The World to Come

At the center of the story is Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy who 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 wrongfully taken from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists his twin to create a forgery to replace the stolen Chagall. What follows is a series of interwoven stories that trace the life and times of the famous painting, and the fate of those who come into contact with it.

From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn takes readers on an amazing journey through the sacred and the profane elements of the human condition. It is this expertly rendered juxtaposition of the spiritual with the secular that makes The World to Come so profound, and so compelling to readers. As we learn near the end of the beautiful tale, "The real world to come is down below--the world, in the future, as you create it."--Gisele Toueg--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Former child prodigy Ben Ziskind—5'6", 123 pounds and legally blind—steals a Marc Chagall painting at the end of an alienating singles cocktail hour at a local museum, determined to prove that its provenance is tainted and that it belongs to his family. With surety and accomplishment, Horn (In the Image) telescopes out into Ziskind's familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam (where Ben's father, Daniel, served a short, terrifying stint); and the paradoxes of American suburbia, a place where native Ben feels less at home than the teenage Soviet refugee Leonid Shcharansky. Ben's relationship with his pregnant twin sister, Sara, a painter who eventually tries to render a forgery of the painting to return to the museum, is a damply compelling exposition of what it means to have someone biologically close but emotionally distant. Horn, born in 1977, expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and Daniel's job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book's title. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
Dara Horn's debut, In the Image, was one of the best novels you never heard of in 2002. Although it didn't generate the popular acclaim won by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, it was a forerunner of their novels about precocious, grief-stricken young Jews searching for lost loved ones with the help of very old guides. Horn's lovely new novel, The World to Come, builds directly on her earlier work, but it confirms that she won't rise into the Foer-Krauss hip-o-sphere. A doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Harvard, she's more devoted to ancient mysticism than chic magical realism. The haunting melody of her work arises from Judaism's spiritual chords rather than its cultural ones, which are far more prevalent in modern fiction. Horn writes about theology and moral imperatives and the afterlife -- as though she didn't realize that such things just aren't done in sophisticated literary prose. But that daring is endearing, especially when it flows from deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come -- or the one before.

The novel opens on Benjamin Ziskind, a severely depressed, recently divorced game-show researcher who's just stolen a $1 million painting by Marc Chagall from the Museum of Hebraic Art in New Jersey. Ben is not a professional thief or an art connoisseur (in fact, he's legally blind), but in the wake of his mother's death, the collapse of his marriage and a new sense of the silliness of his job, he's "sick, sick, sick of having things taken" from him. And so, recognizing the painting as one that used to hang in his parents' living room when he was a child, he grabs it off the wall and runs.

At this point, the novel fractures into a kaleidoscopic collection of stories that sprawl across the 20th century, around the world and through a variety of literary forms. In the present, Ben huddles at home with the painting, worrying about what he should do with it. A too-cute romance with one of the museum's staffers provides a little forward momentum, but this story in the foreground is really just an excuse to spin captivating tales in the background about Ben's family members and about how the painting was created and passed from generation to generation.

Working loosely with events in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, Horn takes us back to the time Chagall spent teaching art at the Jewish Boys' Colony at Malakhovka. His colleagues were a number of brilliant Yiddish writers, almost all of whom were eventually murdered by the Soviets, and his students were traumatized orphans of the pogroms in 1919. In a particularly touching scene, Horn imagines Chagall giving a disturbed little boy one of his paintings while Pinkhas Kahanovitch, the writer known as Der Nister (the "Hidden One"), looks on, wondering what he could give. When their three paths diverge, we follow the boy and his painting through several traumatic generations. Chagall manages to leave the Soviet Union and enjoy a life of fame and fortune. The most powerful sections, meanwhile, describe the deprivation and abuse suffered by his friend Der Nister, who's tormented most of all by spirit-crushing obscurity, swallowing his envy for the increasingly famous Chagall while he scribbles his symbolist legends on any scraps of paper he can find.

Mixed into this swirling plot are Yiddish stories -- some drawn from Der Nister's work, some from other writers of the same period. Babies figure prominently in much of this folklore as Horn tries to imagine a state of existence before ours in which the unborn prepare for their lives, only to forget everything in their fall to earth. The title phrase, "the world to come," shows up repeatedly, in reference to the afterlife but also, for those not yet born, to this life. (There's enough womb/tomb imagery here to make a devoted Freudian wish that sometimes a cigar were just a cigar.) Horn rubs the concepts of death and birth until their edges fray -- all part of her effort to create a mythology in which various states of existence revolve back to each other: "The already-weres and the not-yets of our world, the mortals and the natals," she suggests, "are bound together somewhere just past where we can see, in a knot of eternal life."

Horn's vision -- captivating and startling even when not entirely coherent -- grows from stories that range across the 20th century, from the Soviet Union to Vietnam to New Jersey. All of it is meant to show that the world to come is nothing less and nothing more than the world we make, day by day, with our choices and actions. "Everything counts," Ben's mother says. "Don't ever let anyone tell you that you're just rehearsing for your life."

The final section of the book takes one last daring risk, showing us the paradise before this one, where "the beds and hammocks . . . are made out of music, chained melodies and woven symphonies and firm fanfare mattresses and ropy-netted ballads and strong percussive massages." It's fanciful and mystical and arguably inadequate to staunch the grief or blot out the horrors that Horn portrays so powerfully throughout this novel. But it's all tremendously earnest and fraught with moral weight, and somehow, miraculously, it stays aloft in the mind like a dream you can't decide was sweet or frightening.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Inspired by a true story of a Chagall painting that was stolen from the Jewish Museum in New York in 2001 (which later turned up), The World to Come is at once a mystery, Jewish history and folklore, biography, philosophical treatise, love story, and fantastical adventure. Horn, a scholar of Hebrew and Jewish literature, has produced a surfeit of riches. With elegance and sympathy, she interweaves multiple stories about Yiddish literature, Stalinist Russia, Ben’s father’s Vietnam service, and the Ziskind family, while raising questions about art, identity, cultural inheritance, and the human soul. Though some critics felt jilted by the sudden ending, most felt that what could have been a hodge-podge narrative coalesced into a beautiful, complex, and haunting novel.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* An actual art heist inspired this fictional tale of former child prodigy and television quiz-show writer Benjamin Ziskind, who steals a Chagall sketch from a New York museum during a singles cocktail hour--he's convinced the painting, titled Over Vitebsk, belongs to his family. The provenance of the piece is revealed layer by layer in Horn's spellbinding second novel, which takes readers from a 1920s Soviet orphanage (at which the real-life Chagall taught art to young Jewish boys) to the battlefields of Vietnam, where Benjamin's father lost one of his legs. With the help of his twin sister, Sara, a talented painter, Benjamin hopes to outsmart the comely museum representative who's pegged him for the crime. A Harvard University doctoral candidate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Horn (In the Image, 2002) renders a host of memorable characters, from sensitive young Benjamin, who wears a corrective spinal brace he calls "The Cage," to the twentieth-century Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym "Der Nister," whose writings align with the stolen painting in an ingenious way. A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, The World to Come is a narrative tour de force crackling with conundrums and dark truths. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"Captivating and startling... miraculously, it stays aloft in the mind like a dream you can't decide was sweet or frightening." -- The Washington Post

"Nothing short of amazing." (Editor's Choice) -- Entertainment Weekly

A deeply involving tale…The novel may sound over-ambitious…yet it all seems to work— beautifully. -- Merle Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

A deeply satisfying literary mystery and funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the presentâ€"and how we haunt the future. -- Time Magazine (January 16, 2006)

A dynamic hybrid of…The History of Love and Milan Kundera's philosophical flights of fancy…intelligent, compelling literary fiction. -- Misha Stone, Library Journal

A heist with a twist, Horn's engaging second novel (after In the Image, 2003) explores the history behind a stolen painting as well as the saga of the family that owned it for nearly a century. Recognizing it from his childhood living room, Benjamin Ziskind, a socially awkward quizmaster, lifts a million-dollar Chagall during a museum cocktail hour. We quickly learn that the master painter once taught art to Ben's grandfather in a bleak Russian orphanage in the 1920s. The piece, a sketch for the famed Over Vitebsk, was a gift from the artist to his young pupil. Of additional intrigue to the museum and eventually to Ben are a series of stories written by a legendary Yiddish author (and Chagall's onetime neighbor) that are hidden in the painting's frame. As Ben is pursued-not by the police, oddly enough, but by Erica Frank, a museum staff member-Horn shuttles readers through three generations of the Ziskind family, loosely following the painting as it changes hands, crosses an ocean and withstands enormous turmoil. The family history, and Ben's own covert investigation of the painting's place within it, uncovers questions of authenticity on multiple levels and leaves him (along with his twin sister and accomplice Sara) with a heavy moral decision to make. Despite the vast oscillations in time and place, the story is remarkably coherent, and it is only in the last 50 pages that Horn runs out of gas. The romance that buds between Ben and Erica is trite and seems tacked on to the otherwise finely crafted tale. And the author's reliance on symbolism and doubles, which is subtly effective throughout, becomes unwieldy. After an appealing journey into the past, Horn should have left her readers in the present-rather, her final chapter is a confusing and corny look into "the world to come." An engrossing adventure, in spite of its flaws. Fans of art and Judaic studies will particularly enjoy this well-researched work. (Kirkus Reviews)

An accomplished work that beautifully explains how families - in all their maddening, smothering, supportive glory—create us. -- Natalie Danford, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Horn's engaging second novel is an appealing journey into the past…An engrossing adventure…a remarkably coherent, finely crafted tale. -- Kirkus Review

Horn's roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here… this book is the real thing. -- Julia Livshin, Chicago Tribune

Horn's writing…is shot through with a poignancy and clarity of color not unlike a Chagall painting. -- Bethany Schneider, Newsday

[Horn] moves these tales together in undpredictable, deeply satisfying ways…calling to mind the work of Singer, Malamud and Roth. -- San Francisco Chronicle, "Our Editors Recommend" section--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
"A compelling collage of history, mystery, theology, and scripture, --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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