The World to Come

by Dara Horn

  Yiddish is a thousand-year-old language (not a dialect) which is written in Hebrew characters. In this book I have used the standard YIVO (Yiddish Scholarly Institute) transliteration system to represent it phonetically in the Latin alphabet. Vowels are pronounced as follows: a as in “father,” e as in “red,” i as in “machine,” o as in “home” (or somewhat closer to aw as in “raw”), u as in “blue,” ey as in “they,” and counterintuitively, ay as in the i sound in “high.” The consonant pair kh is pronounced like the ch in “Bach.” There are no silent letters in this transliteration system, so a name like “Reyzele” is three syllables long.

  The following is a list of Yiddish sources for the Rosalie Ziskind books and other literary fragments that appear in the novel. All translations and adaptations are my own.

  Chapter 2: Adapted from “Gekept” (“Beheaded”) by Der Nister; available in English translation in No Star Too Beautiful, ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

  Chapter 3: Adapted from “Farshlofn a veltuntergang” (“To Sleep Through a World’s Collapse”) by Moyshe Nadir; available in English translation as “The Man Who Slept Through the End of the World” in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1953, 1990).

  Chapter 4: Excerpted from “Yingl tsingl khvat” (“Young Tongue Scamp”) by Mani Leyb; available in English translation in Little Stories for Little Children, ed. Miriam Margolin, trans. Jeffrey Shandler (Mt. Kisco, New York: Moyer Bell Ltd., 1986).

  Chapter 7: Adapted from “Di toyte shtot” (“The Dead Town”) by I. L. Peretz; available in English translation in The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse (New York: Schocken, 1990). Song excerpted from “Reyzele,” a “folk song” by Mordechai Gebirtig. Translation and music available in Mordechai Gebirtig: His Poetic and Musical Legacy, ed. Getrude Schneider (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000).

  Chapter 8: Der Nister’s waking dreams are derived from several of his symbolist stories, including “In vayn-keler” (“In the Wine Cellar”), “Fun Mayne Giter” (“From My Estates”), and “Hinter a Ployt” (“Behind a Fence”). These can be found in English translation, respectively, in Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (1976; New York: Overlook, 1987), An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. Joseph Leftwich (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), and A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1953, 1990).

  Chapter 9: Adapted from “Mayse mit di zibn betlers” (“Tale of the Seven Beggars”), an unfinished tale by Nachman of Bratslav; available in English translation in Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, ed. Arnold Band (New York: Paulist Press, 1978).

  Chapter 11: Adapted from “Oylem habo” (“The World to Come”) by Sholem Aleichem; available in English translation as “Eternal Life” in The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse (Washington: New Republic Books, 1979).

  Chapter 16: Adapted from Chapter 1 of Dos bukh fun gan-eydn (“The Book of Paradise”) by Itsik Manger; available in English translation as The Book of Paradise: The Wonderful Adventures of Shmuel-Aba Abervo, trans. Leonard Wolf (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965, 1986).

  Chapter 19: Excerpted from “Khave un der epelboym” (“Eve and the Apple Tree”) by Itsik Manger; available in English translation in The World According to Itzik, ed. Leonard Wolf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE to thank those who first taught me Yiddish—David Braun, who taught me the language, and especially Ruth Wisse, who gave me the gift of this literature—for unwittingly inspiring this novel. (All errors in grammar and translation are entirely mine.) In the early stages of this novel, I often turned to my family’s teacher of generations, Dr. Nathan Winter, whose devotion to Torah, service, and good deeds have surely earned him his place in the world to come, even as the legacy of his work remains in the land of the living. May his memory be a blessing.

  I thank Gary Morris and Alane Salierno Mason—an agent and an editor, respectively, of the kind most writers only dream of. Both made time for this book during the exciting expansion of their own families, and I am very grateful.

  I am, as always, indebted to my parents, Susan and Matthew Horn, who never cease to alert me to the wonders of the world, and especially to my mother as a diligent reader—and to my husband Brendan Schulman, whose patience, honesty, and optimism included a constant belief in this book in every possible version, even though I didn’t give the book the title he suggested: Unmitigated Chagall.

  This book is dedicated to my extraordinary siblings: Jordana (a wonderful writer and the first parent among us), Zachary (a professional animator who has even animated a Yiddish folk tale), and Ariel (run, do not walk, back to the bookstore and buy her first novel, Help Wanted, Desperately). They are my fellow artists, my partners in crime, and my lifelong friends—in prior worlds, in this world, and in every world to come.

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