STUDIA ROSENTHALIANAA PAROKHET 37 (2004) AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 193 A Parokhet as a Picture: Chagall’s Prayer Desk (1908-1909)1 MIRJAM RAJNER LITTLE-KNOWN PAINTING BY Marc Chagall usually referred to as the A Prayer Desk and dated 1909 shows a Torah Ark curtain or parokhet hung above a low narrow table (fig. 1). Franz Meyer suggested that this work was painted in a private home in Narva, a small town on the Bal- tic coast where Chagall used to visit a wealthy Jewish family of industri- alists, the Germonts. They were his patron, the lawyer Grigory A. Goldberg’s in-laws, and as an art student studying in St Petersburg, Chagall often spent his vacations at their home.2 Meyer describes the painting as ‘the paraphernalia used in the [Germont] family devotions’.3 This would have been an unusual practice for a Jewish family. For a service to include a reading from the Torah, a quorum of ten men (a minyan) must be present. This makes it a communal ceremony, in con- trast to the private devotions practised among aristocratic Christian families with chapels attached to their homes. Moreover, the parokhet in Chagall’s painting hangs flat against the wall rather than covering an Ark containing a Torah scroll, which is its function, and which would require much greater depth. Chagall depicted similar synagogue furnishings in his 1917 work The Synagogue (fig. 2) in which the Ark is covered by a parokhet deco- 1. This article is a variation on my PhD thesis ‘Marc Chagall (1906-1910)’ (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004), supervised by Prof. Ziva Amishai-Maisels to whom I would like to express my thanks. 2. F. Meyer, Chagall, Life and Work (New York 1963), p. 69. Meyer translates the French title of the work, Le Table des Prières, as ‘Praying Desk’. 3. Ibid. 194 MIRJAM RAJNER Figure 1. Marc Chagall, The Prayer Desk, oil on canvas, 45.9 x 58.6 cm, 1908-1909 (private collection). © ADAGP, Paris, 2005 A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 195 rated with a similar, single Star of David, beside which stands a low ta- ble. However, while above the table in the 1917 depiction of the syna- gogue a ‘Menorah’ plaque is shown, in the earlier work a parokhet is fea- tured. The curtain seems to be mounted on a frame, possibly an easel, as suggested by the support board typical of an easel-like structure, project- ing above it. The curtain thus appears in Chagall’s early painting re- moved from its original use and exhibited as an art object. Beside the parokhet Chagall placed a tall, slender table. This may once have had a different function. Similar objects were used as shtender (lecterns) in small Eastern European synagogues for holy books, for prayer and study (fig. 3). Occasionally, they were also used for writing, Figure 2. Marc Chagall, The Synagogue, gouache, watercolour, pencil on paper, 40 x 35 cm, 1917 (Marcus Diener, Basel). © ADAGP, Paris, 2005 196 MIRJAM RAJNER Figure 3. Shtender, Jablonov, 18th century (exh. cat. Treasures of Jewish Galicia, Beth Hatefutsot, Tel Aviv 1996, p. 118) A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 197 as in the case of the famous Yiddish writer, Sholom Aleikhem, who often wrote while standing.4 In Chagall’s painting it supports two objects, possibly a glass bottle to the left and a silver Torah shield beside it. The bottle is placed under a bud-like wall pattern, which thus serves as an elegant cover turning the bottle into a carafe. Such bottles for the kiddush wine were used on Shabbat and festivals (fig. 4). The Torah shield leans against the wall, its chain seems to be hanging in front, forming a Y, and its lower left edge appears to be damaged. In front of the carafe and the shield, Chagall set a prayer book, while the black straps and two black boxes on the table beneath the parokhet seem to be phylacteries. Taken out of the context of the synagogue and Jewish home and set beside the wall of a room with a door to their left, they, along with the mounted parokhet, suggest a display ready to be presented, documented and studied as in a mu- seum. Upon his return from Vitebsk to St Petersburg, in the autumn of 1908, Chagall lived at Zakharyevskaya Street, no. 25, which contained Maxim Vinaver’s home and office.5 It was at this time that Vinaver, the famous St Petersburg lawyer, one of the leaders of the Russian Liberal party and the Jewish National Group, took over from his assistant, Goldberg, as Chagall’s patron. Chagall and Vinaver started to meet regularly and developed a close relationship. In his autobiography, the artist recalled him with warmth and appreciation.6 The apartment on Zakharyevskaya Street in which Chagall lived was, according to his memoirs, ‘occupied by the editorial board of the magazine Dawn’.7 ‘Dawn’ is a translation of the name of the Russian- 4. See a photograph of the writer at his writing stand in A. Lis (ed.), Shalom-Aleichem, his Life in Pictures (Tel Aviv 1988), p. 70. 5. Chagall’s letter to Baron David Gintsburg in December 1908 bears this address (M. Cha- gall and Kh. Firin, ‘Menya mozhet ponyat stradalets khudozhnik’ [Peterburgskie gody M.Z. Shagala], Iskusstvo Leningrada, no. 8, 1990, letter no. 1, p. 105). 6. M. Chagall, My Life (New York 1994), p. 95-96. See also similar recollections on their re- lationship written in Paris after Vinaver’s death (Marc Chagall, ‘Pamyati M. M. Vinavera’, in Razsviet, Paris, no. 43, 24 October 1926, p. 11). 7. Chagall, op. cit., p. 97. 198 MIRJAM RAJNER Figure 4. Wine decanter, glass, 24.75 cm, Bohemia, late nineteenth century (private collection) A PAROKHET AS A PICTURE: CHAGALL'S TABLE DES PRIERES (1908-1909) 199 Jewish magazine Voskhod, the mouthpiece of the Russian-Jewish intelli- gentsia, published between 1882 and 1906. Vinaver was a member of its editorial board before its closure in July 1906, and again in January 1910 when it reappeared as Novyi Voskhod.8 During 1908-09, therefore, when Chagall lived there, and while the magazine was not being published, the apartment may have been full of old pre-1906 copies. Moreover, since they were planning to relaunch the periodical, members of the original and future editorial boards probably met there regularly. This gave Chagall an opportunity to meet all of St Petersburg’s Jewish intel- lectuals who were involved in the magazine and active in both the strug- gle for the legal emancipation of Russian Jewry, and the modernisation and secularisation of the Jewish community.9 The connection with Vinaver therefore placed Chagall at the very centre of the Jewish politi- cal, social and cultural revival.10 In his autobiography, Chagall described the atmosphere in the office he used as his studio: The editorial room was full of my canvases and sketches. It didn’t look like an editorial room now, more like a studio. My thoughts on 8. Evreiskaya entsiklopediya: svod znanyi o evreistve i ego kulture v proshlom i nastoyashchem (St Petersburg 1906-1913) 5, col. 813, 11, col. 766. 9. In addition to his first patron, the lawyer Goldberg, the literary and philosophical histo- rian Leopold Sev, the art critic Maximilian Syrkin and the writer Solomon Pozner whom Chagall had already met during his 1907-08 stay in St Petersburg (Meyer, op. cit., p. 50, 57; Rossiskaya evreiskaya entsiklopediya [Moscow 1994] 1, p. 340-341; Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 14, col. 102; cols. 657-668; 12, cols. 665-666), he may now have met Henrikh Sliozberg, Moisei Trivus, Mikhail Sheftel and Lev Shternberg (Evreiskaya entsiklopediya 14, cols. 372-373; 15, col. 20; 16, col. 19; cols. 107-108); Like Vinaver, probably all served as a role model for Chagall. They, like his own father, were all about 20 to 30 years older than Chagall, and had been brought up in provincial towns or villages, as he had. However, unlike his father, they all broke away from tradi- tional Jewish life and left the shtetl. They had gained a secular university education, either in the capital or abroad, had succeeded as professionals in Russian society, had adopted enlightened, acculturated and liberal positions, opposed Tsarism, and then turned to the ‘suffering Jewish masses’ in order to fight for their rights and improve their lives. To Chagall, they probably com- bined the best of both worlds: worldly knowledge and liberalism on one side, and Jewish secular, national identity on the other. 10. On Chagall’s connection with Vinaver and the other editors of the Voskhod and Novyi Voskhod, see also Z. Amishai-Maisels, ‘Chagall and the Jewish Revival: Center or Periphery?’, in: R. Apter-Gabriel (ed.), Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912-1928, exh. cat. (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, June 1987), p. 73, n. 18-19. On the Jewish re- vival, see C. Gassenschmidt, Jewish Liberal Politics in Tsarist Russia, 1900-1914: The Modernization of Russian Jewry (New York 1995), p. 72-109. 200 MIRJAM RAJNER art mingled with the voices of the editors who came to discuss and work. In the intervals and at the end of the meeting, they would walk through my ‘studio’ and I would hide behind the piled-up copies of ‘Dawn’ that lined half of the room.11 As a result of these contacts, Chagall must have also been well ac- quainted with the activities of various new Jewish societies founded in the autumn of 1908.