MARC CHAGALL f I JONATHAN WILSON • V — $19.9. $24.95 Can Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall's work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assump- tions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in out- look; determined to "narrate" the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice. Wilson demonstrates how Marc brilliantly Chagall's life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris New steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present. Wilson's portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe showing us how Chagall the emblematic is Jewish artist of the twentieth century. JEWISH ENCOUNTERS Jonathan Rosen, General Editor Jewish Encounters is a collaboration between Schocken and Nextbook, a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish litera- ture, culture, and ideas. JEWISH ENCOUNTERS PUBLISHED THE LIFE OF DAVID Robert Pinsky • MAIMONIDES Sherwin B. Nuland BARNEY ROSS Douglas Century BETRAYING SPINOZA Rebecca Goldstein EMMA LAZARUS Esther Schor THE WICKED SON David Mamet MARC CHAGALL Jonathan Wilson FORTHCOMING MOSES Stephen Dubner • J. BIROBIJAN MashaGessen • JUDAHMACCABEE Jeffrey Goldberg • YEHUDA HA'LEVI Hillel Halkin THE DAIRY RESTAURANT Ben Katchor DISRAELI AdamKirsch • THE JEWISH BODY Melvin Konner • THE SONG OF SONGS Elena Lappin THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK David Lehman • ABRAHAM CAHAN Seth Lipsky THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE Jonathan Mahler • GLUCKEL OF HAMELN Daphne Merkin THE ALTALENA Michael B. Oren • THE HEBREW ALPHABET Ilan Stavans MARSHALL MEYER Noga Tarnopolsky MESSIANISM Leon Wieseltier • AND POWER JEWS Ruth R. Wisse •