The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (49 page)

Pissarro, one of the grand old men of Impressionism, surely influenced his great successors, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne. But Pissarro’s output was too large, not consistently fine, and in later years often formulaic and repetitive.

Some critics characterize Chagall’s work similarly, yet his early period was truly extraordinarily expressive, unique in inspiration, and something more than just art. Chagall’s oeuvre captured in oils the irreplaceable culture of Eastern European
Shtetl
(village) life, its purest essence. In his pictures, blue, bloated smiling cows fly eternally over thatched cottage rooftops. Villagers celebrate a wedding, forever massed together in a bonfire of celebration while bride and groom standing together under the Huppah or canopy almost rise up out of the picture. Chagall’s art preserved for all time a world now vanished without a trace.

In his gentle way, Chagall symbolized the individual artist’s resistance not only to political oppression (the Bolsheviks) but also against the domination of art by so-called avant-garde movements. He did not consider scientific approaches to art a good thing. Impressionism and rigidly geometric Cubism were “foreign” to him.

During the early years of Israeli independence, Chagall also became an international symbol of the flowering of Jewish artistic creativity. Unlike Pissarro or Modigliani, who never consciously drew on Jewish subject matter, Chagall clearly sought to create out of the experiences of his youth in Russia a Jewish art, sparkling new and modern. (The only other artists comparable to Chagall in this respect were the Swiss-born Ernest Bloch, composer of among many works, a great cello rhapsody about King Solomon called
Schelomo,
and a moving
Sacred Service;
the short story writer and playwright, Sholem Aleichem; and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer). Chagall’s murals and glass panels on biblical themes for churches in France, Switzerland, Pocantico Hills, New York, and at the Hadassah Medical Center and the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, the Vatican, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and the United Nations Secretariat provided public displays of his humane, loving, and healing message.

Born in Liozna, Vitebsk, in tsarist Russia, Chagall’s real last name was Segal (the great American composer Aaron Copland also traced his roots to Vitebsk). Chagall’s father worked for over thirty years as a common laborer in a herring warehouse. He never fully appreciated his son’s remarkable talents. Marc first entered
Heder
, a primitive religious education usually conducted in a study house, then public school. When a friend admired his work, Chagall convinced his mother to support lessons with a local portrait painter.

In 1906, Chagall ventured to St. Petersburg for study at the Imperial Society for the Furtherance of the Arts. Later, he met and briefly studied with Leon Bakst, the Jewish designer for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe (next to Chagall in Bakst’s class stood the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, somehow assuming he too could paint). With a stipend from a lawyer, Chagall was able to leave Russia for four years of productive work in Paris. Exposure to the vibrant art scene of pre—First World War France and the treasures of the Louvre Museum, Chagall felt liberated. Back in Russia, as he recalled in his autobiography, “at every step” Chagall felt, or rather people made him feel, that he “was a Jew.” In France, Chagall became a great artist of Russian Jewish origin. His special brand of Expressionism—lyrical, fantastic, born out of the fertile soil of Vitebsk—resulted in ecstatic, brightly colored canvases. Without question, Chagall became one of the greatest and most influential colorists of the twentieth century.

After a one-man show in Berlin in 1914, he went back to Vitebsk, was drafted into the imperial army, and like countless Russian soldiers in the massed evacuation at the end of the war, simply got up from his government desk job and left. When Lenin seized power in 1917, Chagall was named commissar and director of fine arts in Vitebsk. His works were put on exhibit in the Winter Palace in Leningrad. He was publicized as the great painter of a Soviet New Age. But his individualism proved too warm and humane for the cold conformity of developing Socialist Realism, and he was deposed as commissar.

After innovative work for the stage at the Jewish State Theater in Moscow, Chagall fled Russia with his wife and daughter in 1922. He had already become a well-known name in Western Europe and was honored by the sponsorship of the influential Jewish dealer Paul Cassirer and the Frenchman Ambroise Vollard, who both commissioned etchings based on biblical stories. By the 1930s, Chagall was recognized in Europe as one of the greatest modern painters. In 1937 the Nazis banned his work, destroying some paintings and including others in their infamous exhibition on “Degenerate Art” (which also ridiculed the music of Kurt Weill) in Munich. At the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941, the Chagalls, fearing the approaching Nazi menace, fled to America.

After the Second World War, especially through his remarkable stained-glass windows and much sought-after lithographs, Chagall became one of the most famous painters in the world. However, through the many remaining years of his long life he remained unaffected by the postwar movements from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and photorealism and did not in any meaningful way change the direction or philosophy of art (except perhaps in his use of color). It can never be said that Chagall influenced whole generations of artists in the way Picasso did. Neither did Shalom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer change the art of fiction writing in the way Kafka and Gertrude Stein did. Yet, Chagall’s masterpieces touched his people with a deep religiosity, sense of fun and magic, and an almost Hasidic passion for ecstasy. He enriched and marked world culture permanently with visions of his Vitebsk, a phantasmagoric yet universally recognizable village located at the core of the Jewish soul.

D
otty and Abe Zimmerman’s son Robert Allen was born in Duluth, Minnesota just before America’s entry into the Second World War. Bobby grew up in nearby Hibbing, a largely Christian and plain Midwest small town among other small towns. As in most of America at the time, people were exposed to culture through the radio, early television, and in movies. James Dean’s film
Rebel Without a Cause
and Marlon Brando’s
The Wild One
swayed the impressionable young Zimmerman into modifying his dress and attitude toward society. Always intensely creative, writing poems, teaching himself piano, guitar, and harmonica, Bobby was attracted to 1950s rock and roll, reveling in and imitating the late-night broadcasts of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard.

Hearing rock and roll these first times changed his life. All he wanted to be was a rock and roll star. During high school and later while briefly at the University of Minnesota, Bob tried out his act at small clubs and coffeehouses. Even then he produced music that was raw, not the coaxing, bland diet of Tab Hunter and Fabian, but elemental and searching, unstructured but sharp. On his way to college, this son of Abraham “killed him a son” and changed his last name to Dylan after the rebellious great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The Jewish-born Zimmerman had become a Celtic Dylan. Bob also soon recognized that first, only through folk music, not rock and roll, could he find his true musical and artistic voice and complete the personal transformation he so desired.

Never a “pretty face” like so many of the rock stars of his generation, Dylan was particularly drawn to the rough-hewn folk songs of Woody Guthrie. Transforming himself into a kind of teenage Woody, bound for glory, Dylan sang in scratchy, harsh sounds, uncompromising in his inattention to sweet timbre. In a uniquely American
Sprechstimme
or speech-song, he reinterpreted the almost classic folk music of Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and others with almost alarming inventiveness. Dylan in his late teens and early twenties began to compose, his first accomplished work the paean
Song to Woody.

He began to perform at the now mythical Gerdes Folk City club in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Folk City was a hothouse of postwar popular music, with the likes of Judy Collins, Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, Mary Travers, Richie Havens, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Buffy Saint-Marie jamming together nightly. Most of them lived at the time in great poverty, always in search of a hot meal. Dylan’s appearances at Folk City brought him to the attention of the great record producer (and brother-in-law of Benny Goodman) John Hammond. Hammond’s important role in the development of American popular music is well known from his work with artists such as Billie Holiday and Bruce Springsteen. Hammond produced Dylan’s first album with Columbia Records in 1962. One year later, at age twenty-three, Bob Dylan composed
Blowing in the Wind,
which when popularized by the group Peter, Paul and Mary became the theme song of a generation.

During these years of the early 1960s, Dylan was the nation’s singing poet laureate of protest, establishing his reputation for topical and bardic commentary on the state of our lives. His 1963 composition
The Times They Are A-Changin’
echoed the great strides in human freedom made and the loss of innocence felt during those turbulent days when John Kennedy was still president and Vietnam was a country known mainly to geographers.

Dylan shocked folk music aficionados when he performed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965 with electric guitar accompanied by a rock band. His
Mr. Tambourine Man
and
Like a Rolling Stone
heralded a fusion of folk and rock. Restless throughout his career, never holding for long one homogeneous style, Dylan (after a near-fatal motorcycle accident incapacitated him for nearly two years in the late 1960s) changed his style again, merging country and western music with folk and rock. This style mellowed in the ‘70s when Dylan’s music became more personal and introverted. Yet he never ceased to explore other influences, exposing his unique brew to Latino, soul, and Caribbean music.

Dylan’s private life mirrored his creative pursuits. Born a Jew, he flirted with born-again fundamentalist Christianity in the early 1980s, only to return later to Orthodox Judaism (he was linked, for example, to the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement and its charismatic grand rabbi, Menachem Schneerson).

Dylan’s willingness to combine various styles has influenced many popular music stars. Like John Cage in classical music and jazzman Dizzy Gillespie, Dylan did not let himself be restricted by norms, but searched in a personal (and sometimes quixotic) way to express the rages and hates, the melancholy, hopes, and desires, of modern life.

S
omehow I believe the baseball stars of my youth were greater than the highly paid executives of today’s national conference rooms. My father, Sam, took my brother, Barry, and me to Ebbets Field in 1955. I remember men sitting around us wearing ties, some sporting summer hats, much more formal than today’s careless hordes. Jackie Robinson hit a shot, jumped on first, and when the next batter came up, started to rock to and fro. The place exploded. The opposing pitcher was careless, Jackie took advantage, bolted, and stole second with unforgettable style. When the Phillies later scored, Roy Campanella threw down his catcher’s mask, stood up behind home plate, a look on his sweet, beautiful face so doleful and upset that I still mourn for the run let in, the loss suffered. Although the four-year-old me got bored by the seventh inning and asked my father to tell the cop to stop the game, I was a made Dodger fan, and I would forgive them Walter O’Malley’s treachery when Brooklyn’s heart was ripped out of Flatbush for the charms of California and Chavez Ravine.

Upon reaching eight years of age, American boys dream baseball. When I was eight in 1959, out on the West Coast another older Jewish boy from Brooklyn began to assert his mastery over that most difficult of all baseball skills, pitching. His name was Sanford (Sandy) Koufax, he came from my borough, he was a Dodger, he was Jewish, and I adored him.