Goodbye Malamud
A Fresh Approach to Jewish Fiction
Dara Horn
The World to Come
W. W. Norton, 2006, 320 pages
Reviewed by Naomi Rosenblatt
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Dara Horn has successfully created a piece of magic. In her new novel, The World to Come, Horn grapples with substantial, difficult themes—life, death, the link between the past and the future, and the inextricable bond of family which transcends it all—with grace and poignancy. Even more notably, there is something unique about this novel: it reads very differently from its Jewish-American literary predecessors. Horn has begun to break from the traditions of Jewish-American writers, and the product is something quite remarkable.
The World to Come opens when Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-something year-old writer of trivia questions for a popular quiz show, attends a singles event at a Hebraic art museum in New York at the behest of his twin sister, Sara. At the museum, Ben, still reeling from a recent divorce and the death of his mother, recognizes a study by Marc Chagall for the painting Over Vitebsk. He notices a dab of shiny, clear nail polish in the corner of the painting, and realizes that this work is the exact same one that used to hang in his mother’s living room. And so, in what seems to Ben like a perfectly reasonable and justified thing to do, he takes the million-dollar study off the wall, tucks it into his jacket, and exits the museum.
From this surprising beginning, Horn weaves together a cast of fascinating and diverse characters— Ben; Sara, his artistic and strongwilled twin; Rosalie, a Soviet expatriate and the twins’ mother; Boris Kulbak, the young orphan who captures the attention of his art teacher, Marc Chagall; Daniel, who goes to Vietnam hoping to prepare for a life with his love, but who instead stumbles upon great loss; and Der Nister, the Yiddish storyteller and dreamer. These characters span time and space from turn-of-the-century Russia to the Vietnam War to modern-day New York. The novel is structurally complex, as Horn interlaces all of the separate stories, yet the finished product is a coherent and satisfying whole.
Beneath the simple storytelling, however, lies an even more intricate web of themes and fables. Horn uses her characters’ stories to explore life, death, and the world to come. Horn draws the main thematic element of her novel from the Jewish concept of olam habah (literally, the world to come), which has traditionally been interpreted in a variety of ways, from a sort of “life after death” existence, to the state of the world after the coming of the Messiah. When the twins’ father passes away, Sara Ziskind asks her mother if she believes in life after death. After considering the question, Rosalie turns to her daughter and answers: “I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why they call it the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And when good people die, the reward is that they get to help make the new people in their families who haven’t been born yet.”
This becomes the main question that Horn attempts to tackle—what is “the world to come?” How does it create us, and how does it impact our lives and futures? Perhaps the world to come is the world that Horn paints for us in her beautiful fable at the end of the novel—a place where new souls (the “not-yets”) prepare to be born, where they learn their family’s histories in a heavenly classroom, where they intoxicate themselves on bottles of literature and dine on works of art. In this world to come, the unborn soak in public baths: pools of love, tubs of hate and grief, saunas of friendship. When the moment comes for the soul to be born (and here, Horn draws on a long and cherished Jewish tradition), he cries and protests against being forced to enter the world of the living. His guardian angel, one of the “already-weres,”puts his finger up to the soul’s mouth to shush him, causing him to forget all that he has learned in the world to come—and creating the small hollow that every person has just beneath his nose. Then the soul is born, leaving the world to come behind.
Or perhaps the world to come is what Horn suggests more subtly, through her carefully plotted storylines and characters: the future, as will be achieved through our families, through our unborn children, and through our as-yet unachieved potential. As Rosalie reminds the “not-yet” Daniel, “the real world to come is down below—the world, in the future, as you create it…the world, to come.”
The World to Come is Horn’s second novel. Her first novel, In the Image, almost immediately won national acclaim after its publication in 2002, receiving a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. She has given lectures on Jewish literature in a number of universities and colleges, and is currently studying for her Ph.D. in comparative Hebrew and Yiddish literature at Harvard University. As with Horn’s first novel, The World to Come has earned rave reviews. The Washington Post has declared it to be “tremendously earnest and fraught with moral weight, and somehow, miraculously, it stays aloft in the mind like a dream you can’t decide was sweet or frightening.”1 Other book reviewers have followed suit, recognizing the novel as an excellent work of literature. However, quite surprisingly, the novel is not yet making waves in Jewish literary circles.
This is particularly surprising because it appears that Horn is shaping a new style of Jewish-American fiction, one distinctly separate from the traditions of Bernard Malamud, Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Anyone familiar with these and other Jewish-American writers will note the themes of secularism, as well as the themes of disenchantment with and rejection of traditional Judaism, that run through most of their works. What categorizes these stories as Jewish-American fiction, other than the specific affiliations of their authors, is their tendency to grapple with the issue of what it means to be Jewish in America—or of what it means to be Jewish at all. While these stories certainly make for good literature, readers will be hard-pressed to find a novel by Roth, or a short story by Malamud, that leaves them with a positive feeling of what it is to be Jewish. The stories are often dark, and frequently employ a suspiciously Woody Allen-esque protagonist whose favorite pastime is to complain tiresomely about the trials and tribulations of being a Jew. The end result typically makes for a negative, worn-out, and feeble endorsement of cultural Judaism, side-by-side with a rejection of more traditional Judaism.
For those of us who have grown tired of all of the literary negativity regarding the Jewish-American experience, Horn’s novels serve as a refreshing divergence from the norm. In an interview with the author in the back of In the Image, Horn states that she attempts to keep her stories “connected to the Jewish literary tradition of constant reference to an ancient text.”2 Her work has begun to break away from the literary conventions of cultural Judaism, and instead seeks to explore Jewish spirituality and rich textual inheritance. The World to Come is packed with “biblically-anchored language,”3 talmudic allusions (most notably the recurring image of the angel shushing the newborn soul), and even references to famous Yiddish storytellers such as I.L. Peretz, Shalom Aleichem, and Itsik Manger. Horn’s characters are not the stereotypically Jewish characters of Roth’s novels and the like, yet their Judaism deeply affects how they experience the world around them. As a result, her message is nothing but positive: The World to Come is a celebration of Judaism.
Although she has not yet made a splash for her literary trailblazing, Horn has at least received some recognition for her work. In his review of The World to Come, Hillel Halkin of Commentary has recognized that “Dara Horn has now—admirably, it must be said—written two novels that seriously aspire to be a new kind of American Jewish literature.”4 Judging by the quality, scope, and power of this new kind of literature, we can only hope that Ms. Horn continues such tremendous work, and that others follow in her footsteps.
Naomi Rosenblatt is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is planning to major in History.
Notes
1. Ron Charles. 2000. Review of The World to Come, by Dara Horn. WashingtonPost.com,., http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/01/19/AR2006011902693 . html.
2. Dara Horn, “A Conversation With Dara Horn”, In The Image, 2002, <http://www.wwnorton.com/rgguides/ intheimage.htm> (21 March 2006).
3. Ibid.
4. Hillel Halkin. 2006. Review of The World to Come, by Dara Horn. Commentary, http://www. commentarymagazine.com/article. asp?aid=12103078_1.