If you’re just tuning in, be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our interview with Dara Horn. And now,the thrilling conclusion:
BGB: The historical fiction parts of The World to Come focus on the famous painter Marc Chagall and the comparatively unknown Yiddish author Der Nister who were contemporaries in Imperial Russia. The men present almost perfect contrasts of one another. Surprisingly, I found myself drawn more to the almost hopelessly doomed Der Nister than Chagall. What drew you to use Der Nister as a central character in your novel and can you tell us a little bit about his work?
DH: Der Nister means “The Hidden One”; it was the pen name of the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovitsh. I was first introduced to his work during graduate school, where I discovered his short stories and wrote about several of them for my doctoral dissertation. They are completely, brilliantly insane, so much so that merely attempting to summarize them is nearly impossible; their plot structure is nothing short of demented, though extremely careful reading reveals their intricate and purposeful design. What fascinated me about them was what they revealed about my own (and most readers’) expectations for a story. We really do demand that a story have an ending, no matter how sophisticated or “postmodern” we think we are as readers. And not only do we demand an ending, but we specifically demand a redemptive ending—maybe not a happy ending or even an uplifting one, but one that somehow provides us with a sense of completion, of restitution, of the tools for repairing what has been broken in the characters’ lives or in our own. For a long time in Jewish culture there was a belief that Jewish life could be sustained on what was called a “paper bridge,” that texts and stories alone were sufficient to ensure the survival of a community from one generation to the next. Der Nister was one of the brilliant people who recognized that that was a delusional fantasy. His own life unfortunately proved him right. After the second world war, Stalin decided to destroy Jewish culture in the Soviet Union by murdering Jewish writers and artists; Der Nister died in a gulag in 1950. Nor did his stories endure; during his lifetime, Soviet censorship forced him to change his style of writing to a more conventional one, and then his last novel’s manuscript was lost forever, or perhaps never written. And of course few people have heard of him today.
Der Nister was a roommate of Chagall’s in faculty housing in a Soviet Jewish orphanage that was built after the 1919 pogroms (a series of pogroms in which over a hundred thousand people were murdered, enough people to necessitate the construction of new orphanages). Both Chagall and Der Nister had been tremendously acclaimed as young men, but what fascinated me was how their fates diverged in a way that had no relation whatsoever to their levels of talent. Chagall lived to be 97 and died as a worldwide household name, and Der Nister died in a Soviet prison camp with most of his work censored out of existence. To me this revealed another assumption that I (and probably most people) had unconsciously believed: that what lasts is what’s best, that talent is always recognized at the end of the day somehow, and that what survives the ravages of time is what deserved to be celebrated, while what didn’t survive deserved to be forgotten. It’s simply not true. I admire Chagall’s immense talent, of course, and I am in no way suggesting that his work does not deserve the recognition it has earned. But there is a certain irony in how his work is now often regarded as a kind of kitschy representation of a “lost world”, when his own imagination is precisely what was NOT lost, while so many other imaginations were—and even foresaw that they would be.
BGB: The mother in the present day scenes of The World to Come is a famous author of children’s stories. Her writing method entails translating old Yiddish stories and passing them off as her own. As a scholar of Yiddish literature, you have access to a wealth of primary material that can be read by an ever diminishing number of people. Have you ever considered translating Yiddish works for mass consumption (with attribution of course)?
DH: Yes, I have, in a sense. I was actually recently commissioned to edit an anthology of previously untranslated Yiddish stories, though the project is in its infancy at this point (and these kinds of projects have a high infant mortality rate, so no promises). I have never tried my hand as a translator, though, and there is a whole art to that in which I wouldn’t be able to claim any expertise. There have recently been a number of new translations of previously untranslated Yiddish works published by The New Yiddish Library (Yale), among others. When I first started writing this novel, there were a few works that I referenced in it that you couldn’t find in English; by the time it was published, a few new anthologies had made pretty much everything I referenced available in English. The problem, after translation, is finding ways of introducing these works to audiences that have never heard of them, and preparing them for the fact that what they will find bears no resemblance to Fiddler on the Roof. (Don’t get me started on Fiddler on the Roof.)
What I have tried to do, through my writing and also through my teaching (I have taught college courses in Hebrew and Yiddish literature), is to introduce new audiences to the variety and depth of this literature, and I’ve been really amazed by the response. I can’t tell you how many readers have told me that they’ve finished the novel and have begun reading Yiddish literature in translation, using my list of sources as their starting point. Any way that people can become excited about this literature seems wonderful to me. I recently signed a film contract for this novel. If Der Nister ends up being a main character in a Hollywood movie, then I think we can safely say that awareness of Yiddish literature has risen from the grave.
BGB: An excerpt from your novel in progress was included in the Granta Best Young American Novelists issue. As a native of New Orleans, I was thrilled to see that the novel takes place, at least in part, in my home town during the Civil War. The location and time period seem to be a departure from your previous work, and it appears to also be a spy novel. What can you tell us about the upcoming novel and how you arrived at this location/era/genre?
DH: My next novel is about a Jewish Civil War assassin. He’s a soldier in the Union army, and his commanders find out that he has relatives in New Orleans, including a cousin who’s a Confederate spy involved in a plot to kill Lincoln, so they send him down to assassinate his own cousin. From there, things for our hero only become much, much worse.
It may seem like a departure from my previous books on the surface, and in many ways it is, but I’ve always been interested in aspects of Jewish history that are rarely examined. Most explorations of American Jewish history start in the early 1900s, when the largest wave of Jewish immigrants arrived. But I first thought of this idea while on a book tour a few years ago in New Orleans. I was there to speak at their Jewish community center, and I was wandering around the neighborhood when I came upon a Jewish cemetery there. Many of the graves were from the early 1800s, and when I began reading more about it, I was surprised by how much material I found about Jewish communities on both sides of the Civil War. It’s very common today for Americans to have family in different parts of the country, but in the nineteenth century it wasn’t so common– except among American Jews, who often had relatives who had settled in different places and with whom they maintained close ties. I was interested in the ways that choices about what home is can define who we are. You are right that it’s a spy novel, but it’s really a story about loyalty, about how we decide who deserves our devotion, and why.
Many thanks to Dara Horn for taking the time to chat with us. Now go read her books!
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
Authors, Books, Interviews | Tim | 
November 9, 2007 9:19 am | 
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