THE WORLD TO COME
by Dara Horn
Hamish Hamilton, (August 3) £14.99; 416pp

DARA HORN IS AN impassioned storyteller. The World to Come unfolds in New Jersey, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, even the womb, and through letters, poems, folktales and dreams. It is an ambitious undertaking for a young writer, but Horn’s debut, In the Image (2002), won several literary prizes in the US. Her knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish literature comes to the fore in her second novel.

According to Jewish legend, the unborn live in a paradise of knowledge. Then an angel slaps them in the face, erasing those original truths so they must spend their lives trying to reacquire them. Horn’s “world to come”, it seems, is not only an afterlife but also a pre-existence and could equally be the present, depending on one’s place in time. Confusing, maybe, but it is “a knot of eternal life” that Horn seeks to unravel.

She uses a modern incident to take us through the 20th century: the theft of a Chagall painting, Study for Over Vitebsk, from a temporary exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2001. In real life the culprit was never caught, but in the novel that thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a genius who writes questions for quiz shows. When we meet him he is languishing over a divorce and the death of his mother. Ben sees the Chagall during a singles’ cocktail hour at the museum, and is convinced that it once hung in his parents’ living room.

Flash back to the early 1920s, when Chagall is teaching art at the Jewish Boys’ Colony at Malakhova, a home for orphans. There he meets a traumatised boy, Boris Kulbak, and gives him a painting. We soon realise that this boy is Ben’s grandfather-to-be, and Horn’s intentions become clear: to trace both the lineage of the painting and the Ziskind family through three generations — or four, if you count the story in the womb. In fact, Chagall’s studio looks, to Boris, like the inside of a womb — an echoing, and re-echoing image.

There is someone else in the studio: Pinkhas Kahanovitch, a recondite Yiddish writer whose pen name was Der Nister, the “Hidden One”, and lived in the same artists’ colony as Chagall. Der Nister interrupts the exchange between his friend and the student by reciting them one of his mythical stories, which he then hides inside the painting. Yet Boris senses that the man who laughs at him (Chagall) will last, while the one who praises his imagination (Der Nister) will disappear. The boy, like many of Horn’s characters, is a visionary. Years later, Chagall did indeed leave the Soviet Union for the West and become famous, but Der Nister slipped into obscurity before dying in a Soviet prison camp.

As Horn follows the diverging paths of these characters through the decades, she explores the mysterious ways of posterity, creativity and meaning. In these sections, the tone of the book becomes darker, and more interesting. The “best art”, Horn suggests, is not necessarily the one that survives. The works of many talented Yiddish writers who were either murdered by the Nazis or executed by Stalin were deeply buried.

Horn draws on these Yiddish texts in the same way that Ben’s mother, a children’s writer, resurrected them in English. She raises the questions: to whom do stories belong? To whom does originality belong? While Ben tries to determine the painting’s provenance, he falls in love with the woman at the museum investigating the theft. This is just one thread in a tapestry of tales about romantic and familial love, although it’s more flimsy than the others, which are tested by adversity: war, poverty, illness, death. Horn’s prose sallies along with confidence and intensity, sometimes to the point of whimsy, which means that the novel is, by turns, profoundly bleak and fantastically sweet. While the symbolism is often overwrought, her physical descriptions are full of punch. For instance, there are some staggering passages about an unborn baby being torn from a mother’s womb; Ben’s father getting caught in a tiger trap in Vietnam; Sara touching her father’s phantom leg.

The World to Come is the stuff of dreams, enchanting and daring if not always lucid. Although Horn takes on too many major themes to develop them more sufficiently, she has a spiritual and moral intuition that transcends most of her contemporaries. This is no mean feat — especially since she combines it with a flair for fantastical storytelling.

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