I don't remember -- perhaps my mother told me -- but at the very moment I was born a great fire broke out, in a little cottage, behind a prison, near the highroad, on the outskirts of Vitebsk. The town was on fire, the quarter where the poor Jews lived. They carried the bed and the mattress, the mother and the babe at her feet, to a safe place at the other end of town. But, first of all, I was born dead. I did not want to live. Imagine a white bubble that does not want to live. As if it had been stuffed with Chagall pictures. They pricked that bubble with needles, they plunged it into a pail of water. At last it emitted a feeble whimper. But the main thing was, I was born dead. Excerpt from My Life by Marc Chagall, 1922 (https://www.questia.com/library/654592/my-life)