ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ –This week’s trivia question: What does the “tashlich” ritual consist of, and what does it symbolize? 

This week we celebrate Rosh Hashonah, the Jewish New Year, so to celebrate, we’ve decided to read you a selection from the memoir Burning Lights, by Bella Chagall. Bella Rosenfeld was born in 1895 in Vitebsk, Belarus, into a wealthy Hassidic family. She met Marc Chagall in 1909 and, as he tells it, it was love at first sight. They married in 1915, and subsequently lived in Petrograd, Lithuania, Germany and Paris. In 1941 they fled to the United States, where Bella died three years later from a viral infection.

Burning Lights, her memoir of shtetl life, was originally written in Yiddish. It was published in 1946 in English by Marc Chagall, who also illustrated it.

This excerpt was taken from the book Celebrating the Jewish Holidays, which is a collection of writings edited by Steven J. Rubin and published by Brandeis University Press in 2003.

We hope you enjoy our story, and all of us here at Radio Sefarad wish all of you Shaná Tová, Happy New Year.