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THE JEWISH NEWS

Page Ten

Friday, Sepfambor 20, 1946

Marc Chagall

A Story of The Jews of Russia

Pioneer of Modern Art

Czarism's Downfall Told
In Shneour's New Book

JEWS IN the Russian "pale of settlement", under the Czars,
were known to possess giants and heroes. There were many of our
men who, in spite of their life of poverty, were powerful and had
the strength of superhumans.

NEW YORK:

THE MUSEUM
of Modern At on West 53rd Street recently

Zalman Shneour, in his latest
novel, "Song of the Dnieper,"
which recently 'was published- in
a very excellent translation from
the Yiddish by the eminent Lon-
don author, Joseph Leftwich, in-.
troduces us to such men. -It was
published by Roy Publishers, 25
W.145th St., New York 19.
Noah Pandre is the hero. He is
the central figure in a theme that
is enacted in the village of Shklov
on the banks of the Dnieper. Tall,
strong, handsome, he was a man
who had his way with women.
He later had his way with horses,
when he abandoned the role of
butcher to become a coachman.

opened the most comprehensive exhibition of
Marc Chagall's work ever held on this continent,
covering his pictorial work--paintings and etch-
ings— from 1908 to the present day. Not so long
ago the merits and alleged faults of his art were
hotly discussed among critics and laymen, some
of whom praised him as a sort of Messiah of
Modern Art who had saved mankind from the
peril of unimaginative realism, while others re-
buked him sharply because of his "contempt" for
t1,at i tioni.1 anatomy, perspective, and logic. The
light W ;IS finally decided in his favor, and at pres-
ent Chagall is being hailed as a prince in the
realm of modern art and as the most outstanding
Jewish paint( r of our era.

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Born near Vitebsk. White Russia, in 1887, he
reine•nib•rs the pigrorns that harassed his fellow-
.1,ws in Tsarist Russia; he also recalls that when
he went to St. Petersburg, in order to study the
11, lived there in constant fear of the police,
since tlw influx of Jews into the capital vas for-
bidden. Since those days he has been an ardent
foe of totalitaruini-m.

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o n the other hand, Chagall, who stemmed
from ;1 Hasidic family, 'vas deeply impressed by
th, intrinsic beauty of orthodox Jewish life, es-
pecially by the dignity and solemnity of the re-
ligious rites and customs. Though he spent the
butte r part of his life far away from his native
place—in Germany. Fiance and. since June, 1941,
in America—most of his paintings are crowded
with the memories of his youth, the shtaedtel
(small town) with its shule
(synagogue) and
bearded Jews in long gabardines, the women go-
ing to and from the market, the children stroll-
ing to the •heder (religious school). He exclaimed
however, some years ago: "I owe all that I have
achieved to Paris, to France, whose nature, people,
the very air, are the true school of my life and
art..'

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Story of Struggles

NOAH PANDRE'S story is the
story of the Jews/of Russia. It is
ZALMAN SHNEOUR
the story of struggles for a liveli-
hood,- the fight for justice, the weight loads out of the barns on to
carts and from your cal is into
battle to get the police - to treat your
the barns as if they were balls of
the Jews right, the great effort to wool. One slap across the haunches
was enough to quieten the wildest
assure peace for Israel.
horse that wouldn't go into the shafts.
In this struggle, Noah lands in
They called you ignoramuses. You
jail on a false charge just before sat meekly and submissively by the
western wall of the synagogue. next
his child was born.
to the door. You waited for years be-
fore they called you up to the Law,
When he gets out of jail, he is a
gift flung down at you from the
a central figure in a pogrom.
Reading Desk like a
well-gnawed
bone.
The elders, and voun.g newly-
A village of oppressed men and weds living
--Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
in comfort In the homes
women is painted for us in the of their parents-in-law looked down
The Praying Jew (The Rabbi of Vitebsk)
you, while the youngsters who had
drab colors of a Russian-made on
only just set up house spoke on equal
by Marc Chagall
ghetto which was one of the dis- terms with even the old men among
you—with octogenarians! They did not
many. In the first place because the painter is graceful acts of Czardom that led understand that we must not eat the
good, sweet apples and despise the
Jewish, in the second place because the Nazi to the downfall of Czarism.
black roots of the apple tree: that we
critics could not possibly appreciate his sense of
And as has been common with must
not drink clear water, and hold
humor, his humanity, his depth. More than once these men of Shklov and thou- in contempt the walls of the well.
If a fire broke out in the town,
those of his paintings that had been confiscated sands of similar villages, the men
you were the first to rush to the

and women who could escape
later landed in America.

Chagall•s anti-fascism does not
reveal itself in satirical cartoonz
like those made by William Gro-
per or Arthur Szyk.

That's the end of Mr. and Mrs.
Noah Pandre in Shneour's story.
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In that famous painting, My
Village, the poverty-stricken cot-
tage s and barns of wood are lifted
from reality by joyfully bright
colors, so to speak, the tree seems
to penetrate the sky with its
fant.istica.11y shaped clouds, and
the Jew who drives a goat be-
fore him appears to be floating
in the air. If Chagall paints a
beggar in snow, he puts a fiddle
in his hands, and if he sets a
mournful rant-7i on the canvas, he
adds to this symbol of sorrow an
innocent white cow. a symbol of
• —Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
the pc ce of the Universe. Or
The Wedd ing. oil painting, Paris, 1910 by Marc Chagall
think of his h ■ rge canvas entitled
Revolution. One side of the pic-
by the Nazis loomed conspicuously in their ex-
ture is •riimmed with peasants at war, the other
hibitions of what they termed contemptuously,
side with peasants at peace: in the center a moody
Entartete
Kunst (Degenerate Art).
rabbi is sitting. a samovar is boiling in the snow,
a man is standing upside down on one hand so
When representatives of the Kunsthalle at
he can hoid up a flag with his feet—does all that
Basle, Switzerland, asked the Nazis to lend them
make sense? Not to a Philistine, perhaps.
some of his paintings, the latter were willing to
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oblige, provided each item carried a caption to
Chagall's work has gained recognition all ' this effect: "This specimen of Entartete Kunst for
which the poor misled German people had to pay
ovei the world, but it was verboten in Nazi Ger-
10,000 marks, is not even worth
10 marks." The Swiss laughed at
this nonsense, and enjoyed the op-
portunity of seeing Chagall's
masterpieces.

The artist is a quiet, soft - spoken
with a halo of gray and

man

kind, sparkling eyes. Though he
could have gone back to liberated
Paris, he preferred to continue

working in the U. S.

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In addition to canvases he did
work in New York for the Metro-

Victims of Murderers
WHERE are these strong men

in Israel now?

We know the finale.
They are dead—victims of mur-
derers whose terroristic acts were
not halted by a civilization that
was callous to their sufferings.

But the tribute that is paid to
their memory by Zalman Shneour
will live for a long time as one

of the great epics of history and
literature.

It is the brief essay "In Place
of a Preface" appearing at the
beginning of "Song of the
Dnieper." Mr. "Shneour wrote it
under the title "Where Are You?"
Here it is:

Where are you now. you Jews like
oaks, with your broad-capped jack
boots and squashed, burnt noses like
those of lions? You coachmen. butch-
ers, watercarriers, plasterers, hewers
of wood . . .
Your voices boomed resonant as if
out of an empty barrel, the strength
of life played in your childlike eyes.
You were always redolent of forests,
cart-grease, corn-flour. fresh hides.
Even_ on the Siabbath eve. after you
had come from the baths and had
crept into your fine ,cloth gaberdines
and surtouts—grown tight since your
wed d ng-day—you gave off a smell
of birch and bark and the plenty of
a full week. You held your prayer-
books gingerly as if they were fluffy
yellow chicks. held them with the
tenderness and compassion of strong
men, and piously- swayed over them.
And wit h
h the same calloused and
scarred fists, you tossed five-hundred-

rescue. If there was an epidemic In
town, you came stamping along hi
your heavy jack boots to help the
victims. Modestly and quietly, like
women, you tended the helpless with-
out any thought for yourselves.
If drunken peasants started a fight
on market day, you ran to help the
poor weak shopkeepers, you defended
the widows who sell ginger-bread and
vegetables on their stalls . . and
then you went to jail because you had
protected others.
You were the reservoir of the
healthy blood and the earthly pas-
sions of the people of Israel. But for
the red sap in your powerful limbs,
but for the ancient fire in your veins.
Jewish life would consist of nothing
but weakiirkgs, supercilious noses,
crooked heads, men of straw, goody-
goodies with the guts taken out of
them, neurasthenics.
You preserved for us the sparks of
love and of song; the joy of labor
was kept latent in your bodies. The
yearning for the fields and the wood*
comes from your earthy cearseness,
from the tales you told. The wilt to
break down the last wails of the
ghetto also comes from you. From
your midst the new wave of world
liberation burst and spread among the
younger generations.
From your coarse-colored shirts and
mufflers, from the sunny, naixe de-
signs on the dresses of your high-
breasted wives and sisters, we have
retained till the present day the
(lest colorings on the palettes and
brushes of a new generation of Jewish
painters.
Throu.ch entire generations of dis-
heartened shopkeepers and disgruntled
publicans. your strength. like salt, pee-
served our sickened Je•ishness. And
your healthy humor conserved. like
sugar, the fruits of Jewish life. ‘Vith-
out your stubborn devotion, without
your peasant-like obstinacy, we should
have rotted utterly.
The smallest number of renegades,
the least injurious of apostates. were
those that tell away from you, like
rust from hot forged iron. Not like the
gentler classes, the scholars. the men
of wealth, the elite. When they be-
gan to rot, they went rotten down
to the deepest root.
But enough of singing ybu! I want
to tell of you.

He Knows the Truth About Zion

politan Opera. When Stravinsky's
"The Firebird" was performed, it
was the aged refugee artist, and
not the dancers that stole the
show. Wrote the New York Times
about the ssenery and costumes
designed by Chagall:

"They are overwhelming, and
in front of them the conventional
human being looks insignificant
and the traditional danse d'ecole

faintly foolish. He creates a naive
and irresponsible world without
'gravity or function, in which the
subconscious reigns with such un-
questioning authority as to
achieve an appearance of sweet
reasonableness. In such a world
only creatures of a similar mold
can move without being rank in-
truders .. . "

—Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago

Jacob's Dream, Etching by Marc Chagall
from "The Bible", (1929-39)

REV. L. S. BENNEY BENSON, chairman of the Brooklyn
Regional Action Committee of The Protestant, just back from a
flying trip to Palestine, posed for this picture behind barbed wire,
What the critic wrote about saying that: "Palestine is a huge concentration camp for the Jewish
these designs can be applied, in people instead of being their National Homeland. This picture is
more than one sense, to the entire the best illustration of any comment I care to make of my impres-
life-work of Marc Chagalll
sions of Palestine."

