Горящие огни

by Bella Chagall, Marc Chagall (illustrator), Белла Шагал

Белла Шагал была не только женой и великой любовью художника, но и его музой, героиней множества его картин. Книга "Горящие огни" продиктована желанием писательницы запечатлеть и тем самым спасти от забвения быт и культуру родных мест. В иллюстрациях к книге Марк Шагал отображает главные ее эпизоды, создает портреты, выстраивает собственное графическое повествование.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Memoir, Jewish, Biography, Biography Memoir, Russia

351 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Bella Rosenfeld Chagall was a Jewish Belarusian writer and the first wife of painter Marc Chagall. She was the subject of many of Chagall's paintings including Bella with White Collar in 1917.

Reviews

[Natasha Matsiusheuskaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

ўся кніжка як карціна, ў цёплых і пяшчотных танах. у нейкім сэнсе энцыклапедыя габрэйскага жыцця - такога блізкага, і ўсё ж далёкага - з жыццём маіх бабуль і дзядуль нібы два паралельныя сусветы. я, пэўна, чакала іншага ад кнігі, але тое, што тут знайшла, падаецца нават лепшым - сарамлівае і ціхае святло дзяцінства, некалькі аскепачкаў першага кахання, палёт над горадам якога ўжо няма.

[Darya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Такая рамантычная, такая настальгічная, такая шчырая кніга! Чытала і злавалася на сябе за тое, што не ведала раней пра талент Бэлы Шагал.

Адчуванне падчас кнігі такое, нібы цябе 7-гадовага ўзялі за руку і гасцінна правялі праз усе габрэйскія святы, усім начаставалі і ўсё-ўсё патлумачылі.

Вельмі!

[Eyshe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bella Chagall is a master of nostalgia. Reading this book signaled an emotional return, not only for myself and with a Jewish life I've never known, but for Chagall's childhood Vitebsk. This book is told through the eyes of Chagall as a young girl, Basha, where her life is organized around Jewish traditional life in the Russian Empire. Each portion of the story represents another ceremonial candle, a burning light (or brenendike likht in Yiddish), where Basha retells the joys and sweetness of her childhood life before its subsequent destruction. It wasn't until later in life that Chagall decided to write in Yiddish, and as she describes in the book, Yiddish awakens in her the love of her mother, of her family, of a life she once belonged to, left, shunned, and eventually longed for once again.

It is often difficult to find a book that captures the wealth and beauty of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before and outside of the unspeakable tragedies of the khurbn, and one that does so from such gentle and earnest narration like Burning Lights. Apart from a simple retelling of childhood and tradition, Chagall tackles also the unique experience of being a Jewish girl, and how Jewish Vitebskian life changes so much between its gendered expressions. This book is a must-read for anyone who longs too to understand what Jewish life was and could've been.

[Igor Raikhelgauz]

Bella Chagall is not "a great woman behind a great man". She is a great woman in and of herself. And we are all just lucky that two great people like Bella and Mark Chagall happened to marry each other. Because of Bella we have more of Mark's incredible paintings. And because of Mark we have Bella's books. For she says it was he who first inspired her to write. As she puts it:" I recall that you, my faithful friend, have often in affection begged me to tell you about my life in the time before you know me. So I am writing for you." She writes about the world that was dear to both of them. A world they both used to belong to and knew was no longer there: the world of a Jewish shtetl. In such loving detail draws Bella before our eyes the life pictures of Hassidic Jews of Eastern Europe. Their holidays and weddings, their humour and tears, their prayers and Torah learning. “Unorthodox" could be the modern title of Bella Chagall’s life story. But in Burning Lights we do not find a glimpse of regret or resentment of a victim of religious brainwash. Instead, she writes of the Vitebsk of her childhood as of a Paradise lost.
A beautiful, beautiful book. Illustrations by Mark are of course more than illustrations. They
are part of the narrative. Overall, this book is a genuine product of true love.

[Rvn570 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book for those seeking to learn more about everyday life in the pale of settlement before WWI. The reader is introduced through the eyes the youngest doughter, Bachenka (Bella) to the daily life of the Rosenfeld family, a family from the upper middle-class of the (now) Belarussian town of Vitebsk. Like the majority of the population of Vitebsk, the Rosenfelds are an observant Hasidic family. Chagall tries to invite the reader to participate in the holidays by the description of her experiences of the preparations and the holidays themselves. The book reminded me in some ways of Davitas Harp of Chaim Potok, the perspective being that from a young girl living orthodox life, although in a different time and social context.

Both books transmit something of their love for their tradition, but Burning Lights does not seem to want to ask questions about meaning or sense of the different elements of daily life; whereas Potok more successfully tries to cover this as well. He seems to invite the reader to understand some of his appreciation, whereas Chagall mostly seems to have wanted to just give a daily life picture of a girl growing up in a Hasidic family, introducing mostly questions about life itself and the social context of a big household with staff, family and a family business. (the family owns a juwellery store) In a way it might make the book more accessible to readers today, as the questions of the age of the main character (appr. 11 years old) might apply today for some. In the same time, when seeking a more tradition-based book, it might not offer you much new insights.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bella Chagall grew up in Vitebsk, as did her husband Mark Chagall, before World War I. This book is her memoir of childhood (illustrated by her husband). The best chapters are the those that describe holidays, Sabbath practices, the mikvah. The ones about her rivalries with her brothers can be tiresome. The child Bella's attitude toward her family's servants (yes, they had a cook and a couple of others) is offensive. She writes well and it paints an in-depth picture of life in a middle class Jewish home in Russia's Pale of Settlement in the later 19th C.

[Mich · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful memoir by Bella Chagall as a very young girl growing up in Vitebsk of her family and the Jewish holidays as experienced through her eyes. Language is beautiful and the translators of this Yiddish book did a great job. Also delightful are Marc Chagall’s illustrations.

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

sehr schöner, impressionistischer schreibstil, kein zusammenhängender plot, gerade daher perfekt für alltagseskapismus ♡

[Beatrice]

An impressionistic, modernist, stream-of-consciousness memoir by Bella Chagall, author, translator, and wife of Marc Chagall the artist. It's times like these when I wish I had a firmer grasp on the prevailing theories of, say, the shtetl-nostalgia genre, early modernist fiction, or, like, Lukács. The pshat, if you will, is a gorgeously written, luxuriantly sensual child's-eye view of the Jewish year through the eyes of a young girl living in a wealthy Jewish household in Belarus. The holidays form the main structure for the story, passing from winter to winter through the Jewish year, always through the careful reconstruction of a young child's perspective. The "burning lights" of the title are literal and metaphorical -- the women's work of lighting the candles for the yomim tovim figures centrally, but it informs the whole orientation of the memoir, where these moments of familial and religious togetherness are portrayed as fundamentally bright and life-giving. It's really something to compare to eg Yezierska, as in Bread Givers, where Jewishness and Judaism are portrayed with profound ambivalence, even resentment.

Chagall is just as much concerned with the woman's (and the girl's) experience of this community as Yezierska, but with a more loving eye, though it too has its moments of critique. There's a profoundly beautiful scene near the beginning of Bella's and her mother's visit to the women's bathhouse. It is a site of physical pleasure and pain for Bella, and for her mother, watched uncomprehendingly through the little girl's eyes, but not the reader's, a space of safety and community, and also the site of the mikveh. Bella watches in fright as it almost devours her mother three times before she emerges, content -- though Bella does not feel so calm and restored. At the other end of the memoir, the closing scene is that of a wedding that Bella watches, hidden, from the sidelines, fearful of that profound rupture from the women's space of the birth family. There is plenty of ambivalence here, though it is itself subtle and hidden. The old trope of the baleboste zisike, the spiritual heart of the home, is both upheld and complicated -- more so, I think, than Yezierska truly managed, despite her greater and more direct efforts.

It is intensely dedicated to maintaining the authorial conceit, and Chagall does a truly remarkable job evoking childhood, in all its wonder and powerlessness and inevitable end. This has to be one of the strongest and best evocations of a child's voice and point of view that I have read. At the same time, although she’s telling a very traditional story, she’s giving it through a really modernist aesthetic experience — making things surprising, using all the senses. Perhaps it's an influence of the Parisian milieu in which she lived during the writing.

It has two moments of surprising casual racism, both offhand remarks directed towards made-up, absent figures of fantasy -- and that is two more mentions of non-Jews and non-WASPs that Yezierska included in Bread Givers, set in New York City only a decade or so after the events of Burning Lights. It's interesting for me to think about what Yezierska's unrealistic capsule world was trying to achieve, whereas Chagall's subtly troubled shtetl-nostalgia novel manages to be more cosmopolitan, even if in unfortunate ways. It's the difference, perhaps, between the empires of Russia and of America, and the different ways in which Jews might try, or be unable to even begin to try, to assimilate.

[Robert Sternberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very disappointed in this book for many reasons. While I think that the writing itself is good from a literary perspective and while I am sure the author has offered an accurate portrait of life in her childhood family, I did not find much in this book to be uplifting, or as some reviewers said "charming". The way Bella's brothers treat her, the way the family treats those who are of a lower socioeconomic class than them and the paternalistic chauvinism exhibited towards the women, especially during the holiday of Sukkot, was very bothersome to me. I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish Eastern European refugee family myself and I did not observe any of these troubling things-- not in my family nor in the families of my friends, the majority of whom were Holocaust survivor families from Poland, Lithuania and Hungary. Moreover, there were inaccuracies and lapses in this book that cannot be explained. I do not understand why there was no chapter on the holiday of Shevuot, a major Jewish holy day rich with traditions that in a family like Bella's had to have been practiced and celebrated. There was also an error in the order of things that occurred during the Passover seder. The meal is served BEFORE Elijah the Prophet is invited to the table-- not afterwards. The table manners Bella describes were rather distasteful to me, as was the drunken orgy she describes on Simkhat Torah. Lastly, I do not think that Bella or the cook in her home, Khava, knew very much about cooking. Her description of people pulling bones out of gefilte fish is unthinkable. In our home, when gefilte fish was made-- starting with live, fresh fish that were swimming in the bathtub-- my grandmother took special care and there were NEVER, EVER bones in the fish balls. Bella's description of preparing sauerkraut and sour pickles was also missing the primary ingredient-- coarse rock salt, which is what kosher salt is. These vegetables were marinated in a salt brine and without vinegar. Bella's description of these dishes makes it sound as if they were marinated in nothing but water and spices and, in the case of the cucumbers, dill. The foods Bella describes sound as disgustingly tasteless as her family's table manners. The one interesting note to me was the preparation of the Yom Kippur candles-- a practice I had never before heard of. But in summary, I do not recommend this memoir to anyone looking to find an accurate portrayal of life among Orthodox Jews in Pre-WWII Eastern Europe. If the reader knows little or nothing about this subject, this memoir offers a rather distorted viewpoint.

[James Ritchie]

I have not yet read this book, I am interested in it now because my research on the famous nineteenth century American artist Eastman Johnson revealed that Chagall studied with EJ in Paris and was one of his lovers. The woman using the name Bella Rosenberg is actually his eldest granddaughter Gwendolyn Olga Lorillard Conkling, born c.1893. She was an incredible artist, who worked with her grandfather from childhood learning to paint. She had many artistic identities usually using a male identity to market her work. Some of these men are now very well known artists. A couple were women. She partnered with Norman Rockwell (as did her grandfather) on many occasions. They collaborated on a fraud known as Grandma Moses which was successful beyond their wildest dreams. She faked her death (as Bella) in the early 1940's, but in 1945 appeared in artistic circles as the blond Russian emigre photographer Nina Leen. She had a long successful career associated with life magazine. One of her most famous photographs show a Victorian farmhouse kitchen replete with 4 large (Eastman Johnson) charcoal drawings of his 4 grandparents. It was selected by Carl Sagan in the 1980's to be launched into space in a time capsule as a quintessential view of American life. Gwen had a long career in commercial art/illustration, living into the 1990's. Her wedding to fashion photographer Sergei Balkoff( this may also be an alias) is featured in Life magazine spread as a young couple from Kansas City. Everybody has fake names in the feature. All her relatives play the required parts, minister, florist, wedding cake baker, jeweler. Including her cousin Charles May aka Charles Beach. His life partner, artist Joseph C. Leyendecker plays the jeweler. Although it is supposed to be taking place in 1947, I think it really takes place about 1944. Since she was not Jewish the inconsistencies readers report make sense to me.

[Antje · Rating 2 out of 5]

Von diesem Buch hatte ich mir mehr versprochen. Gewiss, über die religiösen Riten in der russisch-jüdischen Familie Bella Chagalls erfuhr ich einiges Wissenswertes. Jedoch wurde ich bis zum Schluss nie mit der blumigen Erzählweise der Autorin warm. Sie schildert leider ausschließlich den Ablauf der einzelnen Feiertage und das aus der Sicht eines Kindes. Mir fehlte dadurch gänzlich der Bezug zum Alltäglichen. Ich hätte vielmehr Geschichten aus den Kaufmannsladen der Eltern gelesen oder über die Schulzeit Bellas oder das gemeinsame Spiel mit Gleichaltrigen.
So blieben sie, ihre Eltern und Brüder letztlich Randfiguren in einem strengen religiösen Protokoll. Allein die Köchin und hier und da Bellas Mutter scheint Leben und Seele eingehaucht wurden zu sein. So blieb mir die Autorin bis zum Ende fremd und ich war froh, als ich auf der letzten Seite angelangt war. Selbst die Zeichnungen Marc Chagalls wussten mich nicht zu überzeugen.

[Lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

не знаю, какой на самом деле была Белла Шагалл, но авторский голос этого мемуара раздражал так, что я едва дочитала. возможно, это из-за двойного перевода - на русский книга переведена с французского перевода с идиш. раздражали и полные неточностей, неуместных архаизмов и прямых ошибок сноски, даром что издательство "Текст". что было интересно, так это детали быта и материальной культуры хасидской семьи в 20 веке - правда, конечно, никакой исторической и антропологиической точности от автора, пытающегося зафиксировать свой взгляд на мир в детстве, ждать не приходится, хотя встречаются и гороаздо более фактографически ценные воспоминания. ну и, наконец, иллюстрации Марка Шагалла - приятные, но типичные для него, практически клише. в общем, книга совершенно не вдохновила.

[Susan Rothenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful portrait of Jewish and holiday observances in Russia told through a young girl's eyes. Bella Chagall does a lovely job of sharing her memories and her husband, Marc Chagall does a lovely job of providing some drawings. Also interesting is the different customs from that time and place - putting wax on threads - one for each of deceased loved ones - and making it into a candle to burn in their memory on Yom Kippur.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book charming. Bella Chagall wrote it from Paris in 1939 describing her life in Vitebsk, Russia in the early 20th century. She married Marc Chagall and moved to Paris in 1915. Ends up my grandfather lived in the same town and moved to the USA in 1912, so her descriptions of the town would have been very similar to what he experienced. It is written from the point of view of her as a young child. Marc Chagall's illustrations woven throughout the book enhance the story even more.

[Marina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must for Vitebsk lovers or anyone with a connection to the city. If you’re not familiar with the Jewish holidays, consider reading each section around the time the holiday is celebrated. I found this helpful, even if I got to some parts 1-2 weeks late.
The strict gender separation is jarring and there’s classism too. The latter isn’t really examined, you get Bella’s memories “as is”. However this makes them more vivid.
(Still reading)

[Robin K · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a lot that is lovely about this memoir by Bella Chagall, illustrated by her husband Marc. The flow of Jewish life in her childhood Russia was interesting. Also, certain lines were so gorgeous they were begging to be read aloud. Nevertheless, I found the book more anthropological than anything else, which made the read more of a chore than engaging.

[Jay Resnick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing collection of vignettes about her childhood in a well off Jewish family in Vitebsk, where she was born in 1895. Among the best is her description of going to the baths by sleigh with her mother.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up at a booksale and it's such a delightful portrait of the Jewish year in Bella Chagall's childhood home. I read it almost literally in one day (on a longish train ride). I don't have much to say about it but it was really nice to hear.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute, sweet - as though written by a child who doesn't fully understand what's happening around her: life as an Eastern European jew at the very beginning of the 20th century.

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written, painstakingly observed remembrance of the tiny village of Vitebsk by Bella Chagall, the artist's first wife, with line drawings by Chagall. Centers around Jewish holidays.

[Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very lyrical description of Bella Chagall's childhood view of growing up as a Russian Jew. Illustrated by her husband, Marc Chagall.