel
Well, the story about Chagall and Der Nister wasn't too bad, but the modern-day love story was just too too boring
LibraryThing member ChickLitFan
This book chronicled a story of the members of the Ziskind family, told from several points of view, jumping back and forth in time. It started out promising, with a main plot involving twins Ben and Sara and a work of art that once belonged to their family. When it wandered far from this story,
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which it did, I started to lose interest. The ending was highly anti-climactic, when the most developed protaganists' story is dropped entirely, and an extended story about an as-yet-undeveloped character covers several pages. I can't describe it without spoiling it, so suffice it to say there are some very creative ideas in this section, but it bears little relation to the story that preceded it, except for family relationships. All in all, if my book club hadn't selected this book, I likely would not have finished it.
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LibraryThing member jmoncton
Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely, recently single, New Yorker attends a social at an art museum that is featuring a Chagall exhibit. He recognizes one of the featured paintings as a work that used to belong to his family when he was a young man. On impulse, he takes it off the wall and walks out of the
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museum. What gradually unfolds is the story of Benjamin's family, starting in Russia in the 1920's, and traveling to the US with a detour in Vietnam. Interspersed with the family history is a bit of Jewish folklore about heaven and the afterlife and 'before life'. The writing was beautiful and parts of the story were very haunting. My only complaint about this book was that it's scope was too large. There were almost too many sad and disconnected stories without a strong plot to hold it all together. Still a beautiful book.
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LibraryThing member suesbooks
The ending of this book was such a disappointment I have to say I hardly cared for it overall. The historical information was interesting, as were the sections where the protagonist was present. However, the ending was so metaphorical (and I was not willing to sort it out) that I would not
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recommend this book.
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LibraryThing member carmilla222
This may be the closest I have come to a good modern novel. This is the story of a Russian Jewish family and their relationship to a painting by Marc Chagall. The characters were interesting without being too "wacky," and the plot was just interesting enough to keep my entertained. My only problem
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with it was the ending, which veered off into "the world to come" and kind of abandoned most of the characters I had grown to like.
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LibraryThing member shifrack00
Really good. Main question -- What do you do when everything disappears? I really enjoyed. The plot wasn't so tight, but it is literary fiction so that wasn't the point. I loved the scenes from the Old World, mixed in with the modern ones.
LibraryThing member knithappened
"The Wold to Come" is about a recently divorced man named Ben Zizkind who write questions for a quiz show. At the prompting of his twin sister, he goes to a singles party at a Jewish museum and low and behold he sees a painting that used to hang in his parents' home...a small Chagall. After
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everyone leaves to go to another part of the museum for the musical entertainment, he stays behind (he can't hear music as according to Jewish law he is forbidden within the year following a parent's death and his mom recently died). Something comes over him and he steals the painting. Now you might think that alarms go off and the video camera would capture the theft. Wrong...security is focused on preventing terrorists from harming the people inside. So needless to say Ben gets away with the theft until the very attractive museum director puts 2 and 2 together. The rest of the book tells the story of Ben's ancestry and how the painting came into the family (it truly is a Chagall). I have a penchant for novels that jump around in time and are also narrated from different perspectives. There is also a bit of history, art, poetry, short stories, and lots of talk about what happens after death. According to Rosalie (Ben's mom who is a children's writer...albeit a very dark children's writer if you ask me), she doesn't believe in reincarnation. What she believes is that there is a world to come where people who have passed teach and guide the future generation when they are in the womb. Definitely an enjoyable read...one that could be enjoyed by men.
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LibraryThing member nbmars
The story of three generations of the Ziskind family is told in alternating chapters with a unique twist: we also see them in their pre-natal and post-natal existence in Paradise. Members of a family who have passed on literally help to shape the characteristics of those who are yet to be born.
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This charming tale tinged with tragedy is more sophisticated than it might seem, and provides a captivating way to think about loved ones who are no longer among the living.

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.
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LibraryThing member the_awesome_opossum
The World to Come is a book about forgeries and fictions. Not just forgery of artwork and stories - there are those in this book - but forgeries of history. Is it preservation or merely lies when the past takes on a more pleasant cadence in our memories than may have 'actually' happened?

Benjamin
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Ziskind is a socially awkward and isolated man, the unlikely thief of a Chagall painting which he swears hung in his house as a child. As the narrative meanders through the history of the painting, we get to meet both Chagall and several generations of Ben's family. It's both a micro and macrohistory: the characters live small lives, often at the edges of existence, but there is always the tensions in the background of the pogroms, of the Holocaust, of persecutions and families split up and artists suppressed if not killed. So their artwork, and their stories, both remain and don't remain over the span of history.

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.
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LibraryThing member indygo88
There were moments of brilliance in this book. Dara Horn has a magical way with words, and the allegorical component(s) were very creatively written & enjoyable on their own. But I did have trouble with the way the whole story fit together. In some aspects, it just didn't. In some ways it added to
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the mystery, but I also couldn't help but feel that it was disjointed to a large extent. There was absolutely no transition into the last chapter & although beautifully written, it just didn't "fit" with the rest of the book. I would be interested in pursuing other works by Dara Horn, but this one came up a little short with me.
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.
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LibraryThing member voracious
The World to Come was a really interesting novel about a man who suddenly steals a Chagall painting from a museum and the background and history of the family that led him to believe that the painting belonged to his family. I really enjoyed the development of the family story, particularly Ben and
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Sara (twins) as they came to be involved in this spontaneous crime. The family history part was also interesting but tended to stray off into dream sequences and metaphorical/allegory at unexpected times to introduce the reader to the "world to come". The book was really picking up speed and had my full attention until it came to an unexpected halt with no apparently conclusion, to lapse back into a relatively unrelated "world to come" metaphor sequence, leaving the reader completely at a loss to the ending. This infuriated me and I felt ripped off. I was prepared to give this book a higher rating and recommend it to others, but now I feel that I can't. I also would be reluctant to read another Dana Horn book because I would be afraid she might do this again. Great story if you can handle someone stealing the last chapter at the climax and supplementing it with something else...
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LibraryThing member TanyaTomato
I have a real problem with the last chapter, otherwise this book would have warranted a higher rating. Very entertaining, but ultimately unfulfilling.
LibraryThing member ivan.frade
It starts pretty well with an interesting mix of historical characters, sad stories and some humour. Sadly the main plot becomes boring and predictable and everything finishes in a childish simile between food and art.

On the positive side, it has some good side stories and introduced me to some jew
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artists I didn't know before.
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LibraryThing member AnnieMod
A story which starts in Russia and ends in USA, runs a century and involves Jewish history, a family history and the stealing of a painting. It should be a captivating read - all the elements are there - including the real story of Chagall and the world in the 20th century. And yet, the story ended
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up disappointing.

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.
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LibraryThing member Clara53
On the whole, a well-written and thought-provoking novel. Yet, some parts of it seemed redundant and overly-accentuated.
LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
Sometimes a novelist is burdened by a surfeit of rich and poignant characters. It must be hard to decide which of their stories to tell, and tempting to try and tell all of them. Dara Horn succumbs to this temptation and very nearly is overwhelmed by it. If she does not quite succeed, she at least
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gives us numerous wonderful moments, and plenty to think about.

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.
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LibraryThing member andsoitgoes
I had the audio book version of this title and although I enjoyed the story, especially the last chapters, I found the voices the reader used off-putting. I would not recommend the audio but definitely the physical book.
LibraryThing member jonfaith
Manufactured misery. This effort reeks of the university workshop. Assembly was required. Ms. Horn appears to have taken the template of Nicole Krauss and where the latter has a character confront or be molded by The Shoah/Stalin/La Junta; Horn eschews the pivotal "Or" and asks why not cobble on a
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Chernobyl and Vietnam as well? You may think some characters are mistreated. My constructions really suffer from History (and goyim).

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.
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LibraryThing member Eoin
Another beautiful example of the genre (is there a name for books about early middle twentieth century eastern european jews, magic, and late 20th century american jews? like Foer, or History of Love, etc?). Anyways, great. Joy in hard times, humor in tragedy.
LibraryThing member Rdra1962
I loved this book, it was very thought provoking! Would have been a 5-star but the ending dragged on way too long for me. My edition included an interview with the author that had some great questions, especially about the author's thoughts about Chagall!
LibraryThing member mojomomma
Ben steals a small painting from a museum because it looks like the one his parents had in his childhood home. We follow the story of how the painting came into being and how Ben's mother Rosalie got it and why she sold it. Chagall had a colleague at a boy's orphanage where he was teaching and
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where Ben's grandfather was after the pogroms who stuffed his Yiddish stories into Chagall's frames. Rosalie found them later as an adult and published them as English children's stories--plagiarism or the survival of cultural heritage. The final chapter covers the pre-birth of Ben's nephew, as a "not-yet" child. Reminiscent of The Goldfinch. A non-linear plot, which makes it hard to follow.
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LibraryThing member Sarielle
DNF

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.
LibraryThing member ctkjs
Beautiful and wildly imaginative. It reminded me of a cross between "Everything is Illuminated" and "A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon." I enjoyed this more than I thought. Funny, sad, creative and inspiring. What do you do with the life you're given?

Language

Original language

German

Original publication date

2006-01-16

ISBN

3833305290 / 9783833305290
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