3/29/1985: on Yom Kippur with Isaac Rosenfeld and Marc Chagall

"Thinking about [Marc] Chagall in [New York] during the [second world] war, when he once met up with Isaac Rosenfeld and me on Yom Kippur, 57th Street. I feel a comradely twinge toward a fellow Jew when I remember his speaking Yiddish to us and admitting that though he could not get himself to work on the High High Holy Day, he was sauntering on to Pierre Matisse's gallery for a look (no doubt at his own work). Chagall and Vitebsk did summon up that feeling about Jewishness being a kind of sealed treasure, so deep within oneself. . . And what is it? In my case, the sense of all those others who have gone the long, long road. Solidarity. . . especially with those who so silently died at the hands of one power mad group or another."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook