Exhibited here is an original sketch by Marc Chagall, dated Chanukah 5707 (1946) and signed by him, of a Chanukah menorah drawn on the title page of Burning Lights, which was written by his wife Bella and which he illustrated. His chapter-by-chapter 36 pen and ink drawings convey his tenderness and love not only for the Jewish holidays but also most conspicuously for his wife.
In his introduction to the 1947 edition of the book, Marc compared Bella’s words and phrases to “a wash of color over a canvas.” She was the subject of many of his paintings, including Bella with White Collar (1917), and he often represented her as a beloved bride, or in the form of a wife floating symbolically over the rooftops, or walking on air before a river while carefully balancing her husband and child on her shoulders.
Lionello Venturi, a famous art critic and Marc’s biographer, acclaimed her as “the critical consciousness of whatever work has just left his hand, the guiding intellect to his conduct.” From the moment they met, Bella instantly became his favorite model and greatest inspiration. Even after her death he continued to depict her and draw inspiration from her. For example, in Anniversary Flowers, he portrays himself sitting before his easel on each anniversary of her death awaiting an astral meeting with his beloved, as he extends his hand to her.
Bella’s literary works include the editing and translation of her husband’s 1922 autobiography, which she translated into French for its first publication years later (Ma Vie, 1931) and which later was translated into English (My Life, 1960). However, her major work was undoubtedly Brenendike Likht (“Burning Lights”), her memoir of her childhood in Vitebsk, the Russian-Jewish market town where she and her husband grew up, in which she warmly reminiscences on Jewish family life in pre-Revolutionary Russia and documents her childhood memories in accordance with the festivals and holidays of the Jewish yearly cycle.
In the introductory chapter, titled “Heritage,” Bella writes that she still sees images of her family streaming before her eyes “so near, they could be breathing into my mouth,” even though her old home is dead and gone. Yet, she writes, each surviving member of her family “in place of his vanished inheritance, has taken with him, like a piece of his father’s shroud, the breath of the parental home.” She needs to rescue her fleshless memories, lest they flicker out and die:
My ears begin to sound with the clamor of the shop and the melodies that the rabbi sang on holidays. From every corner, a shadow thrusts out, and no sooner do I touch it than it pulls me into a dancing circle with other shadows…. I do not know where to take refuge from them. And so, just once, I want very much to wrest from the darkness a day, an hour, a moment belonging to my vanished home.
The title Burning Lights is an allusion to the festive candles that lit up the holidays of the Jewish year in her childhood home. Bella stated that her visits to Jewish communities in Eretz Yisrael in 1931 and to Vilna in 1935 led to her decision to write in Yiddish, which she characterized as “my faltering mother tongue” and of which she writes “I have not spoken since I left the home of my parents.”
Specifically, the rebirth of Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael, combined with the anti-Semitism she encountered in Vilna, awakened her longing for her hometown, and she began to write her memoirs in Yiddish. Following her untimely death in New York on September 2, 1944, her husband published the book in English in her memory (1946).
