This article accompanies the fable
Letters from Africa



Marc Chagall's Music

Black and Jewish (note the prayer shawl and the white hand)... Chagall painted this in 1920 - the fiddler's music inspires the young boy to float skywards and himself to lift off the ground. Floating people appear in many of his Russian shtetl paintings as a metaphor for joy during hard times. Of course there's also a little bit of Pied Piper of Hamelin here too?

This painting provided inspiration for the title of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964), although the story itself dates back to a Sholem Aleichem story from 1894.