Journalist Dara Horn was determined to tell his story. In a revelatory Kindle Single published today by Tablet Magazine, Horn reports on how Fry came to his rescue work and what became of him after the war. (You can read a preview on Tablet.) But how did this hero decide whom to save in the first place? Horn spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivy about Fry’s exploits, the arguably eugenics-like nature of his mission, the cultural heritage that was not protected by his and other rescue missions, and why so few know of his heroic work. [Running time: 22:09]

Between 1940 and 1941, working out of a hotel room and later a small office in the French port city of Marseille, Varian Fry rescued hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, composers, scientists, philosophers, intellectuals, and their families from the Nazis, taking enormous personal risks to bring them to the United States. Fry was one of the only American “righteous Gentiles,” a man who voluntarily risked everything to save others, with no personal connection to those he saved. At the age of 32, Fry had volunteered to go to France on behalf of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an ad hoc group of American intellectuals formed in 1940 for the purpose of distributing emergency American visas to endangered European artists and thinkers. The U.S. Department of State, which initially supported the committee’s mission, slowly turned against it in favor of its supposed allies in the “unoccupied” pro-Nazi French government—to the point of arranging for Fry’s arrest and expulsion from France in 1941. During Fry’s 13 months in Marseille, he managed to rescue 2,000 people, including a hand-picked list of the brightest stars of European culture—Hannah Arendt, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and André Breton, to name a few. Until recently, I had never heard of Fry, even though it is arguably because of him—and because of his equally brave colleagues, including several other non-Jewish Americans—that these artists and intellectuals not only survived but reshaped the culture of America. But now I was driving through Los Angeles to see the former homes of some of these rescued luminaries—and to meet a filmmaker who is one of the few living Americans who has heard of Varian Fry.

“We pay tribute to the righteous in order to ignore them. There have been no high-caliber books written about the righteous, no rigorous, critical studies of what made these people do what they did.” This is what I was told by Pierre Sauvage, a filmmaker who has spent much of the past 14 years working on a documentary about Varian Fry. Bearded and bespectacled in a red polo shirt and looking less like a French cineaste than an American dad who had just dropped his daughter off at college, Sauvage is convinced that the stories of Holocaust rescuers like Fry should be not merely inspirational, but instructional—that by studying these exceptional people, we can learn to be more like them. It’s a surprisingly lonely point of view. In 1984, Sauvage helped organize an international conference on the righteous, chaired by Elie Wiesel. “We brought all these righteous Gentiles to Washington,” Sauvage recalled. “In the breaks between sessions, the righteous Gentiles were standing around being ignored by the scholars. No one spoke to them, no one engaged them. How can scholars not be fascinated by these people?”

Sauvage is the director (and proprietor) of the Varian Fry Institute, a nonprofit archive of “Fryana,” as he calls it. On a warm winter morning in Los Angeles, he welcomed me to the “institute,” which turned out to be a small office with floor-to-ceiling shelves of binders that revealed an obsession bordering on mania. Sauvage’s collection of Fryana included everything from copies of Fry’s letters to textbooks Fry wrote for a public-affairs think tank to a poem he composed in French not long before his death. But most of the Fryana was stored on computers containing video files of what was easily several months of Sauvage’s filmed interviews with nearly every person who ever worked with, talked to, knew of, or breathed near Varian Fry.

Sauvage’s fascination with rescuers comes in part because he owes his life to them. He was born in 1944 in Le Chambon, France, a Huguenot village in the south central part of the country in which the entire town, following the leadership of its Protestant clergy, formed a silent “conspiracy of goodness,” as Sauvage has called it, to shelter Jews from the Nazis. Sauvage’s parents were among the thousands of Jews hidden by the righteous of Le Chambon. His 1989 film Weapons of the Spirit is a documentary about the village; it has become an educational staple that I watched in my high-school French class. Sauvage’s parents went to Le Chambon, he later discovered, after being rejected for rescue by Varian Fry.

Fry was honored by Yad Vashem in 1997, 30 years after his death, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; there is also a street named after him in his hometown of Ridgewood, N.J., not far from where I live. But to Sauvage, this kind of recognition is meaningless when we make no attempt to learn what motivated people like Fry. “Many years ago in New York, I read about a guy who had fallen onto the subway tracks, and another man had jumped down to rescue him,” Sauvage told me. “When he was asked why he did it, he said, ‘What else could I do? There was a train coming.’ For most people, that would be the reason not to do it. But this man’s response was automatic. Fiction and drama have given us a distorted sense of how rescuers think. Writers need a narrative arc, so they show these people wrestling with themselves, agonizing over what to do. But rescuers actually don’t hesitate or agonize. They immediately recognize what the situation calls for. When they say that what they did was no big deal, we think they are being modest. They aren’t. They genuinely experienced it as no big deal.”

From his research in Le Chambon, Sauvage developed his own theory about the righteous: that they are happy, secure people with a profound awareness of who they are. “I’ve never met an unhappy rescuer,” he claimed. “These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.” He described the inspiration the people of Le Chambon drew from their Protestant history and faith. Then he began showing me his interviews with Fry’s colleagues, introducing me posthumously to several exceedingly intelligent, colorful, and sincere Americans. All of them did indeed seem like happy people, with a deep sense of who they were.

The only person missing from his footage is Varian Fry.

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because of the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant—as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper. When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering. It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive. In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there actually wasn’t much of that. Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance. Stories about Christian rescuers are far more palatable to American audiences, because while they have the imprimatur of true stories, they also conveniently follow the familiar arc of fiction. The overwhelming reality of the unavenged murder of innocents—the reality one finds recorded in the culture that was actually destroyed—doesn’t play as well in Hollywood.

But unlike the humble peasants of Le Chambon, Varian Fry felt oddly familiar to me. Not just because he was young and American, but because he was very much the kind of young American I know best. Like me, he grew up in a commuter suburb in northern New Jersey; he graduated from Harvard in 1931, 68 years before I did. In photographs, he looks a lot like the guys I went to college with: thin, awkward, but handsome in a dorky way, his then-stylish glasses and carefully knotted ties a failed but endearing attempt at coolness. His personal letters, which I read in Columbia University’s Rare Book Room, are well-written and irreverent in a tone I recognize from my college friends—full of witty references to nerdy things ranging from the Aeneid (“I was surprised to find so many more/ had joined us, ready for exile …”) to Gilbert and Sullivan (“I am never disappointed in them [the rescued artists]—what never? Well, hardly ever!”). If he hadn’t been dead for more than 40 years, I might have dated him.

What felt creepily familiar about him, too, were his motivations.

To read Dara Horn’s full story in Tablet Magazine’s first-ever Kindle Single, see here. And remember: You don’t need a Kindle to read—Kindle Singles can be read with a free Kindle app for your iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone or tablet, or on your computer. The complete, 16,000-word version of The Rescuer costs $1.99.

Chagall lovingly portrayed shtetl life, of course, and, by his own account, his childhood home was “the soil that nourished the roots of [his] art.” But he turned away from formal religion after his bar mitzvah, left Russia for good in 1922, and became a vital member of the École de Paris. While his work never fully escaped charges that it was provincial, the dream-like depictions of floating brides and animals for which he is best known mostly universalized his enduring spirituality.

All this makes the three relatively straightforward paintings of synagogue interiors being auctioned by Sotheby’s tomorrow somewhat remarkable. Rare documentary representations from trips Chagall made to Palestine and Vilna in the 1930s, the paintings are among only six known examples of the kind. The others are in the collections of the Israel Museum and Amsterdam’s Stedlijk and on long-term loan to the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris.

Perhaps because the works are atypical, the estimates for their sale prices, in the $300,000 to $600,000 range, are modest for Chagall. (Prime examples bring several million dollars, and his auction record is $14.8 million.) But the realism in the paintings is striking, given how strongly Chagall is associated with the fantastic, and was also a factor that helped Sotheby’s identify the sites. “This was one of his modes of painting,” Hebrew University scholar Ziva Amishai-Maisels told me. Chagall painted several churches around that time, though notably those are all exteriors.

Sotheby’s consignments come to the market from heirs of the collector who acquired them in 1945 at the inaugural exhibition of the short-lived Gallery of Jewish Art in New York. It was a low point in Chagall’s life, when he was still mourning the premature death of his beloved wife, Bella, and coming to terms with the recent destruction of European Jewry. Letters sent by Chagall and on his behalf to the buyer’s son two decades later suggest he cared deeply about these pictures and was interested in getting them back, a request that was evaded. Beyond their sheer radiance, which doesn’t come through in reproductions, the details surrounding the creation of these pictures shed light on why they were so personally significant.

In a presentation at Sotheby’s earlier this month, the artist’s granddaughter Bella Meyer said Chagall always wanted to visit the Jewish ancestral homeland. His opportunity ostensibly came when Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to make a book of prints illustrating the Bible. In fact, it has been established that Vollard had no intention of sending him to Palestine for the project but, fortuitously, Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, invited Chagall around that time to partake in the founding of that city’s art museum. Sailing aboard the Champollion from Marseilles to Alexandria in the spring of 1931, Chagall encountered Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, an old friend, and met the French Jewish philosopher Edmund Fleg. His own Zionism was emboldened by visits to sites like the Wailing Wall and Rachel’s Tomb, which he also depicted.

According to Meyer, Chagall “was very moved to be in the place where the prophets had been,” and, in a sense, the Holy Land replaced Vitebsk as his spiritual home. The experience seems to have reshaped his sense of Jewish destiny. As he put it upon his installation of stained-glass windows representing the 12 tribes in the synagogue at Jerusalem’s Hadassah University Medical Center in 1962: “How is it that the air and earth of Vitebsk, my birthplace, and of thousands of years of exile, find themselves mingled in the air and earth of Jerusalem?” (He also noted that such thoughts first occurred to him on the 1931 trip, the first of eight visits.)

Curiously, of all the synagogues in Jerusalem, the one Chagall rendered was the inconspicuous Hagoral (meaning “lottery” and referring to a late-19th-century housing solution for poor Yemenite immigrants), on the second floor of a nondescript building in the Mishkenot Yisrael neighborhood. With the help of Reuven Gafni, the preeminent expert on Jerusalem’s synagogues, Sotheby’s Israeli art specialist Jennifer Roth tracked the site down and, upon discovering the accuracy and detail with which it had been captured, was awed to find herself “literally in the footsteps of Chagall.”

Despite it being Sephardic and very modest, Roth surmises that Hagoral would have appealed to Chagall, with its tripartite ark most likely carved by Galician artisans and the surrounding streets—narrow, windy, and impenetrable by cars—reminiscent of his Eastern European shtetl. Meyer echoed this, noting her grandfather’s passion for rich textiles, which she imagines was stirred by the synagogue’s Orientalist rugs and the colorful fabrics adorning its parochet, bimah, and benches: “I can’t help but thinking he saw it and said ‘Look how beautiful,’ and that it brought him back to such a deeply folkloric sense of his origins.”

Chagall also traveled to the town of Safed, where he painted two versions of the Sephardic Ha’Ari synagogue and one of the Ashkenazi Ha’Ari. (Both synagogues are dedicated to the 16th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose ideas would have been familiar to Chagall from his Hasidic childhood, but the former dates from the 13th century while the latter was built during the Ari’s lifetime.) Here, perhaps playing up the supernatural, Chagall emphasized soaring Gothic-like architecture and imparted an almost unnatural blue hue. In the Ashkenazi example, the only Safed painting at Sotheby’s, Chagall particularly elongated structural columns and lavishly illustrated the ark, with its red parochet and decorations of leaves and grapes in green, gold, and brown.

That vivid sense of color is also evident in the Vilna painting but the mood is more somber, reflecting that when Chagall traveled there in 1935, to help establish a Jewish art museum, he clearly sensed the impending danger. Whereas Chagall’s depictions of Palestine synagogues show them occupied by lingering worshipers, his Vilna sanctuary seems eerily empty. Tellingly, upon his return from Lithuania, Chagall and Bella ardently tried to shore up their French citizenship, though they would ultimately have to spend the war years in New York.

Sotheby’s initially had difficulty pinpointing this synagogue as well, but senior Judaica consultant Sharon Mintz found archival photos that helped identify it as the “kloys,” or private shul and study hall, of the Vilna Gaon. It was destroyed in World War II—a concrete Soviet school building now occupies the space—and Chagall’s rendering is actually the only image of this direct view, with the central ark flanked by three arched stained-glass windows. A testament to its historic value, it will be included in a forthcoming catalog of Lithuanian synagogues. More poignantly, the painting is an elegy for a lost world, also memorialized by Chagall in a Yiddish poem he later wrote about the Great Vilna Synagogue, included in Yale scholar Benjamin Harshav’s monumental 2003 biography, Marc Chagall and His Times:

The old shul, the old street
I painted them just yesteryear.
Now smoke rises there, and ash
And the parokhet is lost.

Where are your Torah scrolls?
The lamps, menorahs, chandeliers?
The air, generations filled with their breath?
It evaporated in the sky.

Trembling, I put the color,
The green color of the Ark of the Covenant.
I bowed in tears,
Alone in the shul—a last witness.

Chagall would go on to do a series of controversial Crucifixions, expressing the horrors of the Holocaust by linking Jesus’ suffering with the cruelties inflicted on his people, and he finally published his complete Bible prints in 1956. Toward the end of his prolific career, he also created seven monumental paintings that formed the core of the collection at the Musée Message Biblique in the South of France, designed mosaics and tapestries encapsulating the destiny of the Jewish people and its connection to the land of Israel for the Knesset, and (some say urged by his second wife, Valentina, a fellow Russian Jew who converted to Christianity) took several commissions for church windows. But there would be no more synagogues in the strict sense, no imagery as direct and intimate.

Whether because of his widow’s leanings or, as Meyer suspects, his love for his nearby home and the fact that he remained very Jewish but was no longer Orthodox, Chagall is buried in the Saint-Paul-de-Vence cemetery, near Nice, France. It is a far cry from his 1917 “Cemetery Gates,” with weathered stones marking centuries of Jewish life in stars of David and Hebrew letters. But this duality mirrors Chagall’s uniquely successful convergence of tradition and modernity, while the synagogue paintings affirm that he never really took off the mantle of the wandering Jew.

Yet this is how the critic Clement Greenberg responded to Chagall’s Crucifixions: “A new yellow plays a role, along with more ambitious or more surrealist subject matter—crucifixions and monsters. … Chagall’s two or three new major efforts—major in size and pretension—abound in patches of interesting painting, but none is fused into a complete and organic work of art.” The chilly insistence on formal analysis (“a new yellow”) and the brisk rebuke to the Crucifixion imagery—which can be admitted, at most, as an example of surrealism—reads as a complete evasion of the specifically Jewish challenge of these pictures.

It begins to seem a little suspicious, even neurotic, that Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—two leading 20th-century American art critics whose Jewishness played a central role in their public and private identity—set their faces so completely against the very idea of a modern Jewish art. In 1966, Rosenberg attempted to tackle the relationship between Judaism and visual art head-on in a lecture at New York’s Jewish Museum titled “Is There a Jewish Art?” As he recognized, it was a funny question to ask in that venue: “First they build a Jewish Museum, then they ask, Is there a Jewish art! Jews!” He went on: “As to the question itself, there is a Gentile answer and a Jewish answer. The Gentile answer is: Yes, there is a Jewish art, and No, there is no Jewish art. The Jewish answer is: What do you mean by Jewish art?” Was it any art produced by Jews, or fine art with Jewish subject matter, or strictly “Judaica”—Jewish ceremonial objects like rimonim and kiddush cups?

Such questions are very familiar in modern Jewish cultural debates; they are regularly asked, for instance, about Jewish writers. No Jewish reference ever appears in the fiction of Franz Kafka, and it would be entirely possible to read and admire his work without knowing anything about his Jewishness. But as soon as you do know something about Kafka’s life and times, it becomes impossible not to understand his themes—alienation, miscommunication, the perversion of law—as expressions of a particular moment in modern Jewish history. That is why most readers would agree that Kafka is a Jewish writer, while insisting that Jewishness does not explain or exhaust his genius—just as calling Flaubert a French writer is the beginning, not the end, of appreciating him.

With the visual arts, however, things are even more ambiguous. While no one would doubt the existence of Jewish literature, the very phrase “Jewish Art” is still contested—even, ironically enough, in the pages of Jewish Art. Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, the authors, acknowledge in their introduction that, almost half a century after Rosenberg, “no sole definition of Jewish art has universal applicability.” They begin by inviting the reader to “consider two paintings” of haystacks, one by Camille Pissarro, who was Jewish, and one by Claude Monet, who was not. In his lifetime, Pissarro was “often singled out as a ‘Jewish artist,’ ” above all during the Dreyfus Affair, when many of his fellow-Impressionists revealed themselves as anti-Semites. Yet simply by looking at their canvases, Baskind and Silver ask, “can we determine what distinguishes Pissarro’s painting [from Monet’s] as an example of ‘Jewish art?’ ”

In practice, Jewish Art relies on a less abstract criterion: If an artist is Jewish, he finds a place in the volume, regardless of technique or subject matter. Pissarro, for instance, is represented by a cityscape, Place du Theatre Francais: Rain Effect, an urban variation on the Impressionist haystack, which is equally inexpressive of the artist’s religious background. Many other 19th-century Jewish artists, however, were drawn to explicitly Jewish subject matter. Emancipated from the traditional Jewish past yet not quite integrated into the promised secular future, such painters turned to Jewish subjects in a spirit that was both anthropological and apologetic.

Alphonse Lévy (1843-1918) painted the Jews of Alsace, presenting figures “clad in their distinctive ethnic garb, uncompromised by urban modernity in the capital, and busy with activities of prayer or holiday preparations.” Jewish Art includes his 1883 picture Evening Prayer, which shows a middle-aged married couple standing on their balcony: The man davens, holding a book and candle, as the woman directs a slightly insipid smile to the viewer. To Baskind and Silver, “their faces display exaggerated features, which in the hands of a non-Jewish artist might well be described as caricatural,” but in reproduction at least this is hard to see. Lévy seems to be trying, rather, for an effect of frank, unintellectual good-nature, such as we would find charming in 17th-century pictures of Flemish peasants.

If there is an element of domestic exoticism in this canvas, it is nothing compared to the full-blown Orientalism of pictures like The Mother of Moses by Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) or Jesus Preaching at Capernaum by the Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879). As an Eastern European Jew—a native of Drohobycz, like the writer-painter Bruno Schultz—Gottlieb faced an even tougher path to acceptance than French or German Jewish artists did. By depicting Jesus in a synagogue—he stands before an unrolled Torah, wearing a tallis—Gottlieb tries to reinstate Christ in Jewish history, and thus heal the breach between Polish Catholic and Jewish traditions. Baskind and Silver quote his heartfelt plea: “How deeply I wish to eradicate all the prejudices against my people! How avidly I desire to uproot the hatred enveloping the oppressed and tormented nation and to bring peace between the Poles and the Jews, for the history of both people is a chronicle of grief and anguish!”

The Singers had been family friends since I was 10 years old, when my mother interviewed Isaac for an article in the Washington Post. He and I struck up a friendship, and subsequent invitations for tea and living-room chocolates in his apartment in Surfside in Miami Beach became one of the highlights of my Jewish education. I remember one afternoon in particular, when I brought along my Torah portion to rehearse for him and his wife, Alma. Isaac recited his own Torah portion along with mine—as if it were a Jewish opera or a call and response prayer. I remember being impressed that more than six decades after his own bar mitzvah, Isaac was able to recite every word from memory.

My mother and I regularly met Isaac at a drug store soda fountain in Surfside, for his favorite food—grits, which probably reminded him of kasha—while I had a grilled cheese and fries that he and I would share. “I think we merge with the life of the universe,” he once told me, during a conversation about life after death. “When a bubble bursts over the ocean, the water in the bubble falls back into the sea. It goes back to its source. It really does not disappear.”

Several years after Isaac has passed, I received a call from Alma—we both lived in Manhattan by then, she as a widow and me as a graduate student—asking for help. She needed someone to sort through all the clothes she still kept in their apartment at Broadway and 86th Street. As compensation, she offered to give me one of her husband’s typewriters—a gift of extraordinary meaning to an aspiring young writer who had learned so much about life at a young age from his books. What might it be like to roll Rodin’s sculpting tools in your hands, or to hold Marc Chagall’s surviving brushes over a blank canvas? Wouldn’t it be inspirational to play a few bars on Larry Adler’s favorite harmonica, or forcefully connect with a strong chord or passage on Rachmaninoff’s writing piano?

“There are three,” Alma said matter-of-factly of the typewriters. “One of them you can take with you after we’re done.”

It occurred to me that it might make more sense for her to donate them to a museum or a university library, but I knew I’d be an excellent caretaker. And admittedly, I hoped having Isaac’s typewriter in my modest apartment on West 113th Street might serve as a sort of talisman or magnet to draw some of the complicated, mysterious women he had written about so vividly in Enemies, A Love Story and The Magician of Lublin.

***

I passed through the massive gated archway on the Belnord’s south entrance and went up to her apartment. Alma came to the door slowly and didn’t smile as she greeted me. She was older than I had remembered, and her face seemed frozen in a frown of resignation and loneliness. A pang of guilt reminded me of the other reason I had volunteered for this assignment. I had walked past this enormous stone building on West 86th Street nearly every day on my way to what I still called “the 1/9” and had often seen Alma pulling a wire cart full of groceries and other sundries as I rushed to catch the subway. Had I not been habitually racing to wherever I needed to be in those days, I would have stopped to help, I reasoned.

But this Saturday would be different. I would be there for as long as Alma needed me. After an obligatory plate of prune pastry and marzipan, she explained that this was going to be a disposal operation, rather than a sorting-and-packing job or prep work for a charitable donation.

“You don’t want to save everything?” I asked, puzzled.

“I did save everything,” she replied flatly. “How much longer must I keep it?”

Several people had apparently made promises to stop by and cart off whatever she had left to various organizations, but they never arrived, and Alma had gotten tired of waiting; she wanted everything out.

“You can take whatever we don’t throw away,” she said.

She then beckoned me to follow her into a room that was already piled high with turquoise seersucker jackets, blue rubber tennis shoes, and old, worn straw hats. Ah, the straw hats with turquoise blue bands! They seemed a part of a blue-and-white uniform Isaac wore in his days of walking in the ocean breezes of Surfside. Could a man’s life be reduced to this? A stack of hats, a pile of socks, and some frayed undershirts?

“You should try this jacket,” Alma said, attempting to drape one of his seersuckers over my shoulders. Alma seemed to want to believe that his jackets would fit like the proverbial father’s hand-me-downs but, alas, it was at least two sizes too small. The jacket, along with everything else that didn’t fit—shoes, slacks, belts, and even his undershirts—went into the trash bags unsorted, in armful after armful for the garbage truck.

As I helped gather everything for the garbage collectors I thought about happier days with Isaac and Alma in their sunny Florida living room, where he and I would ponder the meaning of the universe, Spinoza’s teachings, and ghosts. But on this lonely Saturday afternoon in the New York present, there were no philosophical discussions of metaphysical reality. Only the sad and halting “yes” or a “no” in regard to what should stay and what should go among the remnants of a man who regaled millions with stories of Old World dybbuks, malevolent spirits, and often rakish protagonists visiting their complicated, passionate mistresses.

In that room a passage from The Cafeteria, one of Isaac’s short stories, came to me:

“I have been moving around in this neighborhood for over thirty years—as long as I lived in Poland,” he had written. “I know each block, each house. There has been little building here on uptown Broadway in the last decades, and I have the illusion of having put down roots here. I have spoken in most of the synagogues. They know me in some of the stores and in the vegetarian restaurants. Women with whom I have had affairs live on the side streets. Even the pigeons know me; the moment I come out with a bag of feed, they begin to fly toward me from blocks away.”

“What would they think of him now, reduced to a pile of undershirts?” I thought, as I glanced around the room for the typewriters.

As the afternoon wore on, I wondered if the belongings of someone whose work had been translated into so many languages and whose visage had been memorialized in enormous caricature on a wall of the Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street should be better preserved—or at least acknowledged with a prayer for such things. Was there a yizkor I could say after tying up the twist-tie on each bag?

Had his spirit been present in the room that day, Isaac might’ve simply shrugged. He had told me many times in my youth that “women are the only people who take life seriously. Men know it’s a joke.” The day’s purge was the wish of his widow, who had certainly earned the right to make such decisions. Alma had supported Isaac in the early days when they were first married by working as a salesgirl at Lord & Taylor while Isaac stayed home to write. She had also stayed with him over the years despite his detachment while writing and in defiance of his other romances. “Ours is a real marriage,” I remembered him once telling my mother.

Alma interrupted my reverie: “Do you want some lemonade?”

“Sure,” I said.

***

Several hours later, I finally stumbled across the typewriters in a closet. There was an old Royal with many of its keys mashed down and its teeth all jumbled and seemingly fused together. There was a second, white plastic manual typewriter that looked like it might be a starter toy or somebody’s idea of a “portable” device back in the 1970s. And finally, there was a beige IBM Selectric that used a center-strike ball.

Noticing my lingering fascination, Alma sighed heavily and told me that the typewriters had already been promised to others and that she was sorry she could not let me have one after all. I was unable to hide a twinge of surprise.

“Really?” I asked. “Not even the mangled old Royal with its snarled keys?”

I stared at the typewriters half-expecting them to emanate shafts of light and spiritual energy, like the lost Ark of the Covenant. Without possessing one of them, how would I ever be empowered by Isaac’s mystical literary powers and be energized with whatever charisma had made him such an intriguing figure to so many people?

But the situation itself was the prize—a turn of events straight out of one of Isaac’s own short stories: A young man, a writer even, is crushed to learn that some things are forever out of reach, that promising ventures often have disappointing outcomes, and that so many journeys that should lead on to fortune take the brave and fearless down winding roads to unhappy endings. I had wanted to take possession of a mystical object that would afford temporal (and possibly libidinous) benefits by mere ownership, but, at the end of the day, I saw much more clearly how our experiences and setbacks inform truly great works of art.

“I see,” I said, trailing. “No problem.”

What else could I say to the widow who had been through so much?

As I walked east along Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard toward Central Park, it occurred to me that I would have to seek out experiences to generate my own stories, buy my own seersucker jacket—one that fit—and be on the lookout for the mysterious women living along the side streets. I reflected also that, in any event, Isaac had actually composed many of his best fables and universal allegories while sitting on a couch, writing longhand in pencil.

Reed Martin is the author of The Reel Truth: Everything You Didn’t Know You Need to Know About Making an Independent Film and a former business case writer in the Global Research Group at Harvard Business School.

Finally, if you reside on the Eastern Seaboard and wish to check out some of Chagall’s work, this weekend is your last chance to visit Paris Through the Window: Chagall and His Circle at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the exhibit closes July 10. There’s still plenty of time, however, to view the newly restored America Windows installation piece at the Art Institute in Chicago.

One painting you won’t be able to see on Chagall’s birthday is, ironically, “Birthday.” It’s in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and not currently on display. You can, however, buy a reproduction for yourself on eBay.

Introduction to Marc Chagall [Nextbook.org]
Marc Chagall [Nextbook Press]
Related: Hasidic Cubism [Tablet Magazine]
Rhapsody in Blue [Tablet Magazine]

Bella Meyer, the owner of Fleurs Bella, an elegant flower shop near New York’s Union Square, calls the flower the true miracle. “To discover its essence—opening, life, death—is to experience an unimaginable mystery,” she says. Meyer traces her love of blossoms to her childhood and to time spent in the company of her grandfather, Marc Chagall. The artist is best known for his depictions of the shtetl—shabby houses, sad-eyed musicians, and melancholy goats—but, according to his granddaughter, he loved flowers, and he took great pleasure in capturing them in his art.

Meyer, 55, grew up in Basel, Switzerland, but spent her summers with Chagall in Southern France, where he lived until his death in 1985. The outdoor markets then overflowed in the warm months with great varieties of flowers and produce, and Meyer recalls delighting her grandfather with the bouquets she brought home. He saw in the “upward-reaching motion of each individual flower a symbol,” Meyer says, and for him, painting flowers may have been “the most visual way to express spirituality.”

Meyer earned a doctorate in medieval art history from the Sorbonne and moved to the United States in 1980. She held a smattering of jobs—from designing props for the theater (which she continues to do, on occasion, for productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) to working as a puppeteer—but none have satisfied her as much as floral design, she says. A number of years ago, she designed a blossom-laden chuppah for her friends’ wedding and she realized that flowers—in their variety and richness, she says, they’re natural art supplies—are a particularly powerful medium for her. She started Fleurs Bella in 2003 as a floral design company and set up the shop just under two years ago.

“Cut flowers,” she says, “have no other purpose aside from being given.” She always keeps a stash just outside the shop, with a sign that says “take one please.” About once a month, she ventures out onto the streets with what she calls “flower graffiti,” tucking small bouquets into alleyways or subway stations. Occasionally she’ll thrust her flowers at random strangers. Not everyone is thrilled. She recalls one man who yelled at her: ”’I don’t want to be happy!’”

Traditional Judaism doesn’t place much of a premium on beauty or happiness. And so it is especially heartening that flowers are so much a part of the festivities on Shavuot; more than decoration, they infuse joy and a sense of aesthetics into the holiday, suggesting that these are not, after all, anathema to Jewish beliefs and practices, and that even as we mark a particularly solemn moment in our history we can find room for both beauty and happiness.

Click below to see images of Fleurs Bella, Bella Meyer’s shop.

Frum Farmer: Though born to a family of cattle dealers, Bill Berman is an anomaly among South Florida’s dairymen, few of whom start their day by putting on tefillin, by Tablet Magazine

Inheritance: First as cattle dealers and now as dairy farmers, the author’s family has long been defined by their cows. A trip back to their Bavarian homeland revealed this legacy to be more unusual—and fraught—than she’d ever imagined. By Daphna Berman

All Night Long: Shavuot is celebrated with all-night study sessions. We asked four people we admire—a novelist, a musician, a rabbi, and a theologian—what texts they’d like to read in the early-morning hours. By Vox Tablet

Fading: The one custom for celebrating Shavuot is to stay up all night and study Jewish texts. But will we continue celebrating the printed word as more and more of what we read is electronic? By Beth Kissileff

Full Bloom: Bella Meyer traces her love of flowers to time she spent with her grandfather, Marc Chagall. Now as the owner of a Manhattan shop, Fleurs Bella, Meyer is creating her own art with blossoms as her medium, by Shoshana Olidort and Jake Marmer

Field Study: Why the holiday of Shavuot is all but ignored across America, by Marissa Brostoff

At Sinai: A recent convert to Judaism discusses why Shavuot is her favorite holiday, by Siân Gibby

Mothers’ Little Helpers: Guidebooks quell the anxieties of raising up a child, by Lynn Harris

DAWN 2010 Celebrates Shavuot: At the mystical intersection of Judaism and science, by Marissa Brostoff

Food

Got Milk? The complicated history of Jews and dairy, by Liel Leibovitz

Dairy Heirs: Shavuot and cheese, past and present, by Joan Nathan

Light and Sweet: A slice of life at a Bronx cheesecake factory, by Blake Eskin

Blintz Binge: One woman’s search for the perfect cheese-filled pancake, by Katie Robbins

Cheese, Glorious Cheese: A taste of Shavuot, by Sara Ivry

I’m not sure that Chagall could actually see the Eiffel Tower from his studio when he painted his gorgeous 1913 fantasy Paris Through the Window (he could certainly catch the stench of the nearby slaughterhouses), but that symbol of “look at me” engineering certainly divides his canvas usefully enough. To the left of it, there’s an upside down train heading back to Vitebsk; to the right, there’s a parachutist floating down, airy and free, in much the way Chagall apparently felt when he first descended on the city. Most of us know how great it is to arrive in Paris. For Chagall, a Belorussian Jew from Vitebsk, who, on account of his religious affiliation, had been required a special permit to live in St. Petersburg, it was something close to heaven.

And yet, Chagall couldn’t let go of the past, and this is what distinguishes him from his Jewish confreres who also set up shop in Montparnasse and Montmartre to paint, draw, sculpt, and party their way through the stupendous Bohemian revels that Paris hosted in the years leading up to World War I, and then again in the roaring Twenties.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has set out to take a look at the work of a group of émigré artists that count in their number a large group of Jewish painters and sculptors— including Amedeo Modigilani, Chaim Soutine, Jules Pascin, Jacques Lipschitz, Moise Kisling, and Chana Orloff—to see what they were thinking about while they looked through their French windows at more or less the same time that Chagall was in town. It becomes clear very fast that, with the exception of Chagall himself, and despite the carnival atmosphere, what was on their collective mind wasn’t Purim.

True, Modigliani went around town declaring “I’m Jewish” as a calling card and picking fights with Parisian anti-Semites, while Soutine’s expressionism was locally regarded as typical over-the top-Jewish drama queen venting, but you will search long and hard in their work to discover more than a smattering of Jewish subject matter. The anagrammatic disguise in Jules Pascin’s name—he began life in Bulgaria as Julius Pincas—pretty much tells the whole story of how the Jews went native in Paris. Modigliani started off by exhibiting his painting “The Jewess” in the Salon des Indépendents in 1919 but quickly moved on to languorous nudes and alluring long-necked women. Soutine’s squigglevision landscapes and Pascin’s borderline-porno little girls didn’t have much of a Jewish story to tell either.

Chagall, on the other hand, couldn’t stop looking both ways at once, backward and forward, East and West, over his shoulder at the observantly Jewish world he’d left behind and straight ahead to the secular one he inhabited for the remainder of his life. Hence, the Janus-like head in the bottom right-hand corner of Paris Through the Window.

The Poet Reclining, 1915.
Tate Modern Museum. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

By all accounts, Chagall wasn’t a Paris party animal. The others would sometimes try to coax him away from his work by chucking stones at his studio windows, but with little success. Cubism certainly got to Chagall (it got to everybody), as did the swirling disks of Robert Delaunay’s Orphism. In fact, what Chagall mainly saw when he looked out of his window was a world with perspective shattered only to be reconstructed in planes and spheres. Chagall, it has been said, was the first (and last) painter to fuse Cubism with Hasidism. He brilliantly harnessed his Yiddish past to modernist techniques and in this way sneaked Yiddish culture into 20th-century painting. Because the vibrant visual expression of his paintings carried the stamp of the modern and not the stigma of a dying language, hardly anyone, with the exception of the odd French anti-Semite, noticed what was happening.

In short, Chagall was a secular Jew who couldn’t get Jews off his mind, in either his life or his art, and in this sense perhaps he resembles no other 20th-century artist so much as Philip Roth. Both managed to experiment with technique (think of The Counterlife) and engage the widest possible audience while obsessively ruminating on Jewish life.

In 1914, Chagall left Paris and spent the war years in Russia. By the time he got back in 1922, he was largely done with Cubism, but Hasidim lingered in his imagination and kept cropping up for the rest of his life.

Oh God, 1919.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louis E. Stern Collection, 1963. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Philadelphia show, somewhat hamstrung by its reliance on the museum’s own collection, doesn’t linger in Paris but accompanies Chagall through his wartime and revolutionary years in Russia. A spectacular Chagall from 1915, The Poet Reclining, painted after his honeymoon, is reproduced in the catalog and promised in the publicity material as being on loan from London’s Tate Gallery, but, unless I missed it (and I checked through the exhibition twice), it isn’t there.

However, we do see intimate details of Russian life on the cusp or in the throes of great changes: The Smolensk Newspaper (1914), with its headline declaration of war; a Wounded Soldier (1914); and, perhaps the most striking painting in the exhibition, Oh God (1919), in which the neck of a man in a white suit holds an inverted head searching a dark sky. To the right of the figure there are a few Vitebsk homes, the blue cupola of an Orthodox church, and the Russian letters for “Oh God.” Chagall executed this uncharacteristically gloomy painting as the Suprematist master Kazimir Malevich was trying to oust him from his position as head of the Vitebsk art school. Maybe it was revolutionary zeal that led Chagall to these bold Russian strokes, but what the painting most powerfully conveys is “Oy vey.”

While Chagall was painting his anthropomorphic animals transported from the folk world of Vitebsk (see: The Watering Trough, 1925), old Jews, and a gift exchange on Purim (Purim 1916-17), his peers were more absorbed with the secular Paris zeitgeist. The Philadelphia show has some delightful examples including three sculptures—Chana Orloff’s neo-Futurist The Dancers (1923), Jacques Lipchitz’s Sailor With Guitar (1914), and Modigliani’s Brancusi-influenced Head of  a Woman (1911)—that are all movement and beauty.

Sometimes Jews just like to party like it’s Fleet week.

The exhibition Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle will be at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through July 10.

Jonathan Wilson is the director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His books include the novel A Palestine Affair, the story collection An Ambulance Is On the Way, and, from Nextbook Press, the biography Marc Chagall.

Oh, and check one out at the 1:07 mark.

Rhapsody in Blue

Marc Chagall. America Windows, 1977. A gift of Marc Chagall, City of Chicago, and the Auxiliary Board, commemorating the American bicentennial in memory of Mayor Richard J.Daley. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

The first time that I saw Chagall’s America Windows at the Art Institute in Chicago, about 20 years ago, I can’t say that they blew me away. Yes, the blue was magnificent, as always with Chagall, but this work, installed when Chagall was 90, appeared to me then to have some of the elements that once led the critic Robert Hughes, waxing a little more nasty than nice, to describe the artist’s late productions as “quasi-religious imagery, modular and diffuse at the same time [that] would serve (with adjustments: drop the flying cow, put in a menorah) to commemorate nearly anything, from the Holocaust to the self-celebration of a bank.”

Maybe I’ve lost my edge, but they don’t seem that way to me now.

Back in 1977, when the windows were installed, the self-celebration was America’s, the work had been planned for the 1976 Bicentennial and conceived as a special gift to Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, a man better known for encouraging his law enforcement officers to test their billy-clubs out on Yippies than for his adoration of the vitreous harmonics of stained glass. Daley died in May 1976 before he could see the windows in situ.

In June 1986, the windows got a big lift when Ferris Bueller and his inamorata, Sloane, stood in awe before them during a time-out on his energetic day off. The viewing area briefly became a hot dating spot for young Chicagoans. Five years ago the museum, about to begin the construction of a new gallery, dismantled the windows for cleaning and restoration, and late last year, amid much hoopla, they were put back on display, all bright and sparkly.

The major difference in the new installation is that the windows are no longer functioning windows in walls but free standing in front of actual windows. Stephanie D’Alessandro, a curator at the Institute, explained that now “the entire installation is lit with a special internal lighting system … to protect it from the elements and further wear and tear.” In terms of preservation, this is clearly good news; the extraordinarily vibrant blues, yellows, and reds will not fade or accumulate residue of any kind. On the other hand, much as I loved seeing the windows in their new setting, some subtle shift in ambience accrues when they are presented, albeit for good reasons, more like paintings. This is not to say that the soaped up, washed off, and newly nitid panels aren’t stunning.

Chagall became fascinated with stained glass after he had moved to the south of France in 1950. Undoubtedly he was seduced by the endless Mediterranean unfolding of color-as-light and the possibility of capturing in glass the kind of spiritually charged, quasi-mystical, sometimes biblically inspired images to which he was increasingly drawn. Stained glass windows, of course, hooked Chagall up with a powerful Christian tradition, and he was always ambivalent about making that connection. When, in 1949, he was first asked to decorate the baptistery of a French church he both convened a rabbinical advisory board and wrote to Chaim Weizmann to ask if it was OK if he went ahead with the project. Thus, for what you saw by the dawn’s early light while gazing at one of his windows, Chagall was generally after something ecumenical and frequently secular, as in the Chicago America Windows. Luckily for Chagall, André Malraux found a direct, highly flattering, and unthreatening link between the painter and the Christian masters: “I cannot understand,” he wrote, “why stained glass, which lives and dies with the day, was ever abandoned. … Artists preferred the light. But the stained glass window, which is brought to life by the morning and snuffed out by the night, brought the Creation home to the worshiper in church. … Stained glass eventually surrendered to painting by incorporating shade, which killed it. It was six hundred and fifty years before someone found a way of shading off colors in glass: Chagall.”

The America Windows (executed in France with the assistance of master craftsman Charles Marq) are beautiful ghosts of an earlier work by Chagall: the four vertical paintings Music, Dance, Drama, and Literature that he painted for the Moscow Yiddish Theatre (known as “Chagall’s Box”) in the hard, freezing winter of 1920 and that he placed in the spaces between the theater’s windows. These paintings were first moved in 1925 to the foyer of a new theater and then hastily taken down and hidden in 1937 during one of Stalin’s purges. They did not see the light of day again until 40 years later when, in 1973, Chagall made a trip to Russia. There the canvases were unrolled for Chagall to view and sign before the powers that be reconsigned them to Soviet oblivion. Clearly, Chagall had the recently viewed Moscow paintings firmly in mind when he conceived the “America Windows” project in 1974, for the four themes are reiterated in the 36 stained glass panels, which feature trumpets, violins, books, acrobats, and, in a gesture to the lost Jewish past, a lit five-branched menorah in the bottom corner of one window.

The newly cleaned windows dazzle, and the blue goes on forever. In his “Theory of Color” Goethe made the claim that “Blue is a darkness weakened by the light.” His reification of darkness (an attempt to supplant Newton) has caused all modern physics to reject his theory but, beginning with the Pre-Raphaelites, artists have always been drawn to his quirky notions as they open a door to the subjective. Chagall’s blue windows certainly appear to have a life of their own, so much so that you almost imagine you could see them in the dark. Chagall is, after all, a painter who excels at being in at least two places at once. For example, in his representation of city buildings, Chagall invariably manages to replicate the higgledy-piggledy qualities of his native Vitebsk’s shops and houses even as he evokes the monumental structures of a great city, sometimes Paris, or in this case, Chicago—a Chicago, it should be pointed out, in which the Statue of Liberty has mysteriously floated west to hold her lamp over what looks like Lake Shore Drive.

Ferris famously kissed Sloane in front of the America windows. You can’t get a better seal of approval.

Jonathan Wilson is the director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His books include the novel A Palestine Affair, the story collection An Ambulance Is On the Way, and, from Nextbook Press, the biography Marc Chagall.

The glorification is such that Vitebsk, his birthplace, remembers Chagall with no fewer than three bronze statues in his image–a rare honor for anyone here other than Lenin. A day is set aside each year to pay homage to the modernist pioneer, with open-air celebrations including everything from international scholars to live goats like those featured in his work. Tourist attractions include the art school that Chagall founded in 1919 and a museum made up of the modest brick house where he grew up and exhibition space for some 300 of his works. The collection may not be as impressive as the one housed at the Chagall Museum in Nice, France, but the crowds here seem enthusiastic enough, judging from all the leggy women who sprawled on the statues for snapshots.

Lionizing the artist, says the Vitebsk museum’s director, Ludmila Khmelnitskaya, has been a way to assert national identity since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Belarusian language is now taught at schools and, as a recent gas dispute with Russia showed, the government chafes when Moscow tries to boss it around. According to Khmelnitskaya, most Belarusians had never heard of Chagall before the museum opened in 1992, but the number of visitors it attracts has grown to 20,000 a year.

“It’s important to return his memory to the culture of Belarus,” Khmelnitskaya said, adding that Soviet encyclopedias listed him as from France, where he spent the bulk of his later years. His name was absent from histories of Belarusian art. “Chagall’s work reflects his memory of the city, yet he’s been neglected in the country where he was born.”

The embrace of Chagall, an outcast Jew under the Soviets, is not unusual for young states in Eastern Europe, said Ruth Ellen Gruber, an authority on Jewish heritage travel. In Slovakia, the 19th-century rabbi known as the Chatam Sofer is being heralded as a national historic figure alongside non-Jewish notables. His tomb is on the list of tourist sites. “Newly independent countries—and especially newly independent countries trying to assert their national identity—look for local heroes, prominent figures they can claim as their own and who can set them apart from countries that once dominated them,” Gruber said.

Yet the Belarusian embrace has its limits. The current authorities downplay the Hasidic traditions that inspired the man who was born into a pious family as Moyshe Shagal. The official website of Belarus fails to mention that he was Jewish at all, and there’s barely a sign of it in the museum built from his childhood home. The museum catalog fails to mention that the area around Vitebsk was the cradle of Hasidism or that Vitebsk was once heavily Yiddish-speaking. When Chagall was born in 1887, Jews made up more than half the town’s population, and up to 90 percent in some surrounding shtetls. His parents came from Liozna, the same village as Schneur Zalman, the founder of the Lubavitcher Hasidism whose teachings they embraced. The guidebook also ignores that anti-Semitism was so prevalent at the time that Jewish children were only allowed to attend heders and Chagall’s mother had to bribe officials to allow him to attend an ordinary school.

What curators do wax on about is Chagall’s lifelong fixation with the town he left at 33. He spent his remaining six decades abroad painting a folksy dream world where lovers and cows flew. Yet while, even today, snowy cottages and roosters can be found in any Belarusian village, Chagall’s motifs integrate specific references to Jewish rituals and proverbs. His fantasy world reflects real life—weddings, prayers, synagogues, births, and music—touched by Hasidic mysticism and Yiddish lore. The artist never lost sight of the suffering of his people, as well, and drew from biblical stories to portray pogroms and the Holocaust.

“Were I not a Jew,” he once said, “I would not have become an artist.”

The official glossing over of Chagall’s Hasidic roots should come as little surprise, considering Belarus’ uneasy relationship with its Jews, who experienced waves of anti-Semitism since they first settled in the region in the 14th century. Pogroms in the late 19th century sent tens of thousands of Belarusian Jews to Ellis Island and left many more wishing that they had done the same. The Communists who overthrew the czars closed most of Vitebsk’s 48 synagogues and banned religious practice. Official prejudice continues, if one is to take seriously the words of President Alexander Lukashenko, who famously said in 2007 that Jews live like pigs. (He later dismissed the comment as a joke.)

Few are left to set the record straight about Chagall’s Vitebsk. Before World War II, the town registered 37,000 Jews. Now only 1,700 remain, and the number dwindles each year, with many emigrating to Israel, where nearly every family now has a relative.

Congregants in Vitebsk can barely manage to scrape together a minyan for the synagogue, a simple white prayer house of pine benches and 35 regular members. Despite efforts by community leaders to revive Jewish traditions, assimilation has taken a toll. Members of the older generation said they had never seen a Torah until the synagogue opened in 1994, and many congregants don’t know any prayers. At a recent service, quite a few women lighting candles relied on a sheet that phonetically spelled out the Hebrew words.

Aside from a shrinking Jewish presence, only fragments remain of the landscape depicted by Chagall. “When I see Chagall’s pictures, it’s about roofs and ruins,” said Chaim Magarshak, an elder of the Vitebsk synagogue. “The wooden houses mostly burned down.” The Jewish homes he so lovingly illustrated were largely destroyed during the war.

The destruction of architectural heritage extends throughout Belarus, where only a few yeshivas and synagogues seized by the Soviets have been returned to Jewish hands. Most of these reclaimed buildings lie in such disrepair that handing them back is not exactly a generous act. It goes without saying that the tiny Jewish population lacks the money to restore most of the properties to functionality. The country’s first yeshiva, in Volozhin, has gaping holes in its floor. It, at least, has a roof and four walls, unlike the oriental synagogue in Bobruisk. While the government preserves historic churches in Grodno, the 16th-century Great Synagogue, a masterpiece of Italianate architecture, crumbles.

As for Vitebsk, Chagall could never bring himself to return. In 1973, he traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg but avoided Belarus. “He said that at his age it was dangerous to get too emotional,” said Khmelnitskaya, the museum director. “He was probably afraid to see how Vitebsk had changed from what he remembered.”

Judith Matloff teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block.

Despite its title and a showstopping roomful of Chagall’s theater murals (which were on view in this space a mere seven years ago), this exhibit is really about the history of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater, a troupe sponsored by the Soviet government from 1921 to 1949. With sets and costumes designed by Chagall and other equally talented Jewish visual artists, and performances led by the brilliant actor Solomon Mikhoels, the theater’s productions were among the most innovative in the Jewish world. Visitors to this exhibit are treated to costume drawings, set designs, photos, and film clips from dozens of productions, and will emerge with an immensely enriched understanding of a lost creative era. What they will not learn is precisely why that era was “lost,” and therein lies the problem—less with the museum’s approach than with the artists themselves.

Benjamin Zuskin and Solomon Mikhoels as Badkhonim in At Night in the Old Marketplace: A Tragic Carnival, by Robert Falk, 1925

The otherwise excellent exhibit ends abruptly in a darkened room, where we are told that these artists—including Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin (a famous character actor)—joined the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the 1940s to raise money for Soviet efforts against the Nazis—and that after World War II, their actions “caught the attention of Stalin.” Mikhoels died first, in a murder staged to look like a traffic accident, and received a grand state funeral. Nearly everyone else, except Chagall, was executed by 1952. But the antifascist committee didn’t “catch Stalin’s attention.” Stalin created the committee, using the Jews to his advantage and then disposing of them when it suited him. Visitors to the exhibit can be forgiven for thinking the regime abruptly enacted what the wall text calls “the brutal end of an extraordinarily creative era.” But the brutality was present from the beginning. What was extraordinary wasn’t the creativity (Jewish theater thrived elsewhere too), but the restrictions placed upon it.

It is appealing to imagine these artists as “dissidents” who openly conformed to the regime while secretly denouncing it. This exhibit suggests as much, but unfortunately it isn’t true. These artists were almost all loyal Communists who took the regime’s promise of support for Jewish “ethnicity” at face value, trading cultural integrity for the legitimacy and money the regime provided. The tragedy here is that these Jewish artists chose—some unconsciously, most with full complicity—to throw their talents behind a regime that would not, to use today’s catchphrase, “sit down with them without preconditions.” Every play was required to denounce religion as “backward,” ambition as “capitalist,” family closeness as “bourgeois,” Zionism as “treasonous,” and Jewish tradition as “nationalistic” and “corrupt.” This required nothing less than an evisceration of Judaism and its replacement with Communist values. As one critic at the time said of a film produced by the theater, based on a Sholem Aleichem story, “Sholem Aleichem is unrecognizable.”

Sholem Aleichem and other classic Yiddish writers, whose works the theater adapted for the stage, were themselves fiercely critical of Jewish life. But implicit in their work was an acceptance of Judaism as a civilization with the highest potential. These Soviet Jewish artists instead accepted their regime’s premise that Judaism was a nauseating failure, and mined it for material to underscore its demise. The theater’s production of I.L. Peretz’s “At Night in the Old Marketplace,” a surreal dream in which a town’s dead revive after nightfall, became in these artists’ hands a zombie story, where Judaism itself was the disgusting corpse threatening to devour the living. (The costume designer, Robert Falk, even made costumes based on visits to morgues.) Most of these plays, in one way or another, are zombie stories, and the attraction to morbid dybbuk-and-golem motifs is no accident—the plays were an autopsy of Jewish life. Ultimately, despite its immense creativity, this work suggests that the artists lacked conviction in their own culture’s unconditional right to exist.

Tailor Shop Workers and Rich Men (Costume designs for 200,000: A Musical Comedy), by Isaak Rabichev, 1923

By ending with a drawn dark curtain behind a photo of Mikhoels’s state funeral, the exhibit downplays the two real winners of the Soviet cultural game. One was Habima, a Russian Hebrew theater given generous attention early in the exhibit, which decamped for Palestine in 1926. Focused on tragedy, the visitor easily forgets that Habima is the success story here: refusing to compromise on language or culture, it persists today as Israel’s national theater. The second unspoken winner was, of course, Chagall.

The exhibit claims that Chagall’s departure for Western Europe in the 1920s came when he “saw the writing on the wall” concerning Soviet repression. In fact he was drawn by the wider market for his work in the West, where his shtetl surrealism was blessed with the appeal of the exotic. Despite enjoying Western artistic freedom, Chagall expressed little concern for his colleagues’ compromises, and his work ultimately became a nostalgic retreat from contemporary Jewish realities. Despite his genius, the comforting harmlessness of his paintings is what makes Chagall, rather than Soviet Yiddish theater, the box-office draw. The exhibit’s final film ends with the words “Theater is an ephemeral art.” It is particularly ephemeral when its artists are forced to deride their own origins—and even more so when they still end up dead.

The Jewish Museum has taken on a tremendous task in introducing the complexities of Yiddish theater to Americans, and this achievement is more than enough to deserve high attendance and great praise. Yet the exhibit’s hesitation in presenting disturbing truths comes at a price for American Jews, a community forever confronting questions about the authenticity and legitimacy of Jewish art, culture, and power. Yiddish culture is often evoked in America with nostalgia for a supposed authenticity and innocence lost. But it would have been even more evocative for American Jews to notice the lack of authenticity and innocence in the lost culture they so revere—along with the losses incurred by creating art on any terms other than one’s own.

Dara Horn is the author of the award-winning novels In the Image and The World to Come. Her newest novel, All Other Nights, will be published by Norton in April 2009.

Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.

The Moscow Yiddish Theater was founded as an actors’ studio in Petrograd in 1919 and moved to the new capital of the Soviet Union a year later. There, under the guidance of director Aleksey Granovsky, it emerged as the shining symbol of a secular Yiddish-speaking culture. The Theater quickly gained an international reputation for modern dramas based—like the paintings of Marc Chagall, who designed sets for its productions—in a mythical Jewish realm. Featuring stars like Solomon Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin, it staged productions such as At Night in the Old Marketplace and The Travels of Benjamin The Third until 1949, when it finally closed, a year after Mikhoels was murdered in a Stalinist purge.

In his new history, The Moscow Yiddish Theater, Benjamin Harshav, a professor of comparative literature at Yale who has written two books on Chagall, combines archival photographs with firsthand accounts of the Theater’s heyday from the likes of Chagall, Joseph Roth, Osip Mandelstam, and Viktor Shklovsky. Hashav weaves it all together into a meticulous account of the Theater’s rise and fall under Soviet censorship.

You write that the origins of the Moscow Yiddish Theater lie at the “intersection of two revolutions”: avant-garde theater on the one hand, and Jewish modernity on the other. How exactly was Jewish life changing in Russia?

I talk about this in my book Language in the Time of Revolution. There was a total transformation of Jewish life—professions, language, geography—and that transformation went in two directions: external and internal. The Zionists wanted to go back to the past, the Communists into the

Benjamin Harshav

future . . . but I wouldn’t necessarily lump assimilation and internal secularization together, because many of the people who supported Granovsky and the Yiddish theater, for example, were returning to Jewish life after disillusionment with the assimilated world.

So nostalgia was the price of freedom.

Yes, but whereas the nostalgia on Broadway was sentimental and kitsch, the Moscow Yiddish Theater was an attempt to make an elevated mythology of the fictional Jewish (or Yiddish—the same word is used in Russian) world.

It’s nearly impossible for us now to imagine mass audiences filling a theater to see a play in a language they don’t understand. Why was the theater so successful?

Well, people who didn’t understand the language came later, after the Second World War, when the Theater had become legendary. The original audiences were either themselves from shtetls or largely familiar with Yiddish. Part of the success came from the fact that the performances had a structure that was easily translated through the mass movements of the actors, their choreography, and other nonverbal aspects of the stage. Chagall had a very big impact as a cocreator of the fictional Jewish world reinvented on stage and as a mentor to the actors—especially Mikhoels—but Chagall was capricious and egocentric and so was Granovsky. They often didn’t see eye to eye.

Right. Granovsky was an assimilated, highbrow disciple of Max Reinhardt—the most innovative theater director in Weimar Germany; while Chagall was a sensual bohemian from one of the bigger shtetls.

Granovsky was totally assimilated: he was born in Moscow into the Russian culture, which means his parents were privileged Jews. After the Jews were expelled from Moscow in the 1890s he grew up in Riga, in a Russian and German culture. Then he studied in Germany where he saw German theater. He didn’t know Yiddish—his actors taught him the language—and the actors themselves were mostly from shtetls. Mikhoels, his right-hand man, was born in Dvinsk and grew up in Riga. And Chagall was from Vitebsk, which was quite a large city; not a shtetl. Yet all three were part of this vast movement to build a Jewish nation with all the attributes of a nation and a culture of its own. Theater was the newest component, after literature and music.

It must have been liberating to create a modern Yiddish theater from scratch, so to speak, without major precedents or an extensive history—especially in a new capital city outside the traditional Pale of Settlement.

Petersburg was a failure for the Theater; there was no audience. Petrograd, as it was called then, had only a small Jewish community consisting mostly of Russified Jews who spoke little, if any, Yiddish. When the Soviet capital moved to Moscow in 1920, the Theater was transferred as well. In Moscow the beneficiaries of the New Economic Policy and other privileged people supported theater art and constituted an audience. It wasn’t that the shtetl was so primitive, but rather that the personalities associated with the Theater wanted to strike out in a new direction, without the psychological “Chekhovism” of the Russian stage on the one hand, and the poor exaggerations of the old itinerant Yiddish theater on the other.

Do you think the Theater’s emphasis on the Yiddish language was inseparable from its sociopolitical orientation, which I take to mean secular and left leaning?

Granovsky said the Theater was a temple—“a temple where the prayer is chanted in the Yiddish language.” These were secular Jews and theater was a substitute for religion.

What is the Theater’s place in Yiddish cultural history? Did it have any influence on poetry or literature?

Actually it was the reverse. The Theater was influenced by the classics of Yiddish poetry and literature, the plays based on Sholem Aleichem, Shmuel Halkin—who translated Shakespeare into Yiddish—and Abraham Goldfaden.

Chagall in particular is very important to you—with your wife you have written two books on him. How does his life at the Theater fit into his artistic biography? What does his work represent?

Chagall was already famous in the West when the Theater was founded. He had spent four years in Paris and was influenced by French writers and painters. But after Cubism there was a crisis in painting where many of the old techniques were exhausted. Picasso turned to African masks; Chagall returned to Russia. With him he brought the fame he had accrued in Europe and only then did the Theater begin to gain an international audience, traveling abroad to Germany, where it was treated to rave reviews. Chagall himself popularized the myth of the Jewish fictional world and, rather than submitting Jewish life to modern techniques, derived modern techniques from his experiences and memories: the deformation of figures, the cubist geometry inherent in Jewish religious artifacts like the tallis and tefillin.

You’ve said that Chagall’s Introduction to the Jewish Theater occupies a similar place in his artistic career as Guernica does in Picasso’s.

Yes. Both were murals commissioned by social forces; Picasso’s by the Spanish exhibition in Paris, and Chagall—much earlier—by the Moscow Yiddish Theater. Chagall’s was a kind of summary of his themes and perspectives: carnivalesque Jewish figures floating above Cubist or Suprematist symbols. Picasso’s represents the tragic vision of European modernism, an Aristotelian moment of unity between space, time and action, when everything comes together. Picasso represents tragedy. Chagall represents anecdotes in the spirit of Jewish comedy.

You mention HaBima, another Moscow theater, which staged performances in Hebrew around the same time. Did it share a parallel fate? That is, was it nationalized and censored until its eventual demise?

No, luckily HaBima went on a tour in 1926 and most of those involved stayed in the West, eventually coming to Palestine, where they formed the new Israeli National Theater. Both theaters were originally part of Russian culture. HaBima was directed by Evgeny Vakhtangov, a major disciple of Stanislavsky’s, who trained his performers in precisely the kind of method acting the avant-garde Yiddish Theater was trying to outgrow. The strength of HaBima was its presentation of The Dybbuk—one of the greatest plays in Yiddish—transposed into the modern Hebrew language. Together, the theaters represented the bilingual revival of Jewish culture.

Is there some parable about the Theater’s fate—its ascent and demise? To me it’s symbolic of the death of culture in a Russia without minorities, without Jews.

The Theater died in the 1920s, when it became nationalized. It could still perform Sholem Aleichem, but was increasingly pressured to address Soviet themes. Remember: the Jews who built the Theater and other secular institutions had already abandoned religion almost overnight. The poet Itzik Fefer—who was also shot on the orders of Stalin—wrote how, in the twenties, he traveled through the Ukraine, from shtetl to shtetl, reading his poetry. Of the youth, he said, “They all read Mayakovsky and Blok, but not Izi, Arn, and me”—referring to the Yiddish poets Izi Kharik, Arn Kushnirov, and last, but not least, himself.

She loved Chagall
and wasn’t ashamed of that.
—t. carmi, “In Memory of Leah Goldberg”

In 1968, when I was in my first year at university, I had a cheap poster of a Chagall painting, Double Portrait with Wineglass, on the wall of my dormitory room. The airborne figures, a young man and woman floating above a Russian town, the woman with a sexy slit in her low-cut white dress (possibly a bridal gown), the young man in a bright red jacket with his head tipsily displaced to one side of his body and grinning like Harpo Marx, embodied for me precisely the kind of secular, whimsical, neoromantic sensibility that, at eighteen, I found so compelling. The poster, in my imagination, went right along with E. E. Cummings’s poem that began “somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond / any experience, your eyes have their silence” and Elvira Madigan, Swedish director Bo Widerberg’s movie about a doomed tightrope walker. I did not, at this stage of my life, have much or any use for the “Fiddler on the Roof” Chagall: his Praying Jew, for example, a more or less straightforward earthbound representation of the Rabbi of Vitebsk wearing his phylacteries (a painting which I later discovered Chagall long prized as his “masterpiece”), appealed to a conservative sentimentality that I associated, rightly or wrongly, with my parents’ generation and the crowds packing in to see Topol or Zero Mostel as Tevye. If I were a rich man I would have bought one of Chagall’s dreamy garlanded canvases,inspired by his trips into the French countryside, rather than, say, The Violinist, which featured an actual fiddler on the roof and which I considered a lachrymose work formed by a nostalgia-tormented shtetl-locked mind. But, of course, I knew nothing of the social context of any Chagall painting, and almost nothing of his personal history. As with so many writers and artists whom I came across in my formative reading and looking years—Kafka, Bellow, Soutine—the salient thing I knew was simply that they were Jewish.

It did not take long for me to learn that sophisticated art aficionados weren’t supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark.

In the last few years a fresh interest in Chagall’s work, partly attributable to the resurfacing of paintings long hidden in the vaults of Soviet museums, has spawned a number of blockbuster shows. The “new” work, which includes a series of outstanding murals created for the Moscow State Yiddish Chamber Theater in 1920, has led inevitably to a reassessment of the “old” work.

Chagall’s oeuvre, when seen in its entirety, seems altogether more historical, more political, harder and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe. There is, too, strikingly and unavoidably, a long Jewish story to be told through Chagall’s work. His career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, and the birth of the state of Israel, and his work directly addresses these transforming events through the prism of a Jewish consciousness. Chagall’s perceptible ambivalence about his role and status as a Jewish artist only deepens the content of the story: drawn to sacred subject matter, he remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to “narrate” both the miraculous and tragic events of Jewish history, including the Nazi Holocaust, he frequently, almost obsessively, chooses Christ as his central symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice, in full knowledge that, even when wrested from their Christian context, images of Jesus are tough for a Jewish audience to swallow. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall (without converting) found his resting place almost a century later in a Catholic cemetery in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France. Aptly, his stained-glass windows adorn both churches and synagogues. His story, then, as told through his paintings, drawings, lithographs, book illustrations, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries, sculptures, windows, and the acts of his life, repeats both the twists and turns and the pulls and tugs of so much Jewish life in the twentieth century: the serpentine vagaries of history, a nostalgic attachment to the spiritually charged but circumscribed pre-Nazi Eastern European Jewish past, and the magnetic attraction of assimilation into an uninhibited secular present.

To some, he is the most famous of the Jewish artists. To others, he is the most Jewish of famous ones. Modernists celebrate him for fusing the Yiddishe sensibility of his provincial Russian birthplace with the urban genre of Cubism and the poetic disjunctures of Surrealism. Postmodernists praise him for pointing a way out of irony. Yet for the general public, Marc Chagall remains nothing but a painter of Fiddler on the Roof-style kitsch and sentimentality.

These contradictions have long intrigued Jonathan Wilson, a writer and critic who teaches English at Tufts University. After completing his novel A Palestine Affair, which was based partly on the life of Anglo-Jewish painter David Bomberg, Wilson began thinking about some of Bomberg’s Jewish peers, such as Modigliani, Pascin and, in particular, Chagall. The result is Marc Chagall, a biography out this March. The seventh title in the Jewish Encounters series from Nextbook and Schocken, it presents the artist as a multifaceted, sexually ambivalent sophisticate who transcends the folkloristic stereotype.

When you were in college in 1968 you had a poster of Chagall’s 1917-18 painting Double Portrait with Wineglass on your dorm wall. Then you learned that the artist was not considered cool. Fast forward several decades. In the introduction to Marc Chagall, you write that the artist is “more political, harder and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe.” When did you come around to this opinion?

Two events: the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1991 and the publication in English in 2004 of Benjamin Harshav’s monumental translations of Chagall’s letters made available a trove of material, artistic and written, previously accessible only to those with keys to various Soviet basements or those who read Yiddish. Chagall’s life in the immediate post-revolutionary period in Russia was both fascinating and fraught and does not comport with stereotypical portraits of him as an airy dreamer. For example, it now seems quite likely that Chagall, while working in his capacity as a Soviet commissar, evicted a Jewish family from their home in Vitebsk in order to establish an art school in the building. On the plus side, the marvelous murals that Chagall executed for Moscow’s Yiddish theatre in 1920, hidden for decades by Soviet authorities, have once again seen the light of day and have circulated, since the end of Communism, to museums worldwide. All in all Chagall’s voluminous correspondence and autobiographical writings reveal a man trying to ride the turbulence of history in the 20th century, and aiming to confront and represent it, and not, as we might imagine, to avoid trouble and politics by taking to the air.

As you put it, Chagall was a “chameleon,” a wandering Jew who assumed different personalities in his native Yiddish and his adopted French and who “resisted a fixed identity whenever one seemed to be on the point of closing around him.” How have the “many faces” of Marc Chagall affected his image as an artist?

Chagall is claimed by the Russians as a Russian artist, by the French as a French painter, and by the Jews as a Jewish artist. At different times in his life he ran into trouble with all three groups. The Soviets thought him decadent (as did the Nazis), some conservative French critics found him too Jewish—certainly too Jewish to be illustrating La Fontaine’s fables or painting the ceiling of the Paris Opera—while more than a few Jewish critics have been disturbed by his obsession with Jesus and his multiple contributions, via stained-glass windows, to church decor. Chagall saw himself, self-effacingly, as “a little Jew from Vitebsk” but also, self-aggrandizingly, as a world-historical figure. His identity as an artist absorbed his contradictions; his studio was undoubtedly his temple and in it his relationship with his work, erotically charged (he liked to paint in the nude) allowed him to transcend both national and religious affiliations.

Chagall is the iconic Jewish artist of the 20th century. A huge chunk of his oeuvre deals with his religion, his culture, and his people. When he was first invited to make work for a Dominican church, he was so conflicted he wrote to France’s chief rabbi and Israel’s President Chaim Weizmann for advice. Of course he later went on to make work for several Christian venues, but that was hardly as controversial as his depictions of Christ, whom he painted mainly as a crucified shtetl Jew. You describe his relationship to the figure of Jesus Christ as “ultimately mysterious, overdetermined, unclassifiable, and contradictory.” You suggest that the imagery is tied into the difficulty of creating an artistic response to the enormity of the Holocaust.

Chagall—who attended cheder from the age of three or four until his bar mitzvah, after which he entirely abandoned his Jewish education—loved the stories of the Hebrew Bible, but he also held the profound belief that Jesus was a great Jewish poet and prophet who had sadly and detrimentally been excluded from Jewish history. In this view he was, perhaps, ahead of his time. The Jesus who appears in Chagall’s painting and who haunted his imagination (so much so that Chagall once paid a visit to the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the hope of getting some clarity on the matter) is indeed frequently depicted as a shtetl Jew and, by extension, as a symbol of Jewish martyrdom, but sometimes he appears, for example on some of Chagall’s ceramics, as a conventional Christ. Fascinatingly, Jesus sometimes morphs into a Chagall self-portrait, in which Chagall’s own name is substituted on the cross where we might expect to find INRI. Undoubtedly Jesus was a ragged figure swinging quite violently through Chagall’s imagination and he was already doing so well before the Holocaust. When it came to the Holocaust Chagall reached out, like no other artist of his time, to the crucified Jesus as a figure to embody the slaughter.

How do Chagall’s depictions of Jesus differ from other modernist depictions of Jesus by Jewish artists that you mention in the book?

While Louise Nevelson and Adolph Gottlieb, among others, produced one-off “Modern Christs” that could be interpreted as symbols of Jewish suffering in the time of the Holocaust, Chagall executed at least ten major Crucifixion scenes between 1941 and 1944. At any time of his life, when Chagall’s emotions were in turmoil, in love or abject misery, he was as likely (or more likely) to turn to Jesus as to King David, Moses, or Elijah in order to find an objective correlative for his feelings.

He made some of his worst art in Israel, in your estimation. Why would that be?

That’s a hard question. Chagall first visited Palestine in 1931 and made many subsequent visits. My speculation is that, while he very much wanted to feel at home in the Jewish State—in his letters to Jewish friends, he sometimes refers to the Israeli government as “our government”—he remained uninspired there. I would explain the blandness of the work that he produced on his visits as emerging from a peculiar combination of guilt and a fear of provinciality. Chagall painted like a tourist while he was in Palestine and then Israel, while his younger contemporary Reuven Rubin, who had made aliyah, painted like Chagall. Chagall was an established international figure in the art world by 1931, a position that he probably imagined would be threatened if he moved to the Middle East. It might have seemed to him like a return to the provincial world of Vitebsk. Tel Aviv, with a Jewish population considerably smaller than Vilna’s at the time, was hardly Paris. Nevertheless Chagall wanted to show how he carried Israel in his heart and so he painted the Western Wall, and Rachel’s Tomb, and a temple in Safed, but he did so, it seems to me, out of a desire to appease some imagined Jewish audience (I want to suggest his parents, but I won’t) rather than from his own strong artistic impulses. The result was paintings that are almost unrecognizable as “Chagalls.”

You write that he walks the tightrope between sentimentality and authentic feeling better than anyone except Yehuda Amichai. How so?

The “how” is tricky, you can never see how either the great artists or the great magicians perform their tricks, unless they deign, like Nabokov, to strip the stage and show you. Perhaps the explanation can only be parsed through reader or viewer response. When you read Amichai, or look at Chagall’s greatest paintings, you are transported to a place that borders the towns of Schlock and Sentimentality, you can see them, but you never cross into them. Instead, you get love in a warm climate.

Also, you relate his modernist approach to his native folkloristic culture to the writing of Gabriel García Márquez. Those are not exactly two artists whom I would link, except through Communism, sort of.

I believe that they have a great deal in common (Chagall, by the way, while a Soviet plenipotentiary, never joined the Communist party) and I might want to add Zora Neale Hurston into the pot. All three absorbed their local folk cultures into their work in ways that produced a strikingly new autonomous aesthetic. They were, and still are in Márquez’s case, all ethnographers from the inside. The realist form is clearly unsuitable to depict a culture where fable, superstition, and religion interact in wondrous ways, as it suggests an order in the community that doesn’t exist. Through Chagall, through Márquez, through Hurston, we get, if you like, the indigenous mind rather than the colonizing mind of the dominant culture. Their strength works against the merely picturesque: no more quaint old market vendors, instead, levitating figures and talking animals in a Cubist world. Chagall was undoubtedly the first magic realist.

You discuss Chagall’s youthful use of makeup—how he rouged his cheeks, wore eye shadow, painted his lips—and you look at a certain gender confusion, suggesting he may have been involved with men. Has this been ignored?

It hasn’t exactly been ignored, maybe elided. In Marc Chagall and His Times Benjamin Harshav describes his early days in Paris as “a period of frustration and confusion, fraught with sexual, artistic and religious ambivalences.” Fragments from two 1910 letters reveal that Chagall’s relationship with Viktor Mekler, whom he had first met in Vitebsk and with whom he met up again in Paris, had a powerful homoerotic element. Chagall’s autobiography reports his propensity to make up his face, which he explains, oddly, as his way of attracting local girls. Certainly, some matrons in town, especially Bella Rosenfeld’s mother (Bella was to become Chagall’s first wife) were perturbed. I don’t know that there is “more.” Chagall spent four years in Paris, from 1910 to 1914 (from the ages of 23 to 27) and we know almost nothing of his sexual life in that period. The assumption has always been that he remained faithful to his true love, Bella, who was home in Vitebsk. I do think that a closer look needs to be taken at the androgynous figures, frequently self-portraits, that populate Chagall’s paintings. The “sexual ambivalences” that Harshav alludes to are certainly on display there.

Chagall is not shy about using sexually charged imagery. You suggest it’s more disturbing and powerful even than Picasso’s.

The sexuality on display in some of Chagall’s paintings is, as my students would say, weird. He’s known of course for his lovely representations of romantic love, but when he does turn his imagination to sex the results are strange. For example, in The Dream (1927) a semi-naked woman arches back along the length of a creature with a horse’s body and a rabbit’s head. Possibly the woman is strapped down, perhaps she has been ravished already, or she is on her way to a ravishing. In The Rooster (1929) a female figure rides and embraces a rather happy-looking giant cockerel. The mythological tradition provides a precedent—we might think of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Leda and the Swan—but Chagall’s references are obscure in that regard, if not in Freudian terms. His painting The Ass and the Woman (1912) was removed from display at the Salon D’Automne because the judges considered it to be pornographic, not because of the erotic embrace that it configures between a woman and a Minotaur with whom she appears to have recently performed fellatio, but on account of a penile oil lamp-cum-opium pipe in the bottom right hand corner. Either way it’s a wild piece of art.

Then, there are his self-portraits, which you note are more plentiful than anyone except maybe Rembrandt.

My knee-jerk response is that of course it has something to do with the consummate narcissism of the artist. But I don’t think that Rembrandt was particularly enamored of himself and while those who knew Chagall rarely accused him of false modesty, it seems to me more likely that Chagall viewed the self-portrait, certainly later in his life, as a way to stave off old age, control the ravages of time and preserve his image as he liked to remember it. There is something extraordinarily touching in his last work, a lithograph titled Toward the Other Light (1985) . Here Chagall represents himself as a young painter at his easel, winged as if ready for flight. An angel reaches down, ready to carry him off. A young man in the painting, who also resembles Chagall, reaches out through the frame of the painting on the easel to offer his doppelgänger a bouquet of flowers. At the end Chagall’s art gave something, a bunch of flowers, back to the artist after all that he had given us.

View Drawings

In 1914, Marc Chagall returned to Russia from Paris on what was supposed to be a brief visit. When the First World War broke out, he found himself stranded and soon became swept up in the upheaval that followed, embracing the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and assuming the post of Art Commissar in his native Vitebsk the following year. Along with his teacher Yehuda Pen, and like-minded masters Kazimir Malevich and Lazar Lissitzky, Chagall transformed Vitebsk from a languishing shtetl into a flourishing art center.

This unexpected proximity to pioneering contemporary ideas in art also made artists of a generation of Vitebsk’s Jewish boys, including my grandfather, Chaim Livchitz, who was five years old when Chagall moved back into his family’s house across the street. Chagall’s longtime friend Viktor Mekler—also a student of Pen—brought some of my grandfather’s drawings to Chagall, who praised them and offered his encouragement. My grandfather then studied with Pen himself before leaving for the Academy of Arts in Leningrad, knowingly following Chagall’s own path from obscurity.

Chagall had always extolled children’s art—one of the distinct sources for his own dreamlike and often fanciful work—and in 1920, when a personal conflict forced him to leave Vitebsk, he moved to Moscow and taught at a Jewish boys’ colony in nearby Malakhovka.

Last month, Moscow’s Ulei gallery mounted a show of children’s drawings from the colony, which date back to the years of Chagall’s tenure and had been preserved by artist Mikhail Fedorov-Roshal. There is barely a whiff of innocence in the twenty works shown at Ulei. The colony housed children who had fled pogroms in Ukraine, and the drawings show a thoughtful engagement with religious stories and scenes of daily life. The favored materials are color pencils and watercolor, with occasional Yiddish inscriptions. The subject matter ranges from illustrations to stories by Sholom Aleichem to drawings of decorative carpet patterns, from landscapes to portraits. One bears a postscript on the back: “I drew how the Bolsheviks entered town.”

While Chagall’s role in the making of these drawings is unclear, their historical interest is transformed by association; the artist’s presence hovers in the background, a marker of an emerging tradition in Jewish modern art. My grandfather’s attachment to Chagall is similarly elusive: Forced to toe the official line during most of his artistic career in Soviet Russia, his life was framed and haunted by his childhood encounters with the artist in Vitebsk. My favorite piece of his may be the earliest one that has survived, a linoleum cut from 1928. Its irreverent tone and animated contours are a tribute to Chagall, who steered and encouraged the young as much as he drew on their insights himself.

I was reminded of this when I read about a new biography published in Germany of Frida Kahlo’s father, Guillermo, that refutes the commonly held notion that he was Jewish-Hungarian, instead identifying him as German Lutheran. The artist herself encouraged people in the misapprehension, Meir Ronnen speculates in The Jerusalem Post, because she feared her friends and lovers, many of whom were Communists and anti-Nazis, would look askance at her German heritage.

The revelation, if true, throws an awkward shadow on the multiplicity of efforts to tease out the Jewish identity of the multiply hyphenated artist, who famously got a kick out of asking Henry Ford if he was Jewish. In the case of a show at New York’s Jewish Museum a few years ago, this included exhibiting her 1936 painting “My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (Family Tree),” along with a book from her library on the torture of Mexican Jews during the Inquisition that she may have drawn on for imagery of her own suffering. Latins, lesbians, and now Lutherans can still claim Frida as one of their own. Is it over for us?

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In my world the process of defining Jewish art, or what is Jewish in art, is both parlor game and intellectual exercise. Either way, clearly it reveals as much about who is doing the assessing as it does about the figures we are claiming for our team. One might imagine that Marc Chagall, of all people, had already been taken care of in this department, but in Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World, Yale professor Benjamin Harshav parses a mind-boggling array of Hebrew, Yiddish, and religious references, inferences, allusions, and illusions in the master’s work and life. He suggests, for example, that critics too easily accepted the version of the threadbare childhood Chagall put forth in the autobiography he published in the Soviet Union, describing his father’s hard work lifting heavy herring barrels. Harshav contends the father supervised a wholesale herring cellar, a misunderstanding made possible by the word meshores, which means servant in Hebrew but store manager in Yiddish. Harshav’s argument linking the multiplicity of linguistic roots in Yiddish to Chagall’s supposed postmodernism didn’t convince me, but the range of information and illustrations in his beautifully produced book succeeds in presenting Chagall as a more complex and edgy artist than many people might think.

Wallace Berman, Untitled (A7-Mushroom, D4-Cross), 1966.

Still Chagall will never satisfy that craving for cool Jews, whether Lenny Kravitz or gangsters. But Wallace Berman, an artist of the Beat generation, is the subject of a traveling retrospective that is now in Wichita and arrives at the Grey Art Gallery in New York this fall. A child of Russian Jewish émigrés, Berman hung with Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn, and Dean Stockwell (all artists in those days), and had a bit part in Easy Rider. He was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. He was so cool, the catalogue notes, he was one of the first men of his generation to wear long hair—and he wore an earring back in early 1970s.

The Jewish element in Berman’s art is quite obvious. The catalogue teems with Hebrew letters—in Semina, the avant-garde journal he produced, as well as in collages, drawings, prints, in his “free-flow bardic utterance,” and painted on rocks, which he left to erode in a gesture that might be described as Andy Goldsworthy meets Lawrence Weiner. The aleph was his personal signet—in a famous 1964 photo of Berman by Hopper, you can see the giant letter on his motorcycle helmet. In his catalogue essay “Surrealism Meets Kabbalah,” Stephen Fredman traces this iconography to the influence of poet Robert Duncan, who learned about Kabbalah in his parents’ Theosophy meetings, and Gershom Scholem, required reading in Berman’s Beat circle. Also, Fredman notes, Berman grew up seeing Yiddish letters in the newspapers and shop windows of the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. To “invoke that world after the Holocaust,” writes Fredman, “is to draw attention to the death of the Hebrew letter, not only because the Yiddish speakers of Los Angeles were dying out but also because the extermination of Jewish culture in Europe had incinerated the letters, both written and spoken, and rendered them ghostly….the letters draw attention to suffering and disappearance, while at the same time invoking a promise of redemption.”

Ready to draft Berman? Not so fast! Not according to Matthew Baigell, whose recently published American Artists, Jewish Images charts iconography in the work of 14 figures ranging from Max Weber to R. B. Kitaj, not counting Berman, who gets only two pages at the end of the Ben Shahn chapter. Baigell (who explains that he included Berman in response to calls for some “hipster culture” in the book) is unimpressed: “Kabbalah is nothing to play around with unless that is all one wants to do with it.” Take that, Skirball Cultural Center! Take that, Jewish Museum!

Which brings us to two current shows devoted to the brilliant and influential sculptor Eva Hesse, at the Jewish Museum and the Drawing Center. In contrast to Berman (and the other artists in Baigell’s book), Hesse did not employ identifiably Jewish iconography. She was an abstractionist. Her sculptures, at once visceral and poignant, unite Surrealism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, eroticism, and a bunch of other isms in nontraditional materials like fiberglass, latex, and rope. They pushed the boundary of what sculpture is and, as the reviews make clear, had a vast impact on what followed.

Ruth and Wilhelm Hesse, Eva Hesse Tagebuch (Diary) 1, January 11, 1936.

Hesse is one of the few artists whose work has been featured at the Jewish Museum in both the 1960s, its avant-garde heyday, and in its present incarnation, which focuses more specifically on Jewish history and culture. Many people, like myself, were disappointed to have missed the groundbreaking retrospective that started at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a few years ago and never made it to the Whitney like it was supposed to. So, at the opening, we were thrilled to see Hesse’s sculptures en masse for the first time, elegantly installed in airy first-floor galleries by co-curators Elisabeth Sussman and Fred Wasserman.

Meanwhile, around the bend, crowds overran a room devoted to the incredible trove of documentary material amassed and preserved by a family that had been uprooted so many times. These include the Tagebücher, or diaries, that Wilhelm Hesse kept for Eva and her sister, Helen (who stood nearby), recording their early childhood in an observant family in Hamburg, where Eva was born in 1936. Collages of family photographs, newspaper clippings, Hebrew prayers, anti-Hitler cartoons, and other ephemera, the Tagebücher, which have never before been exhibited in public, are mesmerizing personal, social, and historical documents. They provide the exhibition with an intimate and appropriate Jewish angle—one that even the curators did not suspect when they started out, said Wasserman, whose moving catalogue essay fills in the details that the diaries neglect. The sisters left on a kindertransport to Holland in late 1938. Reunited with their parents three months later, they emigrated to London and then New York, where they grew up in the German Jewish community of Washington Heights. In 1948, their mother, a manic depressive, committed suicide.

In the gallery Wasserman pointed out some of the other items on view: an article on Hesse in Seventeen, where she had worked as an intern, and one in the Forverts inspired by that one, titled “At Three Years Old, a Refugee, at Eight, Motherless, and at Eighteen, a Painter” (and full of errors, Wasserman notes); her report that she was using the restitution money from her grandparents’ death in the camps to pursue her artistic career; and her diaries from her 1965 trip to Hamburg, where she tried to visit her childhood home and was rebuffed: “Went to see Isestrasse—cried.” Finally there are the documents of her burgeoning success, including her first big solo show, at New York’s Fischbach’s Gallery in 1968, two years before her death of a brain tumor.

How should we link Hesse’s biography to her artistic practice? Is it true, as Drawing Center’s Catherine de Zegher suggests, that the cords she brought to the stark vocabulary of Minimalism reflect on some level her experience of the loss of her mother? Given the evidence in the Jewish Museum, can we trace her collecting impulse to her German Jewish roots? Intriguing and legitimate questions.

The questions we have to ask about Kahlo are intriguing in different ways: What might have been her motives for implying that she was on our team? How complicit were we in going along with the story, and what does that say about us? If she was indeed part German, on the other hand, then it follows that soon enough someone will be showing her work at Goethe House and parsing her work for clues as to how it reflects a latent German sensibility. Frida Kahlo: Crypto-Lutheran?