[CPProt.net] Book review. Originals and forgeries. THE WORLD TO COME, by Dara Horn. W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $24.95.

[Ton Cremers]

.Originals and forgeries
BY BETHANY SCHNEIDER
SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY

January 15, 2006

THE WORLD TO COME, by Dara Horn. W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $24.95.

Sent by his twin sister to a singles cocktail hour at a Jewish museum, Ben Ziskind sees a 
sketch by Marc Chagall. It is a study for the painting "Over Vitebsk," painted during the artist's 
early career in the Soviet Union. Ben recognizes the sketch. He believes it is the same one 
that hung in his childhood home; he can see the shiny spot where his sister painted nail 
polish on it when they were children. The painting disappeared around the time of their 
father's death, and Ben feels its loss is akin to the shattering of his own life.

Ben is a former child prodigy who now writes trivia questions for quiz shows, a former 
husband whose wife has left him, a son whose mother has recently died, a brother whose 
twin has found a love that fulfills her both personally and artistically. Left alone in the gallery 
by more successful singles than he, Ben tucks the sketch, worth a million dollars, under his 
coat and leaves the museum.

Thus begins Dara Horn's symphonic and piercingly beautiful "The World to Come," a novel 
that circles around the story of that painting and its long history of meaning for Sara and Ben, 
the Ziskind twins. In stealing the painting, Ben, whose sense of himself extends only to his 
own small life and its failures, grasps a transcendent cultural inheritance. It is an inheritance 
that Horn reveals to us with simple elegance, writing with a ritual grace, as if she were 
unrolling the Torah, beginning to construct a reading. From Ben's initial act the novel 
expands to include not only the stories of Ben and Sara, but the story of Yiddish art and 
letters in the 20th century, and the story of the unborn inheritors of our own moments of 
connection and dissonance.

Horn shows us Chagall teaching at an orphanage for Jewish boys in Soviet Russia, just 
before his career takes off. We meet his friend Der Nister, "The Hidden One," whose Yiddish 
stories become more and more visionary the more his career falters. We encounter 
fragments of those stories, and meet them again as they repeat themselves in Ben and 
Sara's lives. We are shown the twins' grandfather, an orphan, to whom Chagall gives the 
sketch in exchange for the boy's drawing of a baby in the womb. We follow the romance of 
the twins' parents, whose childhood love for one another becomes the organizing passion of 
their lives. We follow Ben and Sara's father to Vietnam and their mother into widowhood.

Suspended amid these stories is the question of the theft and the slowly emerging possibility 
that the stolen painting is a copy, that the twins' mother was both a plagiarist and a forger. If 
Ben is a thief, we begin to see that Sara has the capacity and even the desire to forge, and in 
copying Chagall to master him, to do it better, to reinvent the meaning of art for the present 
and the future. By the novel's end we are unsure of art itself. Are we meant to revere the past 
or disregard it in our reinvention of the future? Are mothers forgers? Are children forgeries? 
Or is cultural inheritance and re-creation more complicated than that? Are there other ways to 
read and to see?

Horn ties her tale together with a delightful and often funny mystical thread. Before we are 
born and after we die, we exist in a realm of becoming and of having been. Our ancestors 
work with our descendants to prepare the world to come:

"There are no days in a person's life that are better or happier than those days in the womb. 
When those days must end, an angel approaches the child in the womb and says, The time 
has come. But the child refuses - wouldn't you? (Didn't you?) Please, the child begs, please 
don't make me go. And then the angel smacks it under the nose so that it falls from the 
womb and forgets - which is why babies are always born screaming."

The living have forgotten what it was to be in a state of becoming. But Horn teaches us what 
we forgot when the angel smacked us, and we read this novel with an eerie sense that the 
world is much bigger than we thought it was. Horn's writing, both its breadth and its tightly 
focused precision of detail, is shot through with a poignancy and clarity of color not unlike a 
Chagall painting. Almost romantic, almost tragic, almost comic, almost mystical - the novel 
suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang 
there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.

Bethany Schneider is an assistant professor of English at Bryn Mawr College in 
Pennsylvania.

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