Portait of the Artist as a Luftmensch

Judaism and Marc Chagall went together like butter and toast, yet it's the schmaltz that's hampered this extraordinary painter's legacy. He was too "popular" to be taken seriously by the critics, so Jonathan Wilson said to hell with the critics and wrote a biography of Chagall for Nextbook. Jonathan Kirsch reviews it:

The best moments in Wilson's book are those in which he deconstructs the artist's work and decodes its iconography. He suggests, for example, that there is nothing magical, or even whimsical, about Chagall's rooftop violinists. "It was not at all uncommon for shtetl and town residents alike to take to their rooftops, sometimes out of fear and sometimes for fun," he argues. "Chagall's grandfather, for example, liked to climb up on high to chew a few carrots and watch the world go by." At a still deeper level, Wilson finds in a common Yiddish idiom an explanation for the floating figures that appear in many of Chagall's paintings. "Paradoxically, his work is frequently a literalization of metaphors," he explains. "The word luftmensch, which denotes in Yiddish an individual overly involved in intellectual pursuits, literally means 'man of the air,' a prompt for Chagall to set him flying."

Edmund Wilson once said that the worst thing to happen to Abe Lincoln since John Wilkes Booth was for him to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg. Roughly the same mythopoetic rule is said to apply to Chagall's succumbing to the spell of Fiddler on the Roof, though I think Sholom Aleichem deserves more credit than what it typically accorded to "If I were a rich man."

My theory is this: Fiddler is just Jane Austen covered in soot and sent to the Ukraine. Consider: Affable but hidebound papa seeks financial relief by marrying off his daughters. Romance bows before materialism at every turn. As Auden said of the virgin genius of Hampshire, she "reveal[ed] so frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society." Tevye's debate about whether to join the Marxists in the struggle against the tsar takes its counterpart in the more rococo arguments over the Reform Bill of 1832. Had Chagall come of age in Victorian England, he'd have been an early Impressionist mentioned in the novels of that great philo-Semitic Romantic George Eliot.