The artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born Moishe Segal in a shtetl in the Vitebsk province of Russia (now Belarus). Like S. An-sky, he left the shtetl to study, travel, and explore Russian and Western European culture, but ultimately returned to his Jewish roots. Inspired by his father’s work in the fish market, one of Chagall’s frequent motifs was a fish, often a pike or herring. Many of his fish flew through the sky, with or without wings. He also drew a sketch of his wife, Bella, when she was a child, reciting Sabbath prayers with her mother over a dish of pike.

Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye The Dairyman) depicted in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, was the creation of Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), who was born Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich in a Russian shtetl, then inside the Pale of Settlement, today inside the borders of Ukraine. My great-great-grandfather, Aaron David Charnow, might have been someone very much like Tevye, or he could have been a friend. Not much is known of my ancestor, not even the year of his birth or whether or not he came to the United States with his wife, Tzivia. The character of the roof-playing fiddler was the creation of Marc Chagall, and was frequently depicted in his paintings of shtetl life, which were based on the artist’s childhood memories of a way of life that was already starting to fade in the early parts of the twentieth century and whose last remnants would be wiped out completely during the Holocaust.