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CHAGALL'S FIDDLERS AND STALIN'S PURGES

"Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theatre" recently closed at New York's Jewish Museum, and will open at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum on April 23rd. In these waning days of Passover, Daniel Arizona considers the Russian master of fantastical shtetl life:

The posters around New York featured of one of Marc Chagall’s smiling fiddlers, green-faced with a swirling beard, treading over shtetl rooftops like some kind of Yiddish Godzilla. Keen to see some Chagall murals and expand my knowledge of Yiddish culture past the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Michael Chabon (and way too many Borscht Belt comedians), I was game to visit the show at the Jewish Museum, one of the northern-most stops on Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile (keep going and you'll reach El Museo Del Barrio on 104th Street, now closed for renovations).

What I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer scope of artistic creation that was packed into this undersold exhibit.

I had to pass through heavy security to enter the museum, which lent an authentic Jerusalem flavour to the experience. (Parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls are kept upstairs, but I didn’t really feel like catching up on my Enoch.) In the gallery, I couldn’t help noticing that I was the youngest person there, and the only one with full use of my hips.

The exhibition concentrates on Jewish theatre stagings after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 by the Hebrew-speaking Habima theatre and the Yiddish-speaking Moscow State Jewish Theatre (GOSET). Klezmer music--that joyous melding of virtuoso jazz and the two-four oom-pah beat of polka--sets the scene as you read about the productions of “The Dybbuk” and “The Golem". These plays, like many works of the Jewish theatre, drew heavily on the fanciful folk tales of Sholem Aleichem, often considered to be the Jewish Mark Twain.

But what is immediately striking about the visuals is their blend of high Modernism with peasant life. Natan Altman’s Cubo-Futurist set-design sketches are angular, intensely colourful and even grotesque. His peasants have daggers for noses, pallid skin and patches of black around the eyes and under the cheekbones. His vision of funereal exuberance amid gritty and sparse stage sets influenced theatre for years to come.

The murals and stage decorations Chagall created in 1920 for the GOSET are the centrepiece of the show. They are an unrestrained, gravity-defying celebration of shtetl life, full of singing, dancing, eating, drinking, joking, kissing, playing, partying and even pissing (in a pig’s eye no less). Due to the size of the canvases, Chagall painted on the ground, covering the backdrops with floating cows, hovering chickens and flying food. The ebullient klezmer soundtrack lingers appropriately.       

This is the moment of the show when the story of these artists and theatre troupes begins to change. We are familiar with the gradual repression enforced by Stalinist dictates, but we tend to hear it applied to individual artists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Bulgakov and Dmitri Shostakovich. Rarely to we consider the way such developments quashed an entire community or race. The pogroms, purges and emigration of the second world war stamped out nearly all the Yiddish culture once so prevalent in Eastern Europe. Cultural leaders were killed, archives torched (some pictures even bear the scorch marks around the edges).

Solomon Mikhoels emerges as a star of this show. As the lead actor of the GOSET, he appeared in nearly every production, originating Tevye the Milkman and even taking on “King Lear” in a critically acclaimed performance (preserved on film, luckily; pictured right). He then took over the directorship of the GOSET when his predecessor defected, becoming the public face of Yiddish theatre. As chairman of the Jewish Anti-Facist Committee during the second world war, he toured the world seeking financial support to combat Hitler’s invading armies. Up to this point, the productions of the state-funded theatre were all ideologically anti-Kaballah, anti-Zionist and, of course, anti-capitalist, but when Mikhoels publicly endorsed the future state of Israel after the war and his own pride in being a Jew, Stalin gave orders to assassinate him. He was murdered in 1948, and his fellow artists were killed a few years later, in 1952, in what is now known as the Night of the Murdered Poets (those killed included the brilliant Benjamin Zuskin, who played "The Fool" opposite Mikhoels).  

Although the vivid revelry of the klezmer fades into the sombre tones of a dirge in the second half of the show, I came away enchanted by the vital beauty of these productions, and grateful for those who have kept the curtain raised for the rest of us to enjoy.

Leaving the exhibit and pondering its import, the closing words of "Lear" came to mind:

      The weight of this sad time we must obey;
      Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
      The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
      Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

~ DANIEL ARIZONA

Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theatre, 1919-1949, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, April 23rd-September 7th 2009

Picture credit: "Music", 1920, tempera, gouache, and opaque white on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Research Library and Archives of Jewish Theater