"This is a unique celebration of the early life of the greatest Russian-born painter of the twentieth century. It is the ultimate proof, if more were needed, that Chagall drew the inspiration for his dream-like, deceptively primitive work, almost exclusively from his Russian homeland.
The scenes of everyday Jewish life in Russia were mostly reproduced from memory, long after the artist had left his native town of Vitebsk, first for the heady, intellectual atmosphre of St. Petersburg, and later for the bohemian Paris of the 1920s. The paintings and prints show scenes from the daily life in the shtetl, the Jewish village or Jewish quarter of a small town which existed in pre-war Eastern Europe."