Fifty Books Project 2023

The World To Come by Dara Horn

Later, in the time she had created for him, the laws of gravity would be repealed and Ben would hover over the city, looking down and seeing every possibility, all at once:  the buildings crooked and straight, the trees stunted and flourishing, the streets cast in shadows and sunlight, the invisible tombstones pushing through the sidewalk beneath leaves and a cloud.  And then he would soar through the blue and black and orange sky, and he would know what she meant, even if it was only what she meant to him.  But right now, he stood at the door that was not yet open.

This book is based on a few historical events, introduced to us in the first few chapters:

In 1922, a young Marc Chagall took a job in the new Soviet Union (Chagall was from Belarus) as an art teacher in a school for children orphaned by the Tsarist pogroms that preceded the Russian Revolution.  The children had been through enormous trauma, having witnessed the rape, torture and murder of their parents and Chagall was deeply impressed by their ability to focus on art and to embrace learning.  However, Chagall chafed under the dictate to paint in a social realist style and after one year of teaching, he left the Soviet Union for Berlin and Paris and became an internationally famous and successful artist.  

The school was staffed by a number of Jewish intellectuals, several of whom went on to become important Yiddish writers. Most of the other staff members stayed committed to the Soviet revolution and as a result had smaller careers, hobbled by the emergence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.  Many were later killed by Stalin in his purges of the 1950s.   Among these was Pinkhas Kahanovitch who wrote fabulous tales under the pen name “Der Nister,” (The Hidden One in Yiddish.). Chagall had illustrated one of his books in the early 1920s, but he was largely unknown when he he was arrested and killed.

In the summer of 2001, a small Chagall painting was stolen from the Jewish Museum in New York during a cocktail reception to celebrate a Chagall retrospective.  The painting – Study for “Over Vitebsk,” worth over $1 million, was recovered just weeks later in the Topeka, Kansas Post Office.  The thief had mailed it to a phony address with no return address knowing it would be opened by the Post Office.  The identity and motive of the thief were never discovered.

From this background, Horn has fashioned a mixture of fantasy and realism that traces the painting from when Chagall gives it to a child in the orphanage until that child’s grandson steals it from the museum.  The story includes the lifelong suffering of Der Nister, a crippling injury in the Vietnam War, a quiet suburban life in New Jersey, the travails of exiled Soviet Jews in the 1980s and several very romantic love stories.  While all of the novel is written in clear, visually arresting prose, it shifts modes so often that I had to be ready for anything to happen.  Much of this is reminiscent of a Chagall painting in which the physical laws of the universe bend towards the emotional state of the subject – so people readily fly above buildings, as in “Over Vitebsk.”

The phrase “the world to come” is repeated regularly by both the narrator and the characters and can mean heaven (or the afterlife), the world one makes by being decisive (there is a notion here that human decisions create time, that the world is frozen until we decide to make something happen), or human life (when those using the phrase are not yet born).  The main protagonists are twins and much is made of polarities of thought and vision – Ben is a cynical intellectual, his sister Sara is a romantic artist.  Ben is a slight, rather weak man, his brother in law is a large, athletic, sometime bully.  There is a funny story of a man from an old leftist Jewish family who falls in love with the daughter of an exile from the Soviet Union, causing unique in-law dynamics.  Chagall rejects the hypocrisy of the Soviet system, Der Nister doesn’t see the hypocrisy until it is too late.  Horn explores ideas about art, religion, the afterlife, wisdom and love in these dichotomies.

For all its intellectual heft, the book is something of a page turner as we wonder if Ben will get away with stealing the painting, if Der Nister will survive the latest purge, how various love relationships will work out.  However, as both an intellectual exploration and a page turner it ultimately disappoints.  The central love story is left unfinished, with lies and deception left unresolved as a happily-ever-after ending is merely hinted at.  And the questions of the role of art and spirituality in our lives are given a shallow and childish treatment in a final chapter involving the birth of a character we know nothing about.  This was a disappointing ending to a book that had me excited and intrigued for much of its 300 pages.