Arabian Nights: Four Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights (review)

152 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 Arabian Nights: Four Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights, by Marc Chagall, with a foreword by Norbert Nobis. Munich: Pestel, 1988. 176 pp. 13 color plates, 13 black-and-white drawings. n.p.1. One of the special joys ofJewish Studies, at least for this reviewer, is the opportunity to examine the most exquisite Jewish art. Within this particular genre, of course, Marc Chagall always calls forth a magical landscape that brings relief, if only for a moment, from the dreary realism of the world. Despite its title, the book is much more than an illustration of Sheherazade's tales. As revealed in the concise Foreword by Norbert Nobis, both Chagall's beautiful lithographs and the tales themselves are related to Judaic mysticism. The stories of the Arabian Nights are actually similar in genesis to Chagall's pictorial world. These tales come from India and Persia, from Egypt and Mesopotamia, from Syria and other Arabian cultures. Although they are fused into a single work held together by an Islamic faith, Jewish culture is strongly apparent in this collection. This is because tales from the Jewish world were routinely assimilated into the Islamic-Arabian culture, an assimilation so complete that the Jewish origins of Arabian Nights are scarcely recognizable. The interrelations and connections indicate that the fusion of early Arabian stories with Hebrew tales became an integral part of Jewish narrative art, an art that the Jews carried with them in their many sufferings and long wanderings. Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Liosno, a small village where he spent his childhood and youth in strict Chassidic upbringing. Whether or not Nobis is correct that Chagall fclt drawn to the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights largely as a result of his village background ("Close physical proximity went hand in hand with intellectual breadth in a village whose very remoteness ensured that the rites, customs and, of course, literary and narrative traditions of a thousand-year-old culture could continue unbroken and largely untouched by external influences"), the artist's first attempt at color lithography represents an authentic jewel in the crown of his graphic work. Chagall's interest in the world of fairy tales, apparent to all who know and love his art, began years before he started work on the lithographs for the Arabian Nights. According to Nobis, this resulted from the artist's encounter with Igor Stravinsky and the former choreography ofDiaghilev's Russian Ballet, Leonide Massine, who commissioned him to design the sets and costumes for Aleko. Significantly for those drawn to Chagall through Jewish studies, Chagall's love of the theatre, reawakened by his Aleko Book Reviews 153 project, had been spawned in the early twenties, in his work for the Jewish and Habima theatres in Moscow. Marc Chagall's original color lithographs were published in 1948, together with reproductions of the relevant pen-and-ink drawings, by Pantheon Books, in an edition of 111 copies entitled Four Tales from the Arabian Nights. Copies 1-90 contain twelve lithographs each. All of the lithographs were reproduced with the approval and permission ofMadame Chagall. The four tales are printed in the translation of Richard F. Burton. Arabian Nights is, not surprisingly, a work of great charm that transforms poetry, mysticism, and color into a fragrant visual imagery. It is a book to be enjoyed, rather than studied, and is recommended to all who would yield gladly to its multiple enchantments. Louis Rene Beres Department of Political Science Purdue University ...