The works of Marc Chagall (1887-1985), undoubtedly the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century, remain much beloved across the world, and the broad influence on his life and work by his wife, Bella, is well-recognized by critics and art historians. Among his most cherished creations are his portrayals of Jewish practices and festivals, and I present here a sample of his Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur work, including those that he illustrated for Burning Lights, Bella’s magnum opus.
Exhibited here is an October 7, 1963 “Shana Tova” correspondence written in Yiddish by Chagall to his friend Gabriel Talpir. In the letter, Chagall thanks Talpir for sending him an etrog for the New Year, but regrets that his late father will be unable to use it. Instead of writing the word “etrog,” Chagall has added an original illustration of a hand holding the beautiful fruit.
Talpir (1901-1990) was an Israeli poet, art critic, publisher, editor and translator who founded Gazith (1932), a journal on arts and culture that published prose, poetry, essays, reviews and illustrations of art and architecture and that, for many years, was the only Jewish periodical dedicated to the plastic arts. Born in Stanislow Galicia, he was sent to Vienna at the beginning of World War I, where he studied at a Jewish high school before studying art at the University of Vienna. He taught at several Jewish schools in Vilna, Zamosc, Lvov, and Warsaw, and was an active member of the Zionist youth group Hechalutsz before making aliyah in 1925.
Exhibited here is a postcard depicting Chagall’s The Flying Fish, on the verso of which he writes to his correspondent, extending “a good and happy New Year” (September 3, 1967).
In The Flying Fish, Chagall depicts the powerful dreamworld of the unconscious through the dramatic image of a fish dominating the night sky. A symbol of the depths of the unconscious and of water and moon, this elongated and sleepy-looking fish stretches across the nocturnal seascape conveying both a sense of the calmness and the fantastic dreamworld of sleep. With its crescent moon, reflected in the midnight water, upturned sailboat, and sleeping fisherman, all “drowned” in a radiant dark blue, the imagery of the painting poetically expresses the world of the unconscious imagination to which Chagall was so drawn.
In a connection with Rosh Hashana – literally the “head of the year” – the fish head is a well-known symbol of the Yom Tov. In many Jewish legends, fish are also traditionally a sign of parnassah (prosperity), so the fish symbolizes our prayers that we be at the “head” of our luck and prosperity in the coming year. As such, we recite the blessing over the fish: “May it be Your will, L-rd our G-d and the G-d of our fathers, that we be a head and not a tail.” Moreover, the water that covers fish is said to protect them from the “evil eye,” which is one reason why we recite Tashlich on Rosh Hashana, because when our sins are metaphorically cast into the deep, they will not adversely affect the fish of the sea. In addition, the eyes of fish, much like the eyes of G-d, never close, thus symbolizing Hashem’s eternal protective gaze.
For many years, I served as the shliach tzibbur on the Yomim Noraim at Kesher Israel Congregation in Georgetown, where I experienced a truly special and unique treat during the break between Mussaf and Mincha on Yom Kippur. The entire congregation was invited by Mrs. Evelyn Nef to visit the garden at the back of her home located diagonally across the street from the synagogue. Upon my arrival, I was stunned by one of the most monumental Chagall works that I had ever seen: Orphée, a titanic 10’ by 17’ mosaic mounted on a 30’ high brick wall (built specifically to hold the masterpiece) spanning the entire length of the garden and which I later learned weighed over half a ton. Mrs. Nef, who was Jewish but not observant, did not attend synagogue services and was only rarely present at her home on Yom Kippur afternoon; nonetheless, she sent an invitation each year to the synagogue leadership and left the rear gate open each year for Kesher Israel congregants.
Mrs. Nef’s husband, John, was a University of Chicago economics professor and art collector who had met Chagall before marrying Evelyn, and the couple became close friends with Marc and Bella. When the Nefs hosted the Chagalls in 1968, Marc promised that he would create art for their home to honor the couples’ friendship. In 1970, after they all vacationed together for several summers in southern France, Marc took them into his studio and showed them a watercolor scale model of the brilliantly-colored mosaic. The final work was unveiled in the Nefs’ garden in November 1971 with Chagall in attendance, and the annual Yom Kippur visits commenced shortly thereafter.
According to Mrs. Nef’s 1972 story in The Washington Post, Chagall had explained that the principal figures at the center of the mosaic have their origins in the Greek mythological tale of Orpheus. Typical of the ethereal figures and mystical tone that distinguishes so much of his work, swooping arabesques and three concentric suns create an undulating rhythm throughout the mosaic, and the colorful, layered narratives are loosely drawn from both Greek mythology and from the artist’s personal experience. At the center, Orpheus charms animals with his lute, accompanied by the Three Graces and the winged stallion Pegasus while, at the bottom left corner beneath the blazing sun, a group of people wait to cross a large body of water. According to Chagall, this scene suggests not only the Jewish immigrants and refugees who crossed the ocean to reach America, but also his own experience of being smuggled out of Nazi-occupied France by the International Rescue Committee during World War II and finding safe haven in New York. When Mrs. Nef asked the artist if the couple nestling in the greenery at the lower right of the piece depicted her and John, he replied “if you like.”
In her memoir, Finding My Way, Mrs. Neff wrote:
The weather, the time of day, and the kind of light all produce changes in its appearance. When it rains, the wet tesserae are a different, stronger color. The first time it snowed on the mosaic, I wept a little with pure pleasure.
Bella died in 1944, Chagall in 1985, and John Nef in 1988, and, for Mrs. Nef, the mosaic became an enchanting reminder of the warm friendship she and her husband had shared with the Chagalls. After her death in 2009, she bequeathed the mosaic to Washington’s National Gallery of Art. For over three years, a team of conservators, curators, art handlers, designers, masons, and registrars painstakingly extracted the mosaic from the garden wall, cleaned it, and transported it to the museum, where it has been on display in a sculpture garden since 2013.
Bella Rosenfeld Chagall (1895-1944) was born and raised in Vitebsk, White Russia, the youngest of eight children of Shmuel Noah and Alta Rosenfeld, well-to-do merchants who owned and ran a successful jewelry business. Though, as members of the Chasidic community, they were strictly Orthodox in their observance, they also ensured that quality secular education and opportunities would be available to their children. Bella studied Russian at a high school and graduated from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Moscow (1914), writing her thesis on Dostoyevsky and “the liberation of the Russian peasants.” During and after her studies, she was active in the theater while also contributing articles to the Moscow newspaper Utro Rossii.
Bella met Moishe (Marc) Chagall while visiting friends in St. Petersburg (1909) and they were soon engaged, much to the consternation of her family, who were unhappy about their daughter’s marriage to her “social inferior.” The couple finally married six years later (1915) and their only child, Ida, was born a year later. In 1922, the family moved to France, but they fled to the United States following the outbreak of World War II. They arrived in New York in 1941, where she died three years later from a viral infection.
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.”
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 was later 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, entitled “Heritage,” Bella writes that she still sees memories 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.
Following her untimely death in New York on September 2, 1944, her husband published the book in English in her memory (1946). The title, Burning Lights, is an allusion to the festive candles that lit up the holidays of the Jewish year in her childhood home.
Using the voice of her childhood self, Bashke, Bella places her experiences at the center of her radiant narrative, and her portrait of her well-to-do urban family, living among and employing gentiles, successful in business, and religiously active, contrasts with contemporaneous depictions of the indigent Jewish life of the East European shtetl. Her parents, communally active and philanthropic, often invited the poor to their Shabbat table and Passover Seders, and they made a point to seek out and invite Jewish soldiers who may have found themselves far from home in Vitebsk.
Exhibited here are two original pen and ink sketches by Marc Chagall from the Rosh Hashana chapter of Burning Lights, in which Bella beautifully writes about the Yom Tov preparations in her house, shofar blowing in her shul, the tashlich ceremony at the river, and much more, as she beautifully evokes life and celebration in a Jewish world long gone:
The Fearful Days have come, and our whole house is in an uproar… A clear, joyful, purified air, as after rain – this is the air of Rosh Hashana. [During the “black nights of the Selichot prayers”], father wakes up in the middle of the night, rouses my brothers, and all of them dress quietly and go off like thieves slinking through the door. What are they looking for in the cold, in the dark streets? It is so warm in bed!…
In the morning when father drinks his tea his face is pale and fagged. But the bustle of the holiday eve dispels everyone’s weariness. The shop is closed at an early hour. Everybody makes ready to go to shul… Each one puts on something new… Mother dons a white silken blouse; she seems refurbished, she has a new soul, and she is eager to go to shul. One of my elder brothers opens the thick prayer book for her and creases down the pages from which she must pray. They are marked with notations made by grandfather’s hand many years ago. Mother recognizes lines over which she wept last year. A trembling comes over her and her eyes dim with tears. She is in a hurry to go to shul to weep over the words, as if she were reading them for the first time. As for father’s books and tallis, the shames [beadle] comes to fetch them to shul during the day…
On the following day in the morning I too go to shul. The sun is shining, the air is clear and alive. My new shoes give a dry tap. I walk faster. The New Year must be already arrived in shul. The shofar must be sounding there; even now it echoes in my ears. I fancy that the sky itself has come down lower and hurries to shul together with me. I run to the women’s section, I push open the door… The shul is packed full. The high lecterns are piled with books. Old women sit bent, sunk in their chairs. Girls stand almost on the heads of the grandmothers. Children tumble underfoot…
Suddenly from under a tallis a hand holding a shofar stretches out and remains suspended in air. The shofar blares out; everyone is awakened. They are all very still. They wait. The shofar gives another blast… and then suddenly, as though the trumpet blower had pushed out the evil spirit that was clogging the shofar, there comes a pure, long sound. Like a summons it runs through the whole shul, sounding into every corner. The sound rises upward. The walls are touched by it. It reaches me and my handrail. It throbs up to the ceiling, pushes the thick air, fills every empty space. It booms into my ears, my mouth, I even feel an ache in my stomach.
What does the New Year want from us? I recall all my sins. G-d knows what will happen to me; so much has accumulated during the year! I can hardly wait for the afternoon. I am eager to go with mother to the rite of tashlich, to shake off all my sins, cast them into the big river. Other women and men are on their way. All of them are dressed in black; they might be going, G-d forbid, to a funeral. The air is sharp. From the high river bank, from the big city park, a wind is blowing; leaves are falling, yellow, red-yellow, like butterflies; they whirl in the air, turn over, scatter on the ground. Do our sins fly in the same way?…
[Upon returning from the river] Mother at once sits down and recites psalms. She wants still to make use of the day to obtain something more from G-d. Mother is weeping, silently shaking her head. I fancy that from the closely printed lines of the psalms our grandfathers and grandmothers come gently over to us. Their shadows sway, they draw themselves out like threads, encircle me…
[Bella’s mother goes to shul and asks Bella to set the dinner table and prepare the new fruit for the shehechayanu.] No one knows from whence the pineapple comes. Within its scaly skin it looks like a strange fish. But its tail stands up like an opened fan… Is this the taste of the New Year?
“Dear G-d,” I whisper hurriedly, “before they all come back from shul, give a thought to us! Father and mother pray Thee all day in shul to grant them a good year. And father always thinks of Thee. And mother remembers thy Name at every step! Thou knowest how toilworn they are, how careridden. Dear G-d, Thou canst do everything! Make it so that we have a sweet, good year!”
[Upon their return from shul, Bella’s parents exclaim,] “May you be inscribed for a happy year!” My heart leaps up. I imagine that G-d himself is speaking through their mouths.
In the Yom Kippur chapter, Bella beautifully describes the kapparot ceremony, the mood in shul on the Day of Atonement, and much more:
A quite different air, heavy and thick, pervades the night of Yom Kippur. All the shops are long closed. Their black shutters are locked as though forever. They sky too is black, as if G-d himself – heaven forbid – had deserted it/ It is terrifying to walk in the streets… The goyim are not afraid at all. They laugh even on the Day of Atonement.
My head is still throbbing with the clamor that came from father’s white kappareh rooster. A black-garbed, scrawny-looking shochet slunk into our courtyard late in the evening. From the folds of his coat a long knife flashed. He chased father’s cock; the cock shrieked, shaking the courtyard with his din… The courtyard was littered with feathers… I raised my eyes from the prayer book, I wanted to look at my chicken. It cried and clucked as though begging for mercy of me. I did not hear the passages that I was to repeat. And I was suddenly seized by fear that the chicken, as I held it up high, might befoul my head…
Next day, we are prompted from early morning on… We are trying to do good deeds… Mother goes down to the courtyard. There is a neighbor with whom she has quarreled. She begs him earnestly to forgive her.
My bothers change clothes, make ready to go to shul. They seem to have been seized with awe. They wait at some distance while mother slowly blesses her candles… My parents place their hands on each of them and speak a blessing upon each head. Even the grown sons and daughters look like little children under the outspread hands of their parents. I, the youngest, go to them last. Father, with lowered eyes, touches my head, and I immediately choke with the tears that mount to my eyes…
I remain alone at home. The candles burn on, holy and warm. I take my place at the wall to say the Silent Prayer at once… The letters of the sacred writing begin to spread in height and width. Jerusalem sways before my eyes. I should like to hold up the holy city with the thick prayer book that I clutch tightly with both hands…
[Next morning] I run to see my grandfather. He is old and sick and he too has remained alone at home. The Rabbi of Bobruisk has ordered grandfather not to fast, so I go to my grandfather to give him his milk. Grandfather is praying. He does not even glance at me and bursts into soft weeping…
…I am angry at myself because I am not yet fasting through the whole day. Every year I beg mother to permit me to fast. I cannot eat after witnessing grandfather’s tears, and after seeing father come home with his pale, drawn face…
Mother stays at the shul through the whole day. Before Mussaf I go to see her to ask how she is…. The cantor can no longer be heard. The men’s section is half empty. Some have gone home to rest, others sit on the benches, their eyes on the prayer books…There is a bustle, the air grows hot. Men throng around the cantor. The heavy curtain of the arc is drawn aside. Now there is silence, as if the air has become motionless. Only the rustle of prayer shawls can be heard. The shining scrolls of the Torah, like princesses awakened from sleep, are carried out from the ark… I can hardly keep myself behind the handrail of the women’s section. I should like very much to jump down, to fall straight into the embrace of the holy Torahs, or at least move closer to them, to their quivering light, at least to touch them, kiss their bright glory…
As though drawn to the sadness, the men begin at once to pray aloud… One tallis billows up, emits a groan, and smothers the sound within itself. The tallesim bend, shake, move upward, turn to all sides. Tallesim sigh, pray, moan. Voices erupt as from an underground… Hoarse voices outshout one another. They pray, they implore, asking that the ceiling open for them. Hands stretch upward. The cries set the lamps shaking. At any moment now the walls will crumble and let Elijah the Prophet fly in.
[After services conclude:] As always, father is the last to come home from shul. In high spirits we fall upon the food. Glasses of tea are poured and drunk.
We have saved ourselves. We are no longer hungry. May G-d give his seal upon a good year for all of us.
Wishing a g’mar chatima tovah to all.
