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The Author on Her Work
We all know we're not supposed to tell a book by its cover, but what on earth do you mean by "The World to Come"?
I've always been fascinated by the points in our lives where rational explanations fail us. The most obvious of these are death and birth: How could it be that a person who just existed suddenly doesn't anymore? And how could it be that a person who never existed suddenly does?
"The world to come" is a phrase that means different things to different people. To one person, it might mean a life after death; to another, it implies an age of redemption; to someone else, it's simply the future in everyday life. This book suggests that all of those possibilities are actually more similar to each other than one might imagine.
This novel has much more of a mysterious, page-turning narrative element than your previous book. Where did that come from?
A few years ago, there actually was a theft of a Chagall painting from a museum in New York that took place during a singles' cocktail hour. There was an article about it on the front page of the New York Times. I read that article and just thought: what kind of person goes to an event at a museum and walks out with a million-dollar painting?
The story caught my eye for more personal reasons too. In my day job, I'm a student of Yiddish literature. Since it's a language that's spoken largely (though not entirely) by dead people, it's very rare that my scholarly life converges with the news. But when I read about this theft, I thought of how many of the authors I admire had had their works illustrated by Chagall, and I started wondering how he had known them.
What did you find out?
Marc Chagall's first job when he was a young man was as an art teacher at an orphanage outside of Moscow for children who had been orphaned by the pogroms in Russia in 1919, in which over 100,000 people were killed—so many people that it was necessary to create orphanages for all the children who had lost their families. Nearly every person who taught at this particular orphanage with Chagall was a major avant-garde artist or writer, and they all lived there in faculty housing together, collaborating on everything from theater sets to children's books.
Der Nister, one of the Yiddish writers I was studying in my academic work, had been Chagall's housemate at this orphanage. The more I read about his life, the more the contrast between his life and his friend Chagall's astonished me. They had practically been roommates; both of them already had major artistic accomplishments as young men. Chagall even illustrated some of Der Nister's children's books. But while Chagall went on to a fabulous international career and comfortable life in Paris, Der Nister's life became one of horrible poverty and political oppression. He ultimately died in a gulag.
That's an interesting nonfiction story—and given your career as a scholar, you could easily have written it as nonfiction. What about it made you turn it into fiction?
Don't tell this to my doctoral committee, but I've always hated footnotes. Seriously, though, Chagall writes in his memoirs about how astonished he was by how these orphaned children "threw themselves at colors like wild beasts at meat." As a writer, I was intrigued by this idea of art as a kind of nourishing redemption. But the fates of the other artists Chagall worked with were quite different from his own. One night after a long day in the library researching Der Nister's life and work, I had a dream that he had actually survived the gulag, emerging years later. He went into the offices of various publishers to tell them who he was and that he was still here, but they all ignored him; none of them had even heard of him. I woke up and realized that the dream wasn't far from the truth. So I thought I would try to do something about it, to help bring him back to life. And I began to wonder what it is about art that makes it either last or disappear—which is the larger question of what makes us decide what in our lives really matters.
And you were able to get all those themes into a novel? Where did all the other strands of the story come from—the parts set in New Jersey and Vietnam?
There is often a several-decade gap between when one's school history lessons stop and one's newspaper reading begins. For me, and probably for a lot of people my age (I'm 28), this period is more or less the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular. In studying this period on my own, what has amazed me is how there really is no agreed-upon narrative for it, even decades later-because so much of it is so embarrassing, based on all kinds of betrayals of trust in every possible direction, and not only the obvious ones. I had been to Vietnam as a tourist, and at one point I was in a car on the road from Da Nang to Hue, which goes through a tortuous mountain pass. I asked the driver who on earth would have built this ridiculous road, and he answered, "You." The road was built by the U.S. Army in 1965, in an effort to aid the South Vietnamese. Of course it became an easy site for ambushes by the Viet Cong, who were often tipped off by South Vietnamese spies—which is the basis of one of the scenes in the book.
I think there's something about this kind of betrayal that's very soul-shaking, even in more minor cases. My own history gap ended in the early 1990s, when my public high school in New Jersey was suddenly flooded with dozens of Russian Jewish immigrants. My family's community had been active in the cause for Soviet Jewry, so it was a bit amusing to me when these kids arrived at my school and basically formed a gang. In the book, the main character as a teenager has a heartfelt, one-way correspondence with his Soviet bar mitzvah "twin," only to meet the guy in America two years later and discover that he's a thug. But there's a redemptive side to that story too. One of the things I wanted to do in this book was to explore the problem of trust, which haunts all of this history—including that of Chagall and his fellow artists. Trusting anyone is the most dangerous thing one can do, but it's also one of the only things that make life worth living.
What do you really think of Chagall?
I do admire his imagination. But there is a painful irony in his celebrity that my knowledge of Yiddish forces me to notice. Chagall left the Soviet Union for good in the early 1920s and rose to tremendous fame, and now his work is thought of as the true vision of a lost world. But many of his fellow artists—the writers whose works he illustrated, the actors and directors whose theater sets he designed—really decided to commit themselves to Soviet Jewish life by remaining in the Soviet Union and pursuing their art in Yiddish. And they paid an enormous price for that choice. By 1952, nearly all of them had been murdered by Stalin, and today almost no one has heard of any of these major talents. Knowing this, I find that I cannot look at Chagall's paintings without also seeing these might-have-beens, the other imaginations that are hidden behind his. The fact that his paintings are so joyously derived from an imagined world of might-have-beens—the man whose face might have been purple, the people who might have flown through the air and lived other lives—makes them very poignant for me, but not always in the way I think he intended.
Does the Yiddish and Hebrew literature you've studied have contemporary relevance? Does it have something to say to people who are not Jewish?
British literature has something to say to people who aren't British, doesn't it? Actually, I think Yiddish and Hebrew literature are surprisingly relevant to any modern reader. These are literatures where phrases in even the most modern stories echo with words going back to ancient times. Even in comedy, the writers are always aware that they can't escape the past—but they are also aware that because of the arbitrary hatred of their neighbors, their own future might not exist. Each generation of writers in these languages is convinced it is the last. I think there's a tremendous resonance in that for modern readers everywhere. In modern life we are expected to pretend that there was never a past, and to pretend that there is always a future. It is tremendously powerful and ennobling to read a literature where no one ever pretends that a future is assured—where eternity is always breathing over your shoulder, waiting to see if you will notice.
Allegory in fiction has been out of fashion for some time. Would you say your work is allegorical? Are Chagall's paintings allegorical?
An allegory is usually a work where one thing (an ant, a grasshopper) equals one other thing (a hard worker, a time-waster), and that's the end of the story; there's only one way to interpret it. I don't think the book is allegorical, but I do think it's symbolic. A symbol is something that doesn't just represent one thing, but points to a larger constellation of meaning beyond the obvious. I don't think Chagall's paintings are allegorical, but I do think they're symbolic—though one of the ways I imagine his work in the book is that he never meant them to be.
The Ziskind siblings seem to be deeply, and even spiritually connected to one another. Can you explain this?
I was interested in exploring relationships between adult siblings, because I think it's often one of the most meaningful relationships we have as adults. There is something irreplaceable about having someone intractably in your life who has known you since you were a child. The Ziskind twins in the book are so close to each other that they rely on each other even for things they shouldn't. But my own three siblings and I are even closer than that. I speak to all three of them daily, and usually see at least one of them every day. We're close in other ways, too. All four of us are professionally creative-my sisters and I are all writers, and my brother is an artist and animator-and we are also very deeply involved in inspiring each others' work, even though our styles are vastly different. There are characters from my sister's novel who make cameo appearances in mine, and vice versa. I suppose the life I'm drawing from is a bit extreme, but I think all siblings, even as adults, inhabit a kind of world of their own.
What about romantic love? Did you set out to write a love story?
There are several love stories in the book, but what interests me about them isn't really love as much as a very specific aspect of love that also defines every other relationship in the book: trust. Falling in love with a stranger is easy; trusting a stranger is almost impossible. But love without trust isn't really love. In fact, even though this is a book built out of love stories, there is only one place in the entire novel where someone says "I love you." And he proves he doesn't mean it—quite brutally and horrifically—at the bottom of the same page. Real love in this book starts with different words: "I trust you."
Your work has already found an unexpected audience among religious Christian readers. What do you think these readers are responding to in your work? Are they seeing things that secular readers don't see?
I think some people in the world see things that are not visible to the eye. That's true for religious people, but it's also true for scientists and artists. The book can touch people differently depending on their experience of life. Some might see an undercurrent of religious belief in the book; others might see an undercurrent of skepticism or betrayed hope. The two main characters in the book are twins, and even though they grew up together, their views of the world couldn't be more different—the brother is a lonely man who only sees the world's triviality; the sister is an artist who sees patterns in their lives that her brother doesn't see. One of the beautiful things about literature is that we get to try on all these different ways of thinking. And each reader will make his own book out of the one in his hands.
At the end of the novel, instead of a conventional vision of the afterlife, you give us a very unconventional vision of life before birth. Where did that vision come from?
While I was finishing this book, I was expecting my first child, and I began thinking about a legend in the Jewish tradition: that before being born, each person is taught all of the secrets of the world, but just before their birth, someone puts a finger to their lips and whispers, "Don't tell the secrets." And at that moment, they forget everything they learned, and then they have to spend their entire lives trying to remember. At the end of my novel, I created a glimpse of this world before birth, where everyone is studying these secrets. Of course, now that my daughter is a few months old, I realize that the secrets that babies have really forgotten are just the secrets of how to sleep through the night!
Did you draw at all on religious traditions about the afterlife in this book? You seem to end up with a view that is not at all supernatural, but that according to your readers, has tremendous spiritual power. Is there any way to define the spiritual point of view in the novel?
In Judaism, the phrase "the world to come" actually refers to the end of days, when it is believed that the dead will be resurrected and various other divine promises fulfilled. But in the Hebrew bible there is no mention of an afterlife at all. Perhaps the closest it comes is in the book of Ezekiel, in which Ezekiel sees dry bones having their flesh restored and rising back up to life. There's something very compelling about that reversal of time, because it implies so many other things—not merely that the dead will rise again, but also that anything in our lives might be reversible.
I think that's a fantasy we all entertain at some point. In the novel there's a moment when a daughter asks her mother if she believes in reincarnation. The mother says no. She tells her daughter that to believe that your life is only a rehearsal, or that you will eventually have an infinite number of chances to get it right, would make living meaningless. But she does believe in a bond between the living and the dead. She tells her daughter that people who have passed away are in the same world as those in their families who haven't yet been born. In this world to come, as she sees it, the dead spend their eternity shaping the characteristics of their descendants.
That may sound like some kind of supernatural vision, but it's also the reality of genetics. The dead may never be revived, but every aspect of them is. Their dry bones live forever within us.
Discussion Questions
1. This book is about an art heist, or at least it starts out that way. What does Ben's theft suggest about ownership? Does anyone really own a work of art?
2. The novel incorporates the lives of two real artists, Marc Chagall and Der Nister. Are these portrayals fair? What are the limits of the artistic imagination—that is, what are the limitations of each of these artists as they appear here, and what are the limitations of the book's portrayals of these artists?
3. Members of the Ziskind family seem to be deeply or even spiritually connected to one another. What kind of potential do families have in this novel, and what is required for them to live up to it?
4. Throughout the book, there are references to various ways that life mirrors art, which in itself is created from the experience or observation of life. Which takes precedence in the novel, art or reality? Which one defines what it means to be alive for these characters?
5. Much of the novel's plot is built upon historical events that are rarely explored outside of scholarly circles, such as the pogroms of 1919 or the Stalinist purge of Jewish cultural leaders. How much of this history were you aware of prior to reading the book? Are there reasons why certain historical events (World War II, for instance) are frequently revisited in novels and movies, while others, like these, have been popularly forgotten?
6. The novel's plot is rife with forgeries as well as other forms of deception, ranging from the forged painting to the plagiarized children's books to Cung Thien Minh posing as a loyal interpreter to Sergei Popov pretending to be a friendly neighbor. What do these various deceptions have in common? For a deception to work, what is required of the deceiver, and what is required of the deceived?
7. The Rosalie Ziskind stories throughout the book are all adapted from Yiddish sources. What connections do these stories have to each other, or to the novel's main plot? Are there common themes among them?
8. A central question in the novel is one of trust. How does trust define the relationships between the characters, whether friends, relatives, lovers, or enemies?
9. Is there a life after death in this novel? For whom? How?
10. What happens to Ben and Erica at the end of the story?
11. What is the world to come?
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