 His background was therefore not dissimilar to that of Marc Chagall, born a generation earlier in 1887, and although their lives were very different, their art has much in common.The "shtetl" (Jewish village) figures in many of Kaplan's paintings; autobiographical references are very clear in "The Butcher's Shop" (1972) and "Tailor's Shops" (1975) and in the many illustrations which he was to create to the works of Sholem Aleichem.Around 1922 Kaplan came to Leningrad (then named Petrograd), where he was to base his career for the rest of his life, although he often revisited the towns of his childhood.