By Its Cover is a series of posts wherein I read a book based solely on my love of the cover. No reading the jacket, no checking reviews!
Ben Ziskind, former child prodigy, recently divorced and feeling very sorry for himself is at a cocktail party in a museum that his twin sister has all but dragged him to. When he spies a painting of an old man hovering above a city which he recognizes from the wall of his childhood home, he steals it. Just takes it off the wall and waltzes out the door with a million dollar Chagall.
From here, Horn tells a tale going back three generations and which gives us the provenance of the painting that Ben has stolen. It revolves around the historical figures of Marc Chagall and Pinkhas Kahanovitch, known as Der Nister (the Hidden One), a Russian writer of beautiful folklore tales, whom we first meet when they are teachers in 1920’s Russia, at a school for Jewish children. The children have all been made orphans by the Russian pogroms of 1919. The story belongs mostly to Der Nister, who struggled to make a living from the magical tales he wrote in a Russian world where only social realism was allowed. He languished in a life of poverty, finally hiding many of his manuscripts in the back of Chagall’s paintings before being hauled off to a gulag where he died.
In the present day, we learn about Ben’s childhood in a “cage” due to scoliosis, his pregnant sister who is horrified by his theft but helps him put it right, and his parents and their background. Ben is also drawn into a relationship with Erica who works at the museum from where he stole the painting and who is responsible for its return.
All of these seemingly disparate threads are pulled together in a rich and complex tapestry which weaves throughout a lyrical and philosophical look at life and death, folklore and theology, the power and meaning of art and of how past actions have a powerful affect on those made in the future.
It”s a bit heavy at times and definitely a book that needs to be given attention, but well worth the effort. And what I wasn’t aware of until I had finished reading was that the painting theft was a real life occurrence (truth stranger than fiction and all that) and the book cover is actually derived from this charming Chagall painting Over Vitebsk. Fascinating.
