Using the voice of her childhood self, Bashke, Bella places her experiences at the center of her radiant narrative, and her portrait of her well-to-do urban family, living among and employing gentiles, successful in business, and religiously active, contrasts with contemporaneous depictions of the indigent Jewish life of the East European shtetl. Her parents, communally active and philanthropic, often invited the poor to their Shabbat table and Passover Seders, and they made a point to seek out and invite Jewish soldiers who may have found themselves far from home in Vitebsk.
In the Chanukah chapter, which perfectly captures the essence and beauty of the book, Bella writes of her mother summoning all the children, who are warming themselves around the stove on a winter’s day, to come light the menorah with their father, who awaits them near a small window in the darkness. When her father’s shadow bends, the dark silver of the glimmering Chanukah menorah may be seen “like a sleepy moon that reveals itself.” The menorah is small, but there are beautiful etchings carved into it, including two lions with fiery heads and open mouths in a garden of paradise, and the Tablets of the Law which, though blank, “give forth a light as though they were packed full of sacred wisdom inside.” Under the lions is a little bridge, divided into eight goblets awaiting a flame.
Bella’s father recites the blessing and, this being the first night of Chanukah, he lights only one light, which “is so little it could be put out with one whiff” and “he does not even touch the other goblets; all seven of them stand as though superfluous, empty and cold.” As Bella sits and watches the single light, which faints, flickers, trembles, and threatens to be extinguished at any moment, she wonders: “Why are mother’s Sabbath candles tall and large? And why does father bless such a tiny Chanukah light?”
Bella Rosenfeld Chagall (1895-1944) was born and raised in Vitebsk, White Russia, the youngest of eight children of Shmuel Noah and Alta Rosenfeld, well-to-do merchants who owned and ran a successful jewelry business. Though as members of the chassidic community, they were strictly Orthodox in their observance, they made certain a quality secular education and opportunities would be available to their children. Bella studied Russian at a high school and graduated from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Moscow (1914), writing her thesis on Dostoyevsky and “the liberation of the Russian peasants.” During and after her studies, she was active in the theater while also contributing articles to the Moscow newspaper Utro Rossii.
Bella met Moishe (Marc) Chagall while visiting friends in St. Petersburg in 1909 and they were soon engaged, much to the consternation of her family, who were unhappy about their daughter’s marriage to her “social inferior.” The couple finally married six years later and their only child, Ida, was born a year after that. In 1922 Marc moved his family to France, but they fled to the United States following the outbreak of World War II, arriving in New York in 1941, where Bella died in 1944 from a viral infection.
