We get the picture

The theft of a Chagall inspires Dara Horn's The World to Come, a Yiddish literary odyssey. Viv Groskop finds out more
The World to Come by Dara Horn
Buy The World to Come at the Guardian bookshop Public domain

The World to Come
by Dara Horn
Hamish Hamilton £14.99, pp402

In June 2001 a million-dollar Chagall painting went missing at a singles cocktail party at the Jewish Museum in New York. Study for 'Over Vitebsk', 1914, on loan from Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery, turned up months later in a post office in Kansas. This much is true: the painting really did walk out of the museum and it really was recovered.

The same happens in this novel. But while the actual crime was so bizarre as to 'never be convincing in fiction' (according to the author in the novel's acknowledgements), the circumstances for the fictional theft described here, although entirely imagined, are so real you feel completely taken in by them. Horn, a ridiculously accomplished novelist for a 29-year-old, takes the real-life disappearance of the Chagall as the framework for this outstanding, ethereal second novel.

In The World to Come, the thief of the painting is the awkward, geekish Benjamin Ziskind, aged 30, recently divorced, a writer of quiz show questions. He is convinced that his parents, now both dead, owned the Chagall painting when he was a child. But he does not know how it came into their possession, nor does he know whether the painting is itself real or a fake. Worst of all, he has no idea how he is going to keep it - or return it - without becoming a fully paid-up criminal.

Horn's yarn is complicated, rich and rewarding, skilfully managing to avoid becoming convoluted. In the present day Benjamin and his twin sister Sara, herself a talented forgery artist, weigh up whether to trust museum assistant Erika, who has rumbled their scheme but has no evidence. Meanwhile the action flashes back to 1920s Moscow, as a young orphan boy befriends Chagall, a struggling unknown artist, and his colleague Der Nister, an eccentric Yiddish writer. Feeling an affinity with the boy, Chagall gives him a painting. The boy turns out, of course, to be Benjamin and Sara's grandfather. But the painting has a long and tortuous journey to make before it ends up in their hands.

The mystery behind Benjamin and Sara's dead parents, Rosalie and Daniel, looms large. Rosalie, an author and illustrator, was Russian but never spoke of her roots and was largely in denial of her Jewish ancestry too. Daniel was a Vietnam vet who died suddenly when his children were young. Along with Rosalie's illustrated stories, the painting is all there is left of the parents.

Horn cruises effortlessly through memories of Stalin's Jewish purges of the 1940s and American patriotism and paranoia over Vietnam as well as introducing a fascinating crash course in surreal Yiddish literature: the text is peppered with adaptations of stories by Yiddish writers such as Der Nister, Moyshe Nadir and IL Peretz.

The result is as mysterious and beguiling as the concept behind the title: the phrase is a quote by IL Peretz on how a writer's task is 'to build a paper bridge to the world to come'. Although the novel's canvas is broad and sometimes terrifyingly ambitious, Horn has a deft touch when it comes to heavy subjects. What she has to say about what truly matters in life - what is real versus what is fake, what we choose to remember versus what we forget - is nothing short of inspirational.