By the winner of three national awards, a daring, ambitious, and wildly readable novel.
A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-year-old quiz-show writer. As Benjamin and his twin sister try to evade the police, they find themselves recalling their dead parentsthe father who lost a leg in Vietnam, the mother who created children's booksand their stories about trust, loss, and betrayal.
What is true, what is fake, what does it mean? Eighty years before the theft, these questions haunted Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish fabulist Der Nister ("The Hidden One"), teachers at a school for Jewish orphans. Both the painting and the questions will travel through time to shape the Ziskinds' futures.
With astonishing grace and simplicity, Dara Horn interweaves a real art heist, history, biography, theology, and Yiddish literature. Richly satisfying, utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now.
- ISBN10 0393051072
- ISBN13 9780393051070
- Publish Date 24 November 2005
- Publish Status Inactive
- Out of Print 29 June 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint WW Norton & Co
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English