Marc Poem by gershon hepner

Mark my words, in case you’re in the dark
about a Jewish artist, known as Marc.
Originally the name was Moishe, but
the change would open doors once shut
to people named for Hebrew heroes, Bible
a document the goyim wouldn’t eyeball
for Jewish content. Though he changed his name,
he fraternized with Jews, who brought him fame,
because he flattered them with fantasy,
surprising gentiles who began to see
the peddlers, prostitutes and men on roofs
as people without hubris, horns or hoofs.
Yet finally he crossed them all with Jesus,
an aspect of his work that always pleases
sophisticates who’re ecumenical,
as well as dealers who are somewhat cynical
concerning works of art that seem too Jewish,
bought mainly by the riches who’re somewhat newish,
far less selective than more fancy folk
who’ve broken from God’s covenantal yoke,
and let themselves become dejudaized,
assimilated, to be well disguised.

Abandoning Vitebsk, Marc used to settle
in places that were most unlike his shtetl,
but though in exile he would lose his bearings,
he never would forget the shtetl herrings
his father used to draw from barrels, both hands frozen,
but warm in heart because he had been chosen.
The drawings that so artfully he doodled
were like the chicken soup his mother noodled,
and breasts that nourished him helped him to swing
beyond the realm to which the faithful cling,
creating an imagined carnival
whose ringmaster was Moish, not Marc, Chagall.

Inspired by a review of Jackie Wullschlager’s “Chagall, ” by Dwight Garner (“A Life of Chagall, the Shtetl Modernist, ” NYT, November 28,2008) :
Ms. Wullschlager, a supremely knowledgeable docent, steers the reader through the details of Chagall’s life and career. He was born in Vitebsk, Russia, one of nine children in a poor Jewish family; his father was a herring merchant. In his autobiography “My Life, ” Chagall wrote feelingly about his father’s labor: “He lifted heavy barrels and my heart used to twist like a Turkish bagel as I watched him lift those weights and stir the herrings with his frozen hands.” He was closer to his mother, about whom he charmingly said: “If I have made pictures, it is because I remember my mother, her breasts so warmly nourishing and exalting me, and I could swing from the moon.” Wow. Why is that lovely quotation never included in those cute little gift books about the glories of motherhood? Who knows? But it is surely a problem for a biographer if the painter she is writing about is a more vivid writer or speaker than she is. Vitebsk was not much to look at. (Chagall compared its color to that of shoes and potatoes.) But this shtetl, with its wooden huts and rabbis and goatherds supplied Chagall, throughout his life, with the visual material for his best paintings. It was material he turned to magic. The town and others like it were, Ms. Wullschlager observes, “a culture awaiting its artist.” Chagall somehow found the miraculous in Vitebsk. “It was startlingly original, ” Ms. Wullschlager writes, “for a modernist artist aspiring to an international outlook to make art out of the shtetl — an environment from which anyone with cultural ambition was trying to escape and that had no pictorial traditions at all. No one else thought such a world worth recording.” She continues: “Progressive Jews such as the Yiddish writer Moyshe Litvakov despaired of the old ‘shtetl alleys, hunchbacked, herringy residents, green jews, uncles, aunts, with their questions: “Thank God, you grew up, got big! ” ’ while metropolitan Russians treated it with condescension.”


11/28/08