A Sourcebook for "The World to Come" by Dara Horn

THE BOARD OF RABBIS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA PRESENTS

OOONENENE P P PEOPLEEOPLEEOPLE, O, O, ONENENE B B BOOKOOKOOK 5769 5769 5769 A Transdenominational Community Learning Program

Participating Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist & Reform congregations Adat Ari El • Ahavat Torah • Beth Chayim Chadashim • Beth Shir Sholom • Congregation Kol

Ami • Congregation Tikvat Jacob • IKAR • Leo Baeck Temple • Malibu Jewish Center & Synagogue • Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center • Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel • Temple

Aliyah • Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills • University Synagogue Westwood Village Synagogue

A SOURCEBOOK FOR THE WORLD TO COME A NOVEL BY DARA HORN Compiled and Published by The Board of Rabbis of Southern California as part of ONE PEOPLE ONE BOOK 5769

One People One Book is a citywide year of transdenominational learning produced by The Board of Rabbis of Southern California. Several hundred people from over 25 area congregations, plus unaffiliated readers, engage in a year‐long study of a significant Jewish book, connecting it with traditional texts, through community‐wide programs and smaller discussion groups. The 2008‐2009 program on The World to Come by Dara Horn marks the fourth season of One People One Book.

General Editor: Jonathan Freund Sarah Bassin provided invaluable editorial input in the creation of this volume The Board of Rabbis of Southern California 6505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, California, 90048 323 761 8600 [email protected] www.boardofrabbis.org Copyright © The Board of Rabbis of Southern California, 2008 All rights reserved Except for limited use in educational contexts, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

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Contents

Introduction – Rabbi Mark S. Diamond 4

Outwitting History: The World of Yiddish Literature in The World to Come – Rabbi Miriyam Glazer 5

About Marc Chagall and A Chagall Timeline 11

Understanding Chagall and L’dor V’dor: Family Memories and the Power of Chagall – Sarah Rensin 14

Discussion Guides / Lesson Plans 18

The World of the World to Come in Jewish Tradition 19

Acts of Transgression 21

Sleeping through the End of the World 22

Was Rosalie Right? 24

The Paper Bridge 26

Analyzing Chagall's "A Study for Over Vitebsk" 28

Appendix

About the Contributors 30

Curtain Call: What does Chagall have to do with Russian Yiddish Theatre, by Dara Horn 32

Portrait of a Writer: Interview with Dara Horn 34

Further Reading 36

A Sourcebook for The World to Come by Dara Horn

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Introduction Rabbi Mark S. Diamond Executive Vice President, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

ur tradition teaches that when even two people gather to study holy words, the presence of God dwells with them. We are pleased that so many of us will, over the course of the year,

gather together to study words and ideas, learning from and with each other and our shared tradition. The Board of Rabbis of Southern California as a cross‐denominational member organization of rabbis is proud to promote Jewish learning and living in all areas of life: Social Justice, Healing and Spirituality, Professional Growth, Interfaith Activities and Media Relations. Our One People One Book program stands at the core of our Community Learning Initiatives. This year, we are delighted to study Dara Horn’s The World to Come. Translated into eleven languages, this book was selected as an Editor's Choice in The New York Times Book Review and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by The San Francisco Chronicle. It is not difficult to understand why. Horn’s ability to seamlessly weave together lost stories of the old world with narratives of the new, mysticism and post‐modern angst, provides a point of connection for every reader. The One People One Book series is designed for a variety of educational settings, including formal presentations; discussions in classes, book clubs and havurot; and traditional hevruta (partnered) learning. We hope that this sourcebook for The World to Come will help you to understand and appreciate the many Jewish and universal themes employed by this talented young author. To guide your study and help you gain a fuller appreciation of the richness and complexity of the author's work, Rabbi Miriyam Glazer, Jonathan Freund, and Sarah Rensin have prepared essays and other resources focusing on key themes of Horn’s writing. In addition, for teachers and group leaders, we have developed a series of self‐contained lesson plans/discussion guides on themes found in The World to Come and beyond. Rabbis Miriyam Glazer and Daniel Bouskila serve as the 2008‐2009 co‐chairs of the One People, One Book program and we are indebted to them for their devoted leadership. We also express our deep appreciation to Sarah Bassin, Board of Rabbis rabbinic intern, for her invaluable contributions to One People, One Book. We are delighted that you have decided to join us on this journey of learning. Mishnah Peah 1:1 teaches us that there are many things in our world that are priceless, but the study of Torah is equal to them all. Now go and study the extended Torah of our people!

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Outwitting History: The World of Yiddish Literature in The World to Come by Dara Horn Rabbi Miriyam Glazer, Ph.D. American Jewish University Executive Committee, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

oven into the story that Dara Horn spins in The World to Come is the evocative world of Yiddish literature. In her passion to preserve the heritage of her own interrupted childhood of Yiddish culture and literature, Horn’s character Rosalie Ziskind draws on –

well, in fact she actually plagiarizes – stories by the Yiddish masters, which she then illustrates and publishes as children’s stories. Rosalie re‐tells stories by the Hasidic master Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav (1772‐1810), for example, and by the beloved Sholem Aleichem (1859‐1916), among others. But neither Nahman nor Sholem Aleichem have passed into oblivion. Today Rebbe Nahman has thousands of Hasidic followers all over the world, followers who tell and re‐tell the stories that Nahman told and who flock by the hundreds of thousands to visit his grave in Uman, Ukraine, once a year. And even if the actual stories Sholem Aleichem wrote are unknown to many today, his beloved, quirky, often heartbreaking and heartbroken character Tevye the Dairyman has moved millions in languages from Japanese to Hebrew through his re‐incarnation in the musical Fiddler on the Roof.

But Yiddish literature is vastly richer than the spiritually charged tales of Nahman, or the wry, emotionally‐nuanced, but often good‐humored stories of Sholem Aleichem. How many of us are familiar with the works – or even the names! – of the great founders of modern Yiddish literature: Mendele Mocher Sforim (Shalom Jacob Abramovich, 1836‐1917), or Isaac Leib Peretz (1851‐1915)? Or of the generations of writers who followed them: Pinkhas Kakhanovitch, who called himself Der Nister, the “Hidden One” (1884‐1950); Isaac Reiss, who wrote under the pseudonym Moishe Nadir (1885‐1943), or Itzik Manger (1901‐1969)?

Though born in eastern Europe, writers like Chaim Grade, Peretz Hirschbein, Jacob Glatstein, Shlomo Bickel, Joseph Opatoshu ‐‐ who published novels and poetry, along with essays and articles for the Yiddish press from the 1920s to the 1950s – were part of a Yiddish diaspora spanning Poland, Lithuania, Paris, London, Montreal, Buenos Aires, and New York. Nadir, born in Galicia, left for New York in 1899, and Manger, born in Rumania, led a wanderer’s life, living in Europe, England, and then finally in New York. Sholem Aleichem himself left Russia after the 1905 pogrom in Kiev; fled to Denmark when World War I broke out, and died in America two years after his arrival here.

At the same time, those Yiddish writers and performers who stayed in Russia were all eventually killed: Solomon Mikhoels, actor and director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre ‐‐ for which Chagall did the paintings of which Horn writes ‐‐ was killed in 1948 in a staged automobile accident. David Bergelson, Moishe Kulbak and Itze Kharik were either executed by Stalin’s regime or died in a slave labor camp. So did Der Nister, who, figuring so prominently in Dara Horn’s novel, lived with Chagall at the orphanage in Malekova for young Jewish victims of the pogroms, and eventually died a painful death in a Stalinist camp.

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In other words, the whole world of Yiddish literature, the whole world of its writers, was disrupted by history and torn apart by political upheaval, war, exile, suffering. In her brilliant and sardonic story, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” Cynthia Ozick describes how her character Edelshtein, sees it:

…the language was lost, murdered. The language – a museum. Of what other language can it be said that it died a sudden and definite death, in a given decade, on a given piece of soil? Where are the speakers of ancient Etruscan? Who was the last man to write a poem in Linear B? Attrition, assimilation. Death by mystery, not gas. The last Etruscan walks around inside some Sicilian. Western Civilization, that pod of muck, lingers on and on. The Sick Man of Europe with his big blob‐head, rotting, but at home in bed. Yiddish, a littleness, a tiny light – oh little holy light!‐dead, vanished. Perished. Sent into darkness.

This was Edelshtein’s subject. On this subject he lectured for a living….Synagogues, community centers, labor unions underpaid him to suck on the bones of the dead. Smoke, He traveled from borough to borough…mourning in English the death of Yiddish. Sometimes he tried to read one or two of his poems. At the first Yiddish word the painted old ladies of the Reform Temples would begin to titter from shame, as at a stand‐up television comedian. Orthodox and Conservative men fell instantly asleep. So he reconsidered, and told jokes…1

“Loss” inevitably becomes one of the most recurrent themes of Yiddish literature, just as – from the moment Ben steals the little Chagall painting from the museum – the drive to overcome loss becomes a major theme of The World to Come. Yiddish culture confronted so many losses. Beginning in the late 19th century, thousands of Yiddish speakers fled pogrom‐ridden eastern Europe for America; while many Yiddish writers continued to publish in New York, their audience was continually shrinking as the new generation increasingly cast aside the past and fully embraced the English language. As we’ve noted, millions of those who stayed behind in Eastern Europe were killed in the Shoah. In the Soviet Union, Stalin began purging Yiddish writers in the late 1930s, and by the late 1940s, most of the Yiddish writers had been thrown into prison or labor camps and the publication of books in Yiddish had ceased. By 1952 most of the Yiddishists in Russia had been killed, “and even simple Jews were so frightened,” says one writer, “they destroyed their own Yiddish books.”2

Devora Telushkin’s memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Master of Dreams, recounts a conversation between Singer and Menahem Begin, leader of Likkud and former Prime Minister of Israel:

“Vith Yiddish, you took a living language vhich vas alive for some eight or nine hundred years and managed to kill it.”

Menahem Begin, who had himself grown up in a Yiddish‐speaking home, began pounding his fist on the glass coffee table while spittle flew from his lips…

1 Cynthia Ozick’s story is in Jewish American Stories, edited by Irving Howe. New York: Mentor Books, 1977, 129‐177. 2 Golda Werman, ed. The Stories of David Bergelson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. xxv.


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“With Yiddish,” he shouted, “we could not have created any navy; with Yiddish, we could have no army; with Yiddish, we could not defend ourselves with powerful jet planes; with Yiddish we would be nothing. We would be like animals!”

Isaac sat with his hands folded in his lap and shrugged his shoulders. “Nu,” he said sweetly to the hushed crowd, “since I am a vegetarian, for me to be like an animal is not such a terrible thing.”3

It is part of the artistry of Dara Horn and The World to Come that that nearly lost world movingly comes to our attention once again.

In Chapter 11, for example, Ben opens Erica Frank’s copy of his mother Rosalie’s The World to Come – which is actually a story by Sholem Aleichem (whose title can be translated either as “The World to Come” or as “Eternal Life,” as it is in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s book, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories). Through an intricate plot, the story drives home how foolish and self‐defeating it is to act with false heroism or to undertake to do good in this world not for its own sake, but for the sake of a future reward, an always elusive “eternal life.” As he re‐reads the story, Ben realizes that “the world to come” is not a reference to a place of future reward; rather, it is the future each of us creates for ourselves, based on what we do here and now: “your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made…” (page 193).

Chapter 3 incorporates a different Yiddish story that also has life‐changing significance for Ben. Here Ben is at home in his apartment, which his ex‐wife‐to‐be has stripped of all their furniture and even all of their books, except for the illustrated books Ben’s late mother Rosalie had published. It is as if his whole adult life has been stripped from him, and all that is left is a copy of Rosalie’s own attempt to reconstitute her own lost world. Ben opens his mother’s book, called The Man Who Slept through the End of the World. In “real life,” the story titled “The Man Who Slept through the End of the World” was written by Moishe Nadir (Horn’s adaptation of the story in The World to Come is almost identical to the original.)4

What are we to make of the story? A man who is perennially sleepy wakes up one morning after a stormy night, and discovers that his whole familiar world – his wife, his bed, his window, “outside” itself – has disappeared. At first glance a kind of humorous story, it becomes terrifying and tragic when we ponder it some more. 3The story is told by Miriam Weinstein in Yiddish: A Nation of Words (Vermont: Steerforth Press, 2001), p. 127. 4 The story appears in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (NY: Penguin Books, 1990).

Compare Sholem Aleichem’s portrayal of “The World to Come” in his story with Ben’s understanding of the “world to come” in Dara Horn's novel, and also with the way the rabbis used the concept (see the text sources in The World of the World to Come in Jewish Tradition in the Discussion Guide section). Do they all have a different notion of what “the world to come” means? What does the phrase mean to you?


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What does it really mean to sleep through the end of the world?

Does it suggest being blind to what is happening around us, refusing to “wake up” and see the writing on the wall, refusing to face what is too painful, too threatening, for us to see? Living in a state of denial? In chapter eight, the agonizingly wounded Daniel, the man who will become Ben’s father, is trapped inside a cave in the Vietnam War; while Daniel desperately tries to stay awake, Horn reminds us that “It is easier than it seems to sleep through the end of the world.” Daniel begins to hallucinate, remembering parts of Nahman of Bratslav’s very mystical, dense, and elusive “Tale of the Seven Beggars.” This tale, in turn, is the last and arguably most famous of all of Nahman’s tales, one which includes a young couple in a forest – a couple reminiscent, therefore, of Daniel and Rosalie. In Nahman’s actual story, the ending comes abruptly. Though the first six beggars arrive at the young couple’s wedding feast, the seventh beggar never arrives.

While “The Tale of the Seven Beggars” has many interpretations, one way to understand the seventh beggar is to see him as symbolic of the ultimate redemption which has never yet come in Jewish history. But Horn’s retelling of the story includes some additional words at the end: “GO FIND OUT.” With those words, Daniel wakes up out of his pain‐induced stupor just as he is rescued. Is his waking up and rescue a sign of redemption? Is this very human reality what redemption actually is? Was it somehow wrong for Daniel to have fallen asleep, or was it a chance to get through his physical anguish? Is “sleep” always a way to endure anguish? And is that why many of us go through life half‐asleep?

Is going to sleep a way of explaining what happened to millions of Jews after the rise of Hitler? Or what happened to those who refused to face the truth of the murderous regime of Stalin?

After hallucinating Nahman’s story, the wounded Daniel wakes up in the cave. By also resurrecting Moishe Nadir’s story, Horn is able to show Ben, his son, waking up in a different way. Horn writes:

When Ben last read it, years ago, the story seemed the same as always: amusing, absurd. But this time, as he looked around his empty apartment, he was suddenly astonished by how possible it was to let your wife and your life slip through your fingers simply because you didn’t hold on tight enough…how very, very easy it was to sleep through the end of the world. (p. 46)

What are all these complicated stories‐within‐a‐story about?

First: by weaving her own story out of existing stories (including the factual Chagall theft), Horn is showing us the sheer power of stories in our lives.

Second: just as a story makes Daniel wake up out of his pain‐induced sleep in Vietnam, so a story makes his son Ben, years later, awaken from his emotional stupor.

Third: through both the fact that Horn herself is telling us a story, and the question about his own life Ben asked himself, we readers are challenged to ask ourselves a similar question: Are there still some ways each of us as individuals in the privacy of our own lives, and all of us collectively as Jews, are letting “life slip through our fingers”? Do we fully allow powerful stories we read to have life‐changing impact on how we see our lives and the world?


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How can we – and should we – rescue works of art, literature, and culture from the past? Should Yiddish literature be permitted to fall into oblivion? Does it matter one way or another? What about other aspects of our heritage? Are there traditions we should let go of because they’re “primitive” – even if they have meaning for others? Who is to decide? What should be allowed to fall into oblivion, and what shouldn’t? On what basis should we make such decisions? What is the point of recovering the past?

“To be awake is to alive,” American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. But then he added, “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” Are we fully alive? Fully awake?

A MORAL DILEMMA: WAS ROSALIE WRONG?

ara Horn’s novel also encourages us to unravel a significant moral (and cultural) dilemma. Many of us would probably not have read the particular stories by Yiddish writers, had Horn

not incorporated them in her novel. How many of us knew “The Man Who Slept through the End of the World”? Or “Eternal Life”? Or the stories by Der Nister, Manger, or Peretz, also interwoven into the novel under the guise of being plagiarized by Rosalie Ziskind and published as stories for children?

And if it is true that we probably would not have read them, what are we to make of the following conversation between Erica and Ben in Chapter 13?

Erica – pointing out the real sources of Rosalie’s stories – says, “your mother, whose work I had very much admired, is a plagiarist and a fraud.” Ben responds, “…my mother rescued all these stories that were buried in library vaults and that no one would ever read again.” He goes on:

And when she tried to publish them with the dead authors’ names, nobody wanted them…and when she decided to publish them under her own name, her greatest dream was that someone would notice that they weren’t hers, because that would have meant someone finally cared…Congratulations. You are the first person in fifteen years to care. (p. 207)

The question we need to ask ourselves is: was Rosalie wrong to do what she did?

One way of regarding Dara Horn’s inclusion of otherwise forgotten Yiddish stories in her novel (her “plagiarizing” the stories for the sake of showing a character who “plagiarizes” the stories) is to consider the words of Aaron Lansky, at the end of his extraordinary book, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. Lansky, the

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founder and president of the National Yiddish Book Center, whose rescue operations first started over 25 years ago, when he was a 23‐year‐old graduate student, writes:

Sometimes, at night, standing alone in our warehouse, looking at those rows upon rows of rescued books, I marvel at the wiles of history. How did it happen that we, arguably the most book‐loving people on the planet, parted with an entire literature, without so much as a word of deliberation or regret? Even after twenty‐four years of hauling and shelving and thinking about Yiddish books, I’m not sure I have an answer. On one level it’s obvious: Jews gave up their parents’ and grandparents’ books because they couldn’t read them, they didn’t know what they were, and figured no one else in their families ever would, either. But sometimes, when I’m feeling especially road‐weary or discouraged, I wonder if maybe it’s not more complicated than that. Maybe the reason Jews, the People of the Book, uncharacteristically discarded a literature was not because they didn’t understand it, but rather because they understood it too well. After all, look how Yiddish literature ended up: its world in ruins, its writers murdered, its readers dying, its children estranged….

Given the magnitude of the depredations Yiddish books endured – the Holocaust, Stalinist purges, displacement, assimilation – it’s no wonder so many rational people concluded that their day was done.5

But is their day really done? Though Tevye announces “No more Tevye the Dairyman!” to Sholem Aleichem, insisting that his era has ended, Sholem Aleichem goes on to tell his story anyway – and millions of people around the world are touched by it. Similarly, says Lansky, “we have gone out of our way and saved Yiddish books anyway.” And now he is discovering that

a new generation is emerging, unbent and untrammeled, to recover the shards of a shattered past…to discover just how hip Yiddish really is. ‘Yiddish has not yet said its last word,’ Isaac Bashevis Singer predicted. It does have magic, and it is outwitting history after all.6

“Outwitting history” is perhaps another way of “entering the world to come.” That is precisely what the young writer Dara Horn is doing as well, by incorporating the stories of another generation into her own, showing how powerfully they can affect those that recall them, and insisting throughout her novel on the power of one generation to deeply shape and influence the life of the next.

5 Aaron Lansky, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books. New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005.

6 Ibid.


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Birthday, 1915

About Marc Chagall Source: Wikipedia 2008

arc Chagall was born in Liozno, near Vitebsk, Russia, close to the Latvian border. The eldest of nine children in the close knit Jewish family led by his father Khatskl (Zakhar)

Shagal, a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige‐Ite. This period of his life, described as happy though impoverished, appears in references throughout Chagall's work.

After he began studying painting in 1906 under famed local artist Yehuda Pen, Chagall moved to St. Petersburg some months later, in 1907. From 1908‐1910 Chagall studied under Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. Chagall painted "I and the Village," 1911 (oil on canvas) during a difficult period in his life. Jewish residents were only allowed to live in St. Petersburg with a permit, and the artist was jailed for a brief period for an infringement of this restriction. Despite this, Chagall remained in St. Petersburg until 1910, and regularly visited his home town where, in 1909, he met his future wife, Bella Rosenfeld.

After gaining a reputation as an artist, Chagall left St. Petersburg to settle in Paris, near the burgeoning art community in the Montparnasse district, where he developed friendships with such avant‐garde luminaries as Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger.

In 1914, Chagall returned to Vitebsk and, a year

later, married Bella Rosenfeld, an event he celebrated in the painting "Birthday". While the couple was still in Russia, World War I erupted. In 1916, the Chagall's had their first child, a daughter they named Ida.

Chagall became an active participant in the Russian

Revolution of 1917. Although the Soviet Ministry of Culture made him a Commissar of Art for the Vitebsk region, where he founded Vitebsk Museum of Modern

Art and an art school, he did not fare well politically under the Soviet system. He and his wife moved to Moscow in 1920 and then back to Paris in 1923. Chagall eventually became a French citizen in 1937.

With the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and the deportation of Jews, the

Chagalls fled Paris, seeking asylum at Villa Air‐Bel in Marseille, where the American journalist Varian Fry assisted in their escape from France through Spain and Portugal. In 1941, the Chagalls settled in the United States.

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I and the Village, 1911


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Adam & Eve Expelled from Paradise, 1954‐67

On September 2, 1944, Chagall's wife Bella, the constant subject of his paintings and companion of his life, passed away from an illness. Two years later, in 1946, he returned to Europe. By 1949 he was working in Province, in the South of France.

The depression Chagall experienced following Bella's death was alleviated in 1945 when

he met Virginia Haggard McNeil, with whom he had a son the following year, David. During this time, Chagall rediscovered a free and vibrant use of color in his painting. His works of this period are dedicated to love and the joy of life, with curved, sinuous figures. He also began to work in sculpture, ceramics, and stained glass.

In 1950 he also began experimenting with graphic

mediums. After meeting with Fernand Mourlot, he often visited Mourlot Studios where he eventually produced close to a thousand different lithographic editions. With the assistance of Charles Sorlier, a master printer working at Mourlot, he spent 30 years exploring the graphic medium that most lends itself to color representation.

Virginia left Chagall in 1951; he remarried in 1952, to Valentina Brodsky. He traveled several times to Greece and in 1957 visited Israel. In 1960, he created stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem and, in 1966, completed tapestries and other works for the reception hall of the Knesset. He continued to produce work during the 1970s.

At the age of 97, Chagall died in Saint‐Paul de Vence on the French Riviera on March 28,

1985, and was buried in the local cemetery. A Chagall museum, containing only copies of his work, was founded in 1997 in his hometown of Vitebsk, in present‐day Belarus. It is located at 29 Pokrovskaia Street, in the same building where his family lived.


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A CHAGALL TIMELINE

Born: Liozno, near Vitebsk (now Belarus) 1887

Expressionism

meets Bella Rosenfeld 1909 Futurism

moves to Paris 1910

Cubism

Study for 'Over Vitebsk' 1914 World War I

marries Bella Rosenfeld 1915

Dada

Russian Revolution

teaching in Russian orphanage 1918

Over Vitebsk / returns to Paris 1922 Fauvism

Surrealism

becomes French citizen 1937

World War II

settles in the United States 1941

Bella dies 1944

meets Virginia Haggard McNeil 1945

returns to France 1946 Abstract Expressionism

State of Israel founded

Virginia Haggard McNeil leaves 1951

Marries Valentina Brodsky 1952

visits Israel 1957 Pop Art

Died: Saint‐Paul de Vence France 1985

Self‐Portrait 1910 The Sabbath 1910

Self Portrait 1914

The Blue House 1917

Green Fiddler 1924

Loneliness 1933

Wedding Candles 1945

Red and Blue Circus 1973

Knesset Tapestry 1966


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All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

‐Marc Chagall

Understanding Chagall Sarah Rensin Student, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, American Jewish University.

ll art is a reflection of the self, by both the artist and the viewer. The artist expresses both the conscious and the subconscious. There are images to be interpreted by the observer and

there are those where the deeper meaning is only intended for the creator. While there are technical issues to be dealt with and questions to be posed, it is the initial attraction which will grasp the observer. The artist must capture the eye and hold the gaze. The image should be enticing enough so that the observer’s attention is held. Drawing him or her into the details and providing fascination for the artist’s work will compel the participant to find meaning and return continually to the source. Accessing new levels, new angles and finding a new understanding is what makes art relevant.

Every piece can be viewed as an independent work. However, the larger narrative is the artist’s life that flows through his work. The internal vocabulary and personal images of the artist become snapshots into the soul of the creative force which drives his or her hand. The artist is a shape‐shifter whose work will reflect the personal, political and cultural transformation of their environment. Each creation is a moment from their lives frozen in time. These moments capture images engraved upon the artist’s soul. In turn, they manifest themselves into a tangible form.

The viewer comes to the art with an internal dictionary of his or her own, a world of experience and symbolism. This world adds color and meaning to all they perceive. Therefore, creation is perpetual; each new observer creates a new interpretation as the two worlds become one.

Chagall employs visual metaphors and allegories. Viewing a Chagall is like walking into a dream. The colors are surreal, animals and inanimate objects represent people. A proverb becomes an image, for example the proverb “father time” becomes a fish with a clock. The fish possibly represents his father who sold herring and the clock may represent the time in which he lived. His intention is to convey feelings and images associated with memory.

Can you remember an important moment of your life and describe it with color and shape? For example, it was a dark time, a blue time, the lines were broken; or it was a bright time, a red time filled with circles. The blue might become a broken glass and the red might become a balloon. The broken blue glass might then become connected to a person you knew during that time of your life (perhaps a lover or a friend). The unbroken glass placed next to the balloon could now represent a time when love was full, round and taunt with passion.

This free form association could include childhood stories. Chagall was heavily influenced by the stories of Sholem Aleichem. He often incorporates religious symbols, such as in 'Study for Over Vitebsk,' the branches of the tree form the Hebrew letter shin (ש) which represents God. Of course, the true meaning of symbolism is always a little mysterious; some things are meant only for the soul to understand.

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L’DOR V’DOR: FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION Family Memories and the Power of Chagall Sarah Rensin

hen I was a child, my grandfather gave me an art book, Marc Chagall, Art for Children. At the time, I was too young to understand the significance it held for him or to foresee the

eventual relevance it would have in our relationship.

For several years during my childhood, I lived with my father's parents. My grandfather’s name was Ernest. He died thirteen years ago, and this painting of mine (entitled L’dor V’dor ["from generation to generation"] and completed in the summer of 2008) became the bridge between his death and my life.

I reached back to his generation and beyond to his grandfather’s generation. Through the creation of the painting, I traveled roads that would lead me back to him. I am sharing this experience in order to encourage all participants in this year’s One People One Book to discover their own creative ways of “reaching back across the generations.”

This painting began as a project for my Yiddish Literature class taught by Prof. Miriyam Glazer at American Jewish University. In class, we studied the stories of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and many other great authors. Sholem Aleichem, in particular, was a powerful influence on Marc Chagall. His stories become a part of Chagall’s inner world, his characters and phrases were woven into

Chagall’s canvas. The final project for this class allowed me to combine my fine art background, my new understanding of Yiddish literature, my love for Chagall, and my family history.

Much like the characters of The World to Come, I discovered a connection I hold to Chagall through researching my family’s history. After learning that my grandfather Ernest’s father and grandfather came from Vitebsk, the same Eastern European town that Chagall came from, I understood that my grandfather’s gift to me—the Chagall book—was a family heirloom. The tiny, picturesque towns in Chagall’s paintings represented Vitebsk. Now, as my project for the class, it seemed only natural to create my own Chagall. In doing so, I was heavily influenced by his painting “I and the Village” as well as his famous imagery of the fiddler on the roof.

Like Chagall, I began by working with personal metaphors and by cultivating an internal vocabulary. And like Chagall, I too was influenced by the “story within a story” narrative of Yiddish literature.

W


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Sarah Rensin. L'dor V'dor.


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My grandfather played piano and although I had originally wanted the weight of the piano to represent the sorrow of World War II, something an uncle said seemed determined to influence the weight of my brush. “He was happy when he played piano,” my uncle explained, during one of the interviews in which I gathered memories, asked questions, and assembled photographs as part of the background research for the painting. Like Chagall’s fiddler, my grandfather’s image came to represent carefree joy and the bliss of music. He bends his knees to dance, closes his eyes to the music, and allows himself to be swept away by the emotions of his internal world. My grandfather is dancing on the roof of his house which has been transformed into a salmon. In reality, my grandparents’ house is salmon‐colored and, as European Jews, they were always "fish out of water". For me, living in that salmon‐colored house for those years and returning to religious observance have been like "swimming upstream".

The painting shows how my grandfather’s head tefillin has fallen off because he no longer believes in God, yet his arm tefillin is bound to him because he still maintains a semblance of observance. I am the little girl. I chose to represent myself as a five‐year‐old because it was during this time that my grandfather gradually went blind, so that a five‐year‐old girl was his last remaining image of me. He once told me that the worst part of losing his sight was that he would never be able to see my paintings again. As a child, I reached out and caught his tefillin. As a grown woman, I wore his set until I was able to get my own. I have taken upon myself his discarded practices.

The town in the background is Vitebsk and each semi‐circle represents a period of time. Vitebsk represents the oldest generation moving like a train into the past (note Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye on his wagon). The pink house represents my grandfather’s generation and the bright, green grass symbolizes mine. My parents are represented by trees. My father is the large tree on the left which he planted as a child. My mother embodies two trees which are

simultaneously tefillin straps which in turn morph into the Hebrew letter shin (ש). In turn, the lines of the shin flow into the image of a tallit. The stars in the sky signify the covenant between God and Abraham (Genesis 15:5). Although one wears tefillin only in the morning, the night sky represents my own internal world of prayer and Jewish continuity.

Last week I dreamed of my Grandfather.

We were sitting in a theater, waiting for the performance to begin and I told him about the painting.


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Discussion Guides / Lesson Plans

While the following Discussion Guides/Lesson Plans are designed primarily for teachers or group leaders, they may also be useful and illuminating for casual readers or informal reading groups.

Each discussion guide is designed to encompass a single 60‐90 minute learning session – although several of them could easily go beyond that.

"The World of the World to Come in Jewish Tradition" provides an introduction to the overall theme of Olam Ha‐Bah (The World to Come) using excerpts from Jewish texts. The other plans all focus on themes, characters or incidents within Dara Horn's novel The World to Come. Participants should bring their copies of the novel to each session.

We advise the discussion leader to review the plan ahead of time, to determine if additional texts or materials (a whiteboard, maybe) will be necessary, and to decide how the lesson will best work with her or his individual group.

Leaders may wish to create their own relevant source sheets to accompany the session, although none are strictly necessary. The exception is "The World of the World to Come," which includes a source sheet to be copied for participants ahead of time.

Note that the discussion guide on A Study for "Over Vitebsk" will greatly benefit from using color copies or projecting the images on screen.


19 Developed as part of One People, One Book, a transdenominational community learning program. Copyright © Board of Rabbis of Southern California 2008. All rights reserved.

THE WORLD OF THE WORLD TO COME IN JEWISH TRADITION Discussion Guide for Group Study of The World to Come by Dara Horn

By Rabbi Daniel Bouskila, Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel; Vice President, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

One of the basic principles of Jewish faith is the belief in the “World to Come”. From the Pharisees to the Mishnah, from the Talmud to the Midrash, and from the rationalist Maimonides to the mystics of the Kabbalah, Olam Ha‐Ba plays a central role in the theology of Judaism. Whether as a response to theodicy during persecution or personal suffering, or simply as a promise of a better life in a better place, the belief in the world to come has been a central component of the belief system of Jews from all regions of the world. In this exercise, participants read and respond to several traditional definitions and quotes about Olam Ha‐Ba, the "World to Come." (Quotes and study questions are found on the next page.)

OUTLINE

1. In chevruta∗, read aloud the accompanying quotes from traditional Jewish sources related to Olam Ha'Bah ("the World to Come").

2. Take a few moments after each one to share brief first impressions with your partner(s)..

3. After reading all the source quotes, tackle one or more of the questions within your chevruta. Be sure and leave time for the final two questions – which everyone should answer.

4. Reconvene as a full group.

5. Ask each participant to either speak about their favorite (or least favorite) of the sources – and, for those who are comfortable doing so, to share their own definition or description of Olam Ha‐Ba, the World to Come.

∗ Chevruta is the traditional method of partnered Jewish study. Taken from the Hebrew word chaver, meaning "friend," chevruta

partners, usually twos or threes, take turns reading a text aloud and then discuss and exchange ideas about the text. Freedom of expression and creative thinking are encouraged.



SOURCES

Rabbi Jacob said: This world is like a hallway into the world to come; prepare yourself in the hallway so that you may enter into the main room. Pirkei Avot 4:21 He (Rabbi Jacob) used to say: One hour of repentance and good deeds in this world is better than the whole life of the world to come; yet one hour of spiritual bliss in the world to come is better than all of life in this world. Pirkei Avot 4:22

The following are things for which a person enjoys the fruits in this world, while the principal remains for him in the world to come: honoring parents, the practice of charity, and making peace between a man and his friend. Mishnah Peah 1:1

Rabbi Simon Bar Yohai taught: What path of life ultimately leads a person into the world to come? The path of suffering. Midrash Mekhilta, Chapter 10

The World to Come is not like this world. In the world to come, there is no eating nor drinking, no sexuality, no business nor jealousy nor hatred nor competition. Instead, the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads and feast on the splendor of the Shekhina’s Divine Presence. Talmud Berakhot 17a

Shabbat is a taste of the World to Come. Rabbinic Saying

STUDY QUESTIONS

How is one’s way of life here on earth potentially impacted by a belief in the world to come?

Is there any inherent meaning to physical life here on earth, or is it simply a means to an ultimately higher end?

What crisis of faith in Judaism was Rabbi Simon Bar Yohai responding to in his teaching? Is the description of the World to Come from the Talmud a literal belief or a metaphor? Discuss both

options. What elements of Shabbat observance reflect a “taste of the World to Come”? When you recite the Torah blessing upon concluding an Aliyah, and you say “Blessed are You

God…who planted within us eternal life,” what does that mean to you as it relates to the belief in the World to Come?

How might you apply any of the above source quotes to Dara Horn's novel The World to Come? Do any help your understanding of the novel? Does the novel help you understand the sources?

After studying and discussing the above quotes, and wrestling with these questions, take 2‐3 minutes to each write your own definition or description of the World to Come?



ACTS OF TRANSGRESSION Discussion Guide for Group Study of The World to Come by Dara Horn

by Rabbi Miriyam Glazer, American Jewish University and Jonathan Freund, Board of Rabbis of Southern California

Dara Horn's novel, The World to Come, begins with an act of theft: Benjamin Ziskind steals a Chagall painting from a museum, an act that has echoes throughout both the history and the family drama explored in the novel. However, it is not the only act of transgression in the narrative. There are also deceptions, lies, forgeries, betrayals, assaults, blackmail.

I. WHO DONE WHAT?

a. Divide the group into pairs. Give them 5 minutes to flip through The World to Come (and their memories), and find as many immoral, sinful, dishonest, corrupt or criminal acts as they can.

b. After 5 minutes, have them share what they found. List them on a board, if available. [Some examples: Ben's ex‐wife takes all the furniture and books from their apartment; Rosalie, Ben and Sara's mother, plagiarizes Yiddish writers; Daniel is betrayed by his unit's Vietnamese translator; Leonid is a thug; Erica blackmails Ben over the painting; Sergei betrays Boris in Russia; Sara forges a Chagall which may itself be a forgery.]

II. TRANSGRESSION IN THE NOVEL

a. What motivates the various acts?

b. Are there any consistent themes?

c. What do the acts have in common? How are they different?

d. Do you see any of the acts of transgression as justified?

e. Why do you think transgression is an important theme in the novel?

III. TRANSGRESSION IN HISTORY and IN PERSONAL LIVES

a. How does the theme (or reality) of "transgression" figure in Jewish history and culture?

b. How has actual transgression figured in your own family history?

c. What role do you see transgression having in the world to come?



SLEEPING THROUGH THE END OF THE WORLD Discussion Guide for Group Study of The World to Come by Dara Horn


One of the Yiddish stories embedded within Dara Horn's novel The World to Come is Moyshe Nadir’s The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World. This story offers insight into the historical context and mindset of Yiddish writers. The question of awareness raised by Nadir at the turn of the twentieth century is a question with which we still wrestle today.

I. READ ALOUD The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World

a. Divide the reading (pp. 44‐45, in the paperback edition of The World to Come) among two or three volunteering participants. Or simply go around the room with each person taking a paragraph

b. No one should be forced to read who does not wish to.

II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

a. Ask the group: What are your first reactions to the story? Is it humorous? Disturbing? Heavy? Absurd?

b. Does the story resonate with you? How so? Or why not?

c. Why might Moishe Nadir (1885‐1943) have been motivated to write this story? How is it reflective of his historical setting? Is it reflective of any timeless truths?

III. CONTEXT

a. Remind the group where this story appears in the novel: Ben is looking at the just‐stolen painting in his almost‐bare apartment from which his former wife has taken everything except a bed, a desk and a small bookshelf – and the children's picture books by his mother, Rosalie. This story, this book, is Ben's favorite.

b. Read aloud the paragraph in the novel which immediately follows (p. 46) the story.

c. How does the novel's context for the story change your reactions to the story? What echoes or parallels exist between the novel and the story?



IV. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY SLEEP?

In her essay "Outwitting History: The World of Yiddish Literature in The World to Come," (found elsewhere in this Guide), Rabbi Miriyam Glazer asks what it means to sleep through the end of the world:

Does it suggest being blind to what is happening around us, refusing to ‘wake up’ and see the writing on the wall, refusing to face what is too painful, too threatening, for us to see? Living in a state of denial?

a. Have Jews ever been sleeping through the end of their world? (That may seem like a leading question, but let's consider it seriously) Is that kind of sleep particular to Jews – or does it exist in other cultures?

b. Are we – Jews – also sleeping through joyous, pleasurable and good times?

c. Who in The World to Come is sleeping through life or through the end of the world? Who is fully awake and engaged?

V. CONCLUSION

As you return home, consider what American writer Henry David Thoreau writes:

“To be awake is to be alive… I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

It would be impossible to be “fully awake” in every moment of our lives. Even so, there are moments in which we want to be more awake and aware than we normally are.

a. What are those moments for you?

b. What might you do to “wake up” more in those particular moments?



WAS ROSALIE RIGHT? Discussion Guide for Group Study of The World to Come by Dara Horn


Both Dara Horn and her character Rosalie deeply value Yiddish stories. For them, the stories not only provide readers with a glimpse of a lost world, they address timeless themes of human existence and Jewish identity. Horn invites us to contemplate our obligation to these stories and whether we may cross certain ethical boundaries for the sake of resurrecting this literature from oblivion.

I. Matters of History Jewish immigrants to America, and Israel, are often relieved to be able to cast off the past and begin anew. Often the children or grandchildren of those immigrants seek to rediscover the culture of the old country – forming klezmer bands, doing Fiddler on the Roof, and resurrecting Yiddish literature, as Dara Horn does in The World to Come.

a. Do we hold our predecessors partly responsible for breaking the chain of our collective history?

b. If our people has largely forgotten these stories and their history, and if the culture that produced them is itself gone, why do some feel so compelled to bring them back?

c. What do you make of a generation that is interested in and celebrates Yiddishkayt, a culture they never knew? Is it mere nostalgia, the equivalent of late‐night reruns of old sitcoms? Or something genuine and important?

VI. The Stories Within

Break the group into chevruta7 – pairs or threes – and assign each chevruta, or allow them to choose, one of the stories‐within‐the‐story below. (We leave it to the instructor as to whether more than one chevruta can have the same story, based on her or his preference and knowledge of the group.)

Explain that they will read their assigned/chosen story aloud with their partner(s), discuss the story, and afterwards share the highlights of their discussion with the

7 Chevruta is the traditional method of partnered Jewish study. Taken from the Hebrew word chaver, meaning "friend," chevruta

partners, usually twos or threes, take turns reading a text aloud and then discuss and exchange ideas about the text. Freedom of expression and creative thinking are encouraged.



whole group.

Stories‐within‐the‐story (page numbers refer to the paperback edition):

i. “Beheaded” by Der Nister (33‐36) ii. “The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World” by Moishe Nadir (44‐

46) iii. “The Dead Town” by I.L. Peretz (108‐110) iv. “Tale of the Seven Beggars” by Sholem Aleichem (172‐175) v. “The World to Come” by Sholem Aleichem (190‐192) vi. “The Book of Paradise” by Itzik Manger (234‐237) vii. “Eve and the Apple Tree” by Itzik Manger (298‐299)

Suggested questions to help start individual discussions:

a. Have you heard this story before?

b. How do you relate to the story? Do you find yourself or something from your life in it? Or is it completely foreign or obscure to you?

c. Do you find it suggestive? Troubling? Moving? Evocative? Dull? What?

d. What does or does not speak to you about the story?

e. How does the story work in the context of the novel?

Bring the entire group back together, and have one person from each chevruta briefly report on their discussion. Share reactions.

VII. Conclusion: Rosalie’s Gift or Sin?

a. Do you think that you ever would have read these stories if they weren’t included in The World to Come under the guise of Rosalie’s plagiarism?

b. Was Rosalie right to plagiarize them and Horn to interweave them into her novel?

c. If these stories actually appeared in a children's book, as they do in the novel, are there any you would read to your children or grandchildren?

d. What should be allowed to fall into oblivion, and what shouldn’t? What is the point of recovering the past?



THE PAPER BRIDGE Discussion Guide for Group Study of The World to Come by Dara Horn


This lesson plan is a companion to the essay “Outwitting History” found in this Sourcebook. Dara Horn’s exploration of how people relate to history permeates both her writing style and the moral of her novel. She implicitly challenges readers to become aware of how they cling to, preserve, forget, discard, and are ultimately shaped by their history.

I. To Outwit

a. Ask for definitions and synonyms: What does the term "outwit" mean? [OUTWIT. To surpass in cleverness or cunning; outsmart. To beat through cleverness and wit; defeat.]

b. What does it mean to outwit – to defeat or outsmart – history?

c. List and describe how various characters in The World to Come seek to outwit history. Who is successful and who is unsuccessful?

d. Consider how author Dara Horn incorporates long dead characters and stories originally written in Yiddish into her novel. Is she attempting to “outwit history"? Is she successful?

II. Organizing History

The World to Come does not unfold chronologically. It jumps back and forth in time and from one geographical locale to another. (For example, chapter one is the present, chapter two takes place in 1920, chapter three takes us to the present again, and chapter four goes back to Ben’s childhood.)

a. What connection might there be between this structure to the book, and the theme of “outwitting history?”

b. How does such a structure affect us? (For comparison, try reimagining the book – reordering the chapters – chronologically and see what happens.)

c. How does this jumping back and forth in time help to create or recreate "the world to come"?



III. The Paper Bridge

a. In chapter five, Der Nister goes to visit the great writer I.L. Peretz, one of the founders of the new Yiddish literature. Peretz recounts the following story to Der Nister:

Remember the story you learned as a child: When the hour arrives for us to proceed to the next world, there will be two bridges to it, one made of iron and one made of paper… The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a bridge to the world to come.

b. What is your understanding of Peretz's paper bridge? Is paper truly eternal?

c. How does the paper bridge relate to the novel itself?

d. If you were to build a “paper bridge" to "the world to come" what would you put on it?

IV. Conclusion: Your Own History

As you return home, consider your own relationship with history – your personal history, your family history, and your people’s history.

a. What do you preserve? Are there gaps in your knowledge?

b. How do you or will you outwit history?

c. How will you build a bridge to the world to come?



ANALYZING MARC CHAGALL’S 'STUDY FOR OVER VITEBSK'

Chagall created this piece in 1914. What historical, cultural and personal events might have been influencing him?

What is the first thing your eye is drawn to? What else jumps out? (Consider that the painting itself is very small, about 7x9 inches.)

What is the relationship between

objects? What are some of the objects? (Ex: The two dark objects in the snow. Are they gravestones? Children's tunnels? Torah tablets?)

What emotional response do you

have to the colors of the painting? How might you respond if they were different or brighter colors?

What echoes of The World to Come

do you see in the painting? Does

seeing the painting itself influence your response to any scenes or characters? What might Ben or Sara or other characters see in the painting?

Does the painting have a narrative

content? If you knew nothing about Marc Chagall's life or work, what story might you tell from this painting?

Compare this "Study" with the final painting on the next page



Discuss the differences between these two works and their possible effects. How does the "story" change between the first painting and the second?

Marc Chagall. Study for Over Vitebsk. 1914. 7 1/8" x 9 3/4"

Marc Chagall. Over Vitebsk. 1915‐20. 26 3/8" x 36 1/2"


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About the Contributors

Rabbi Daniel Bouskila has been the Senior Rabbi of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel since 1993. He holds a B.A. in history from UCLA and Rabbinic Ordination from Yeshiva University in New York. He studied at the Hesder Yeshiva Kerem B’Yavneh in Israel, served in the IDF’s Givati Infantry Brigade during the first Lebanon War, and studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A Vice President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, Rabbi Bouskila also serves on the boards of UCLA Hillel, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, the Israel Film Festival, and as an advisor/educator for the recently founded Professional Leaders Project (PLP). A devoted activist on behalf of Israel, he was honored by the LA Israeli Community with the 2004 “Yekir Ha‐Kehilla Ha‐Yisraelit” (cherished friend of the Israeli community) award. He is a regular contributor to local and national newspapers (in both English and Hebrew), and has published an extensive commentary to the Sephardic Passover Haggadah. He teaches advanced rabbinical courses at the Academy for Jewish Religion, and has taught at Shalhevet High School, where he also coached the Girls Varsity Basketball team, leading them to two consecutive national tournament championships in Miami Beach, Florida. Rabbi Miriyam Glazer is a professor of literature at the American Jewish University, where she heads the Communication Arts department and co‐chairs the program in Jewish and World Civilization. An eclectic scholar whose books include the landmark collection of Israeli women’s writing, Dreaming the Actual as well as Dancing on the Edge of the World: Jewish Stories of Faith, Inspiration, and Love, Rabbi Glazer has published many essays and book chapters on Jewish literature, as well as on nature, gender, and spirituality in Judaism and Jewish culture. Her study guides and Torah commentaries have been translated into Hebrew, Russian, and Spanish; and most recently were included in the Reform movement’s new A Women’s Torah Commentary. Rabbi Glazer’s newest book, Psalms of the Jewish Liturgy: A Guide to their Beauty, Power and Meaning, a new translation and commentary in honor of David L. Lieber, has been well received and widely praised. She is also editor of The Bedside Torah by Bradley Shavit Artson. Rabbi Glazer is currently working on her memoir, Judaism, Wars, and Womanhood, the writing of which has been supported by a Hadassah‐Brandeis Institute grant. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, the Publications Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, and the Board of Directors of the newly reconstituted Jewish Women’s Theatre. Rabbi Mark Diamond is the Executive Vice President of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, a multi‐denominational organization of 290 rabbis. He also serves on the


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management team of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles. Rabbi Diamond received his rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and is a Magna cum Laude graduate of Carleton College. Prior to joining the Board, he served as rabbi of congregations in metropolitan San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York. Rabbi Diamond is a fellow of the 2007‐2010 Rabbinic Leadership Initiative of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is a member of the Ethics Resource Committee of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, the California State Advisory Committee on Institutional Religion, the executive committee of the United Jewish Communities Rabbinic Cabinet, and is a past chairman of the Los Angeles Council of Religious Leaders. He is the author of numerous articles on Jewish life and thought, and founded the "Ask a Rabbi" forum for America Online. His sermons have been published in Torah Aura's "Learn Torah With" series. His articles and book reviews have appeared in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, the Northern California Jewish Bulletin and the Washington Jewish Week. Jonathan Freund worked for over 20 years in various capacities in theater, film and television at Manhattan Theater Club, Williamstown Theater Festival, Paramount Pictures, HBO, Warner Bros. and Punch Productions, among many others. In 2006, he received a Masters in Jewish Education from the University of Judaism. Prior to joining the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, he ran programs with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Storahtelling, and Camp Alonim. He has taught Torah and Judaica, to adults and youth, at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Adat Ari El, University Synagogue, Shomrei Torah Synagogue, Milken Community High School and for the Jewish Federation. As a writer, he has contributed to the 2007 edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, and to Murder Most Merciful: Essays on the Ethical Conundrum of 'The Judgement of Herbert Bierhoff' (Studies in the Shoah), edited by Michael Berenbaum. With the Board of Rabbis, Jonathan is the inaugural Director of Educational & Interreligious Programs, overseeing the Board's educational and interreligious activities, including interfaith missions and other programs advocating a positive, nuanced vision of Israel; the One People, One Book transdenominational literary program; and lifelong education for judicatory leaders, clergy and community leaders. Sarah Rensin was born in Long Beach, raised in the Santa Clarita Valley, and graduated from Saugus High School. She attended Otis College of Art and Design for two years, and finished her B.A. in Jewish Studies at American Jewish University. Sarah is currently attending Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at American Jewish University.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0028659287?ie=UTF8&tag=boarofrabbofs-20&link_code=as3&camp=211189&creative=373489&creativeASIN=0028659287




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11.20.08

Curtain Call What does Chagall have to do with Russian Yiddish theater? BY DARA HORN A sad day has arrived when, in order to attract an audience to an engrossing exhibit about the Yiddish theater, one must claim that the exhibit is about Marc Chagall. That’s exactly what’s happened at New York’s Jewish Museum, where a provocative exhibit, “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,” opened last week. Despite its title and a showstopping roomful of Chagall’s theater murals (which were on view in this space a mere seven years ago), this exhibit is really about the history of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, a troupe sponsored by the Soviet government from 1921 to 1949. With sets and costumes designed by Chagall and other equally talented Jewish visual artists, and performances led by the brilliant actor Solomon Mikhoels, the theater’s productions were among the most innovative in the Jewish world. Visitors to this exhibit are treated to costume drawings, set designs, photos, and film clips from dozens of productions, and will emerge with an immensely enriched understanding of a lost creative era. What they will not learn is precisely why that era was “lost,” and therein lies the problem—less with the museum’s approach than with the artists themselves.

The otherwise excellent exhibit ends abruptly in a darkened room, where we are told that these artists—including Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin (a famous character actor)—joined the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the 1940s to raise money for Soviet efforts against the Nazis—and that after World War II, their actions “caught the attention of Stalin.” Mikhoels died first, in a murder staged to look like a traffic accident, and received a grand state funeral. Nearly everyone else, except Chagall, was executed by 1952. But the antifascist committee didn’t “catch Stalin’s attention.” Stalin created the committee, using the Jews to his advantage and then disposing of them when it suited him. Visitors to the exhibit can be forgiven for thinking the regime abruptly enacted what the wall text calls “the brutal end of an extraordinarily creative era.” But the brutality was present from the beginning. What was extraordinary wasn’t the creativity (Jewish theater thrived elsewhere too), but the restrictions placed upon it. It is appealing to imagine these artists as “dissidents” who openly conformed to the regime while secretly denouncing it. This exhibit suggests as much, but unfortunately it isn’t true. These artists were almost all loyal Communists who took the regime’s promise of support for Jewish “ethnicity” at face value, trading cultural integrity for the legitimacy and money the regime provided. The tragedy here is that these Jewish artists chose—some unconsciously, most with full complicity—to throw their talents behind a regime that would not, to use today’s catchphrase, “sit down with them without preconditions.” Every play was required to denounce religion as “backward,” ambition as “capitalist,” family closeness as “bourgeois,” Zionism as “treasonous,” and Jewish tradition as “nationalistic” and “corrupt.” This required nothing less than an evisceration of Judaism and its replacement with Communist values. As one critic at the time said of a film produced by the theater, based on a Sholem Aleichem story, “Sholem Aleichem is unrecognizable.” Sholem Aleichem and other classic Yiddish writers, whose works the theater adapted for the stage, were

Benjamin Zuskin and Solomon Mikhoels as Badkhonim in At Night in the Old Marketplace: A Tragic Carnival, by Robert Falk, 1925

http://www.nextbook.org/

http://www.nextbook.org/


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themselves fiercely critical of Jewish life. But implicit in their work was an acceptance of Judaism as a civilization with the highest potential. These Soviet Jewish artists instead accepted their regime’s premise that Judaism was a nauseating failure, and mined it for material to underscore its demise. The theater’s production of I.L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace,” a surreal dream in which a town’s dead revive after nightfall, became in these artists’ hands a zombie story, where Judaism itself was the disgusting corpse threatening to devour the living. (The costume designer, Robert Falk, even made costumes based on visits to morgues.) Most of these plays, in one way or another, are zombie stories, and the attraction to morbid dybbuk-and-golem motifs is no accident—the plays were an autopsy of Jewish life. Ultimately, despite its immense creativity, this work suggests that the artists lacked conviction in their own culture’s unconditional right to exist.

Tailor Shop Workers and Rich Men (Costume designs for 200,000: A Musical Comedy), by Isaak Rabichev, 1923

By ending with a drawn dark curtain behind a photo of Mikhoels’s state funeral, the exhibit downplays the two real winners of the Soviet cultural game. One was Habima, a Russian Hebrew theater given generous attention early in the exhibit, which decamped for Palestine in 1926. Focused on tragedy, the visitor easily forgets that Habima is the success story here: refusing to compromise on language or culture, it persists today as Israel’s national theater. The second unspoken winner was, of course, Chagall. The exhibit claims that Chagall’s departure for Western Europe in the 1920s came when he “saw the writing on the wall” concerning Soviet repression. In fact he was drawn by the wider market for his work in the West, where his shtetl surrealism was blessed with the appeal of the exotic. Despite enjoying Western artistic freedom, Chagall expressed little concern for his colleagues’ compromises, and his work ultimately became a nostalgic retreat from contemporary Jewish realities. Despite his genius, the comforting harmlessness of his paintings is what makes Chagall, rather than Soviet Yiddish theater, the box-office draw. The exhibit’s final film ends with the words “Theater is an ephemeral art.” It is particularly ephemeral when its artists are forced to deride their own origins—and even more so when they still end up dead. The Jewish Museum has taken on a tremendous task in introducing the complexities of Yiddish theater to Americans, and this achievement is more than enough to deserve high attendance and great praise. Yet the exhibit’s hesitation in presenting disturbing truths comes at a price for American Jews, a community forever confronting questions about the authenticity and legitimacy of Jewish art, culture, and power. Yiddish culture is often evoked in America with nostalgia for a supposed authenticity and innocence lost. But it would have been even more evocative for American Jews to notice the lack of authenticity and innocence in the lost culture they so revere—along with the losses incurred by creating art on any terms other than one’s own. Dara Horn is the author of the award-winning novels In the Image and The World to Come. Her newest novel, All Other Nights, will be published by Norton in April 2009. Copyright 2003-2008, Nextbook, Inc. - http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=1595


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PRESENTENSE MAGAZINE jewish life: here and now Portrait of a Writer: Interview with Dara Horn By Ariella Saperstein December 1, 2006

"I am one of four siblings who are very

close in age, and when we were children,

our parents developed elaborate tactics for

keeping us from attacking strangers and

each other. We traveled a lot as a family

(to places like Cambodia and Peru), and to

prevent us from beating up the flight

attendants, our parents told us that we all

had to keep journals during these trips. I

took it very seriously, and it taught me a lot

about how to be a careful observer.

"At home, my parents would also assign

creative projects to us in order to keep us

out of their hair. We'd come home from

school and our mother would tell us to write a play and perform it after dinner. It really worked, because

now my two sisters are also published writers (my younger sister published her first novel two years ago

and is just finishing a second one; my older sister is a journalist who's written for The New York Times

and any other papers and is now working on a first novel) and my brother is a professional animator for

television. We still do creative projects together as adults, and we give each other's characters cameos in

our books. One of my sisters is a teacher during the year, and during the summer we actually sit in a

café and write together.

* * *

"I really think that being a writer is more like having an addiction or a disease than having a job — it's

not a choice, it's a chronic condition, and the question is how to deal with it. For me, the big realization

wasn't about being a writer, but about writing fiction. I always thought I would become a journalist, and I

walked around with notebooks, collecting ideas for non-fiction articles and essays. Then one day I read

through one of these notebooks, and I realized that a lot of the things I had jotted down had more in

common with each other thematically than I would have expected. It occurred to me that all of these

little anecdotes and stories and thoughts were just waiting to be woven together into a single plot. I had

never written any fiction at all, not even a short story, until I wrote my first novel.

"One nice thing about writing fiction is that you get to test out ideas without committing yourself to them.

I do have deeply held religious beliefs, and I have other beliefs that change as my life changes. But I

wrote The World to Come in part as a way of exploring things that I wanted to be true. I think that no

matter how rational or secular a person is, there are two things that can never stand up to rational

questioning: How can a person who just existed suddenly not exist anymore? And how can someone who

never existed suddenly exist? I think we all want to believe in the presence of those who have passed

away, and I think we all feel their presence in unexpected ways long after their deaths. The idea in this

book of how our deceased ancestors "train" our future descendants by giving them their traits and ways


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of thinking, might seem strange or "spiritual" (usually a euphemism for "flaky"), but it's really just the

reality of genetics. Everyone wants to believe in the revival of the dead, but the truth is that the dead do

live. Every aspect of them is preserved within us.

* * *

"In terms of being a 'young Jewish-American writer in the 21st century,' I disagree with the claim that

young Jews are rebelling against Judaism. I actually think that young people of every generation like to

rebel against their parents, but the circumstances have changed. For Philip Roth's generation, the way to

rebel against your parents was to come home and announce that you were marrying a non-Jew and

eating pork on Yom Kippur.

"But consider this. People my age (I'm 29) are the grandchildren of people Philip Roth's age. Our parents

and grandparents already did the rebellion-against-Judaism thing. If someone my age wants to rebel

against his parents, he won't tell them he's eating pork on Yom Kippur and marrying a non-Jew, because

his parents probably already did that themselves and wouldn't be bothered by it at all. Instead, if a

Jewish person my age really wants to piss off his parents, he'll come home and announce that he's joined

Chabad-Lubavitch, that he's growing a beard, that he's getting married at age nineteen and having ten

children, and that he refuses to eat in his parents' house because it's not kosher enough for him. I've

taught college courses in Jewish literature, and it's always astonishing to me how many of my students

find their way into varieties of Jewish life (religious, secular, cultural) that their parents would never have

imagined.

"Philip Roth was first published fifty years ago — in a very different America, where being seen as a

Jewish writer was a career-killer. Now it's practically a marketing asset. But I also think that most writers

of Philip Roth's generation actually didn't know very much about Judaism or even Jewish culture. They

were essentially writing about the second-generation immigrant experience, about assimilating into

American life. My work is quite different because I've written about the content of Jewish tradition, which

most of the earlier writers didn't. Most writers are fearful of being labeled because they feel it may limit

their work or their audience. But I've actually been surprised by how much non-Jewish readers have

taken to my books. I've spoken at churches, and I get a lot of mail from non-Jewish and even religiously

Christian readers. The beauty of literature is that it becomes universal precisely through its particulars."

---

Dara Horn is an award-winning novelist, essayist, professor and scholar. This portrait was painted with Dara Horn's words, by Ariella Saperstein's pen. Ariella Saperstein is Assistant director at the Anti-

Defamation League's New York Regional Office, covering international, public policy and campus issues.

Last Updated ( Friday, 01 December 2006 ) / Photo by Avital Aronowitz http://www.presentensemagazine.org/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94


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Further Reading

Works by Dara Horn

In the Image. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2003.

The World to Come. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2006.

All Other Nights. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2009 (forthcoming).

For further information on Dara Horn and her writing, visit www.darahorn.com Works by Artists and Writers Referenced in The World to Come: Aleichem, Sholem. Tevye's Daughters. Danbury: J B H of Peconic, Incorporated, 1999. Chagall, Marc. Violinist on a Bench. 1920. LACMA, Ahmanson Building. www.lacma.org.

Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg, eds. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. New York: Penguin

(Non‐Classics), 1990.

Howe, Irving, and Ruth R. Wisse, eds. The Best of Sholom Aleichem. London: Bravo,

Limited, 1995. Manger, Itzik. The Book of Paradise: The Wonderful Adventures of Shmuel‐Aba Abervo.

New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1986. Manger, Itzik, and Leonard Wolf. The World According to Itzik : Selected Poetry and Prose.

Ed. Leonard Wolf. New York: Yale UP, 2002. Nadir, Moishe, and Harvey Fink. From Man to Man : Fun Mentsh Tsu Mentsh. New York:

Windshift P, 2006. Nadir, Moishe. Peh‐El‐Peh, Face To Face: Improvisations. Trans. Joseph Kling. Whitefish,

MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2008. Nister, Der. The Family Mashber. Trans. Leonard Wolf. New York: NYRB Classics, 2008. Wisse, Ruth R., and I. L. Peretz. The I. L. Peretz Reader. Ed. Ruth R. Wisse. New York:

Yale UP, 2002.

http://www.darahorn.com/

http://www.lacma.org/

A Sourcebook for "The World to Come" by Dara Horn

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Transcript of A Sourcebook for "The World to Come" by Dara Horn