The World to Come may be more a painting than a book. After all, Dara Horn's newest novel is based on an account of the theft of a Chagall during a museum's cocktail hour. And whereas books have all sorts of complicated meaning to sort out, paintings are freer to do as they please. As one character—a writer—remarks, "A painting doesn't have to mean anything, but a story does. Just barely, but it does." Horn's story means an awful lot, but what that meaning is changes constantly. Better then to stay in a painting, in a simple moment of the present.

The central feature of this painting is a bridge. It connects heaven and hell. But heaven and hell aren't pictured; that would be meaningful. Instead, it is weighed down by words. Yiddish words. Words in a language that has, built into it, the assertion that "eternity is always breathing over your shoulder, waiting to see if you will notice." These words anchor the paper bridge, though to what is unclear. Connections and paths may change, but "paper is the only eternal bridge."

And there is a man above it. His name is Benjamin Ziskind. A bout with scoliosis left him in a back brace for six years, and transformed him into a child prodigy with his own game show. Unfortunately, he had the misfortune to grow up, and now lives his life out of the limelight, writing questions for other contestants to answer. Having just divorced, he is even more unsteady than the bridge underneath him. But he is also in a womb, and as such is full of potential for new life. He only needs to be pushed.

That push comes from Der Nister, the Hidden One. His stories, "kaleidoscope stories with tiny worlds packed one inside another," are the ones that make up the bridge and swirl through the background. He never meets Ben, but in the 1920s taught writing to Ben's grandfather in a Soviet Orphanage. In a painting, as in the world to come, where all souls begin and end, past and present are one and the same.

There is also Chagall's Study for 'Over Vitebsk ' to consider. A work from early in the artist's career, when he too was a teacher in the Soviet orphanage, it lacks the symbolic figures and "colors too imaginary to be real" for which Chagall is known. It is very small. It shows a snowy street, and in the background a bearded peddler—"unaware, in murky horizontal profile, that he was actually in flight." One small spot on the painting's surface is shinier than the rest. That is where Sara, Ben's twin sister, decided to try to coat the painting with clear nail polish when she was seven. Her parents stopped her. But the spot is how Ben recognizes the painting when he sees it in the Museum of Hebraic Art and what convinces him to yank it off the wall.

Finally, an indistinct sketch of a golem, the soulless demon that is said to be created from clay when Jews are in times of need, hovers in the background. Golems have appeared in Jewish literature since the Middle Ages, and have recently made a comeback. One figures centrally, for instance, in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2000. Golems, being soulless, are not usually very developed characters. Horn's golem is named Leonid Shcharansky. He enters Ben's middle school as a bullying Chernoble evacuee, yet inexplicably sees the beauty in Sara that no one else does and woos her into marriage. It is a leap never really explained, the one flaw in a piece otherwise perfect.

Ideally, The World to Come would have no end. As Der Nister tells Chagall, "there are no real endings in life, either. Since when do things end?" The painting's frame cannot contain it, because it is part of the eternal cycle it portrays, folding back on itself in webs of meaning that will never remain frozen in time. The bridge is trembling, and Benjamin Ziskind is flying.

 

Jayme Herschkopf does not speak Yiddish but often fakes it at cocktail parties.