The World to Come, by Dara Horn, W.W. Norton & Company.
This unusual, many-sided novel was inspired by a real-life art theft from a Jewish museum in Manhattan some years ago. The painting by Chagall, Over Vitebsk, depicted a bearded Jew floating over the skyline, over the housetops of a rural village. The figure seems to be walking, unaware that he is actually in flight.
When Ben Ziskind visits the museum one day to participate in a social singles mixer, he is astonished to see the familiar Chagall, which he is certain used to hang on the living room wall of his parent’s home in New Jersey.
In the wake of his mother’s recent death and the collapse of his marriage, Ben is angry and disturbed. In a moment of irrational rage and convinced of the provenance of the painting, he wrenches it from the wall and runs.
Where did the painting come from? The author goes back in time to a Jewish boy’s school in Malakhovka, set up by the Soviet authorities for orphaned children. In an impetuous moment, Chagall, who was a teacher at the school, gave the painting to a promising student, who in time turns out to be Ben’s grandfather. We follow the boy and the painting through several traumatic generations of change and suffering.
Another teacher at the school was the Yiddish writer who went by the one name Der Nister (the hidden one). Chagall manages to leave the Soviet Union, to enjoy both fame and fortune. Der Nister unhappily remains relatively unknown, a figure of deprivation, poverty and abuse.
Mixed into the complex plot are Yiddish short stories, homilies and parables, including some by I.L. Peretz, Shalom Alecheim and Der Nister.
The author, who received her PhD degree from Harvard in the field of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, makes creative use of Jewish folklore and mysticism, most notably the tradition that before we are born we know all the secrets of the world, but at the moment of birth an angel presses a finger to our lips and we forget everything we knew. This angelic action explains the dent beneath our noses.
Ben eventually falls in love with Erica, a member of the museum’s staff who has discovered the secret of the painting and knows that Ben is its thief.
A terrorist act, a truck loaded with explosives, turns the Jewish museum into an inferno. Ben enters the tottering building in search of Erica. His fruitless attempt ends in semi-consciousness. “He slipped in the mud again, pawed at the walls, pulled himself up to stand, and reached for the doorknob. ‘Erica?’ he called, and listened for her answer. And then he opened the door and entered the world to come.”
Babies figure prominently in much of the book’s folklore. At one point the author strives to imagine a state of existence where the unborn undergo a series of immersions in pools of water: the pool of ice-filled hate, the cold still pool of grief, the pool of warm friendship and finally, the pool of love.
The bathhouse attendant explains, “Once you are born you might feel all the things into the world to come… I hope it never will. But if it does, I want you to be prepared.”
Beautifully written, symphonic in its layers of the real and the imaginary, combining elements of mystery, romance, theology and folklore, The World to Come is an engrossing literary adventure.