The World to Come by Dara Horn

This is Dara Horn's second novel. Her first, In the Image, was terrific. This one doesn't quite live up to her first book.

The protagonist is the legally blind Benjamin Ziskind. He is depressed because of the recent death of his mother and the collapse of his marriage. He reluctantly attends a singles' cocktail hour at an art museum. While there, he spies a Chagall, which he is convinced is the one that once hung in his parents' home. He steals the painting. From here, the novel zigzags in time.

Going back to Russia we ensounter the fledgling artist Chagall as an art teacher in a Jewish orphanage in the 1920s. The orphans lost their parents during the 1919 pogram. The drifts to the Yiddish writer Der Nister (the Hidden One), who stories are stuffed inside the frames of Chagall's paintings. Artifacts are preserved; people are disposable.

Chagall leaves Russia and becomes well known. Der Nister remains in Russia and is now virtually unknown.

The book's title, The World to Come, is a reference to not only the afterlife, but also to those not yet born to this world. In Jewish tradition, the world to come, Olam ha-ba, not clearly defined. Is it the afterlife? Is it redemption and ressurrection? Is it the future? Is it all of the above? Horn blurs the boundaries of life and death.