Book Review: The World to Come, by Dara Horn

Thanks to this book, I reconsidered and reconfirmed many of my ideas about writing. Actually, the World to Come is what I call a good book.

As in a Chagall's painting, you are flying over time, countries, doubts and misunderstandings. The whole book it's a spiritual mystery you don't grasp always the sense or the meanings. As in real life: do we understand always the chains or are we always able to find the missing links? Life is art and art is life and sometimes there is not an obvious meaning in what we are doing or what it's happening to us.

The story is based on a real fact: Chagall's Study for Over Vitebsk was stolen from a gallery in NYC during a cocktail. The study represents a bearded man moving over the houses of a snowy street. He looks like a shadow flying and hurrying up. Where is he going to? Where is he coming from? What can we do in this respect abour ourselves?

In the book, Ben Ziskind, the former wonder-kid, recently divorced and currently making quizzes for a TV show, stole the 1 million-dollar painting during a cocktail for singles at the Museum of Hebraic Art from New Jersey. The painting belonged to his family, his Russian grand-father Boris Kulback being a former pupil of Chagall during his teaching time in an orphanage for Jewish children. There, Chagall befriended the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovich called the Nister (The Hidden One) writing Hasidic stories with a hidden key. Some of his stories were hidden on the back of some of the paintings.

Ben's mother, an illustrator and writer of children book, sold the painting after the death of her husband - former Vietnam veteran - for offering to Ben and his twin sister Sara a good education. Doubts are surviving regarding the authenticity of the painting and till the end of the book we gather a bunch of unanswered questions most of them built around the painting: how the painting was brought to Europe from Russia, was it faked in Russia by the expert that used to be Kulback's neighbor?

The key for all our answers is in the world to come, a Chagall-tailored world where the old souls are together with the new ones, the only moments when we can have authentic answers to our overwhelming questions.

From a generation to another, the parents are always missing: Kulback was orphan, his daughter will survive alone after he is imprisoned by the Soviets and Ben and Sara should overcome the death of their father and after, their mother's. The parents are transmitting to their children mysteries to solve and the mystery if the world to come. As in Chagall paintings, we are flying from the Soviet Russia and its revolution, to the Vietnam War and the daily American East Coast life.

From the beginning to the end, the pieces of the kaleidoscope are rearranging over and over again. In the middle of the stories, we are transposed to dreams about singing paradises with colourful butterflies or fluid universe of the world as it is before we are landing on Earth.

What it is all about? Each moment, we are the making our present and future: we are taking decisions and actions. The world to come is the world we are building carefully while waiting for the world to come.

A wonderful story, perfectly fitting the special time before Rosh HaShana.