The White Crucifixion

Fiction
I was born dead

THE WHITE CRUCIFIXION

By Michael Dean

256 pp. Holland Park Press

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

“On a highly auspicious day, the seventh day of the seventh month, I was born dead.”

What an opening sentence! How can we not read on?  The narrator born dead is Moyshe Shagal, known to us now as Marc Chagall, painter of dreamlike fabulist scenes. The White Crucifixionis a fictional autobiography.

The opening paragraph continues: “I was brought back to life by the midwife holding me in a tub of cold water, then lifting me out again. I went from black to blue to pink. Then a fire broke out.”

According to this author, Chagall’s paintings refer to actual events in his life, and the figures painted, whether flying (some are) or grounded, are pictures of actual people.

My painting of the scene, Birth, shows a claustrophobic single-room izba pressed down by a low crooked ceiling. By a red-canopied bed, a midwife is holding a baby. There is a proud father present, and a cow. There is a mysterious rabbinical figure at the window. The mother is naked except for a cloth round her middle and one sock. In front of her, by the bed, is a large tub of water into which they are about to dunk the baby, bringing it back to life.

Chagall is portrayed as a hypersensitive man, “emotional, as feminine as I am masculine.” He stammers and is subject to fainting spells. Yet he is irresistibly handsome, attractive to women despite his lack of machismo.

He was born Moyshe Shagal in the village of Vitebsk in what today is Belarus. His father was a laborer who spent ten-hour days hauling barrels of herring; his mother had a small grocery shop. They lived on the wrong side of the Dvina River. His mother scraped together five rubles a month to send him to the local art school, where he flourished.

A mysterious stipend surfaces to send young Moyshe to Paris. Although he is married, his wife Bella does not go with him. He takes up residence in an artists’ colony called La Ruche, the Hive, because it is laid out like a honeycomb. His fellows include Modigliani, Soutine, Archipenko, Lipchitz.

Michael Dean shows us in colorful detail the grunge and sexuality of the Paris artists’ colony. But he abandons this skill to create visions for the young painter:

As I was later to paint him, the Prophet Elijah flew over Vitebsk, on his way to the Shagal household for the seder. Elijah flew like a Luftmensch in Jewish folklore…soaring above the snowscape, bent forwards with his sack of worldly goods in his hand, his Russian cap on his head. I painted him as a traditional Jewish figure…a peddler.

Just as such ethnic figures appear in Chagall’s art, the old peddler appears again and again to Dean’s fictional Chagall.

The Hive’s artists all work frantically to prepare for a showing to the Paris dealers. Dean describes the event: “Imagine a teen-age dance with all the boys – the dealers – along one wall and all the girls – the painters and sculptors – along the facing wall. But instead of eyeing the girls the dealers eyed their wares…” Those who understand French (Chagall does not) realize the murmuring among the dealers is about food, not their art.

In 1914 Chagall leaves the Hive to visit Vitebsk and go on to Berlin for an exhibition of his paintings (yes! he has a dealer). But the outbreak of World War I leaves him trapped in his native town. The Bolshevik revolution elates him and his family; for the first time Russian Jews are free of Tsarist restrictions. Their hopes dwindle as winter arrives and they cannot get enough food or fuel. And suddenly soldiers are everywhere.

He is asked to teach at the People’s Art School in Vitebsk; he is appointed Commissar for the Arts. Then another artist arrives, Kazimir Malevich. He has connections Chagall does not understand. Malevich spearheads a movement he calls Suprematism, espousing abstract geometric art. Gradually but blatantly, Malevich takes over the school.

Dean, who has written before about such artists as Rembrandt and Hogarth, chooses to tell Chagall’s story by turning his paintings into narrative. The technique results in puzzling gaps. One moment the artist and his family are starving and under suspicion from the Communist government. The next moment they are on a train to Paris, with no explanation of how they got there. The prophet Elijah provides Chagall with visions of Nazi persecutions – although the real Chagall lived well beyond the World War II and must have endured them himself. But that would have required a much longer book.

Unhappily, because of its peculiar construction, most of the novel is less compelling than its beginning. Even so, it offers an interesting window into early 20^th-century Europe and the life of this one-of-a-kind painter.

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Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.