Marc Chagall - Jewish Quotes
5 Sourced Quotes
My grandfather, a teacher of religion, could think of nothing better than to place my father – his eldest son, still a child – as a clerk with a firm of herring wholesalers, and his youngest son with a barber. No, my father was not a clerk, but, for thirty-two years, a plain workman (in the Jewish ghetto of Vitebsk). He lifted heavy barrels, and my heart used to twist like a Turkish pretzel as I watched him carrying those loads and stirring the little herrings with his frozen hands.... Sometimes my father's clothes would glisten with herring brine. The light played above him, besides him. But his face, now yellow, now clear, would sometimes break into a wan smile.Marc Chagall
'There you are', said Efros (Granovsky, director of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, in 1920), leading me into a dark room, 'These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them'. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. 'You see', he continued, 'the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there'. To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen.... And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them. The rooms and corridors were in the process of being repaired; piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread.Marc Chagall
