Burning Lights.
Chagall, Bella. Burning Lights. With Thirty-six Drawings by Marc Chagall. (New York): Chocken Books, (1946).
8vo.; title-page and 36 other full-page illustrations by Marc Chagall; black cloth, stamped in gilt after a Chagall etching of Bella; pictorial dust-jacket darkened at the spine, front panel illustrated with a color portrait of Bella by Marc; a handsome survival of a beautiful book.
First edition of Bella Chagall’s moving autobiography of her life from early girlhood in peasant Russia to the bohemian circles of the Parisian avant-garde, illustrated with original drawings by her husband Marc.
Bella Chagall (1895-1944) was born in Vitebsk, Russia, to a Hassidic family, in December 1895. The youngest of seven children of Samuel Rosenfeld and his wife Alta (née Levant), Chagall attended the Vitebsk school for girls and the University of Moscow, where she majored in journalism and contributed to the Moscow periodical Utro Rossii. In 1914 Bella became reacquainted with Marc Chagall, a childhood friend of the family, during the artist’s visit to his native Vitebsk. The two were married in their hometown on July 25, 1915.
In 1922 the Chagalls settled in Paris, where they became active in the political and artistic community. Bella was Marc’s intellectual and spiritual companion and inspired some of his best known works. She edited Chagall’s autobiography, Ma Vie, and translated it from Russian into French in 1931. They both maintained strong Jewish ties throughout their lives: Bella’s visits to Palestine in 1931 and Vilna in 1935 moved her so much that she began to write primarily in Yiddish. During the Second World War the Chagalls fled France, settling in New York; Bella died at Cranberry Lake, New York, in September 1944. Two years later Marc oversaw the publication of Burning Lights.
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