Chagall and the Murdered Poets

Paul Trewhela is a journalist, author and former anti-apartheid activists now living in Aylesbury, UK. From 1964-1967, he was imprisoned for his political activities, which included editing Freedom Fighter, the underground journal of Umkhonto we Sizwe during the Rivonia Trial. He has since written extensively on the lives of fellow Jewish political activists and other aspects of the liberation movement. He is the author of Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO (Jacana Media, 2009).

If a painter’s “hands are tied”, what happens to the painter, and the painter’s work? The phrase is Marc Chagall’s, writing about himself.

Standing alongside Picasso and Matisse, no artist of Chagall’s international repute in the 20^th Century experienced such intense, specific and long-lasting censorship of his own free expression. He was the friend and colleague of nine (very likely ten) cultural figures – most, though not all, writers – who were specifically murdered or otherwise brought to their deaths by Stalin in the Soviet Union. His two surviving sisters and their families were living in Russia, and were very vulnerable, as were other friends. Chagall was never free of concern that anything he might do should threaten them.

Discussion of this crucial issue in his life and work is still grossly inadequate.

“My tongue is blocked,” Chagall wrote from France to Jewish friends in New York, Yosef and Adele Opatoshu, on 24 October 1950, at the height of Stalin’s antisemitic purge. (All his colleagues who perished over these years in the Soviet Union were, like him, Jews). “My hands are tied when I think about my poor friends and my sisters…” Concerning two of these writers “and others” then under arrest and interrogation, who were later executed, he wrote to the Opatoshus on 11 September 1951: “I certainly knew [them] very well.” Despite living and working in freedom, Chagall felt himself – and remained until he died - a hostage.

After February 1952, in a letter to the Opatoshus, he never again mentioned the names of these colleagues in writing. Thanking the Opatoshus that month for sending him a book of writings by the “Yiddish Russian writers,” he wrote, “It is a tragic document how Jewish life (there) is…I lack the words to think, to talk about our calamity, for we live in a world where the ground is missing.”

Five of those colleagues were executed in Moscow six months later in the basement of the Lubyanka on the Night of the Murdered Poets, 12 August 1952.

On 8 January 1953, Chagall wrote to Yosef Opatoshu, “every day of the new year we are waiting what ‘terrible’ news they will throw our way. …The last drop went over (even before the Prague trial).” He was referring to the trial followed by public execution on 3 December 1952 of 11 leading Communists in Czechoslovakia, nearly all of them Jews. The first public announcement of the so-called “Jewish doctors’ plot” appeared in Pravda on 13 January 1953, ahead of Stalin’s death on 5 March the same year.

Chagall’s beloved wife, Bella, had died in the New York in September 1944, where they had been living during the Second World War since escaping from occupied France in May 1941, following Chagall’s (brief) arrest in Marseilles as a Jew the previous month. In the middle of the profound crisis caused for him as friend, artist and Jew by the pogrom of Stalin’s last years, his partner of the previous seven years, Virginia Haggard (who was English and not Jewish), left him to marry another man in April 1952, taking away her and Chagall’s young son, David. The death of Yosef Opatoshu in October 1954 – through whom “I loved Yiddish literature and Yiddish writers, among whom he was the finest star” – then removed Chagall’s most intimate correspondent.

Whether in writing about him or exhibiting his work, there is a scandal of silence on the part of the art establishment relating to the crisis for Chagall at this time, with a particular focus on the killing of his Jewish friends by the Soviet state. Chagall’s experience over this period has no equivalent relating to any artist of his stature arising from Nazi Germany.

This is directly relevant to Britain because between June and October 2013, the state-funded Tate gallery in Liverpool staged a major exhibition, Chagall: Modern Master, with a superb collection of work ranging from Birth (painted by Chagall in St Petersburg in 1910, before his first sojourn in Paris) to the elegiac War, painted in France between 1964 and 1966, when he was nearly 80: a most moving evocation of the European tragedy of his lifetime. The exhibition included the seven surviving murals which Chagall painted on canvas in 1920 for the Moscow State Yiddish Academy Theatre (GOSET) in the pinched, starved period of Soviet “war communism”, for the Yiddish Theatre’s earliest productions.