Word: vitebsk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Chagall's was a textbook case of the way some artists receive their subject matter, their grammar of signs, in childhood. He was a child of the Russian ghetto, born in the town of Vitebsk in 1887; his father was a herring packer, his grandfather a cantor and kosher butcher, his uncle an amateur violinist. The imagery of music and shtetl folklore, mingled with the face of his childhood sweetheart (and future wife), Bella Ro- senfeld, furnished the unaltering ground of his work for 80 years, long after the close-knit and weak little societies it represented had been incinerated...
...little book contains no names, not even that of its owner, though there is evidence that he had some connection with Vitebsk, in Byelorussia, and had served with Soviet forces in Hungary. He was a dead Soviet paratrooper, whose personal journal had fallen into the hands of anti-Soviet Afghans...