This book draws a comparison between two of the most prominent Jewish artists in the twentieth-century: Polish-born magician story-teller Isaac Bashevis-Singer (1904-1991) and Russian-born creator of visual magic Marc Chagall (1887-1985). In addition to their East European Jewish background both were exposed to Western culture. Chagall absorbed such turn-of-the-century avant-garde styles as Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Abstract Art, Surrealism; from these he created a unique blend, to which he brought the various Russian influences he had absorbed and his own special highly imaginative and inventive personal style. Bashevis-Singer brought to his works philosophical, psychological, scientific, medical and legal knowledge. While both artists were affected by these Western influences, they remained firmly entrenched within the Jewish culture - the Yiddish language and life in the "shtetl" - from which they drew their inspiration. Their world consisted of a special blend of reality and dream, realism and fantasy. Ruth Dorot demonstrates that they shared, albeit unwittingly, a common "meta-realistic" style combining the earthly with the supernatural and the transcendental. Their works allude to real place names, dates, facts and historical events; but at the same time contain occult forces, angels, demons, mysticism and mystery. Comparisons range over the Jewish "shtetl", Jewish artists, Love and Despair, the Holocaust and war, religion and mysticism. In the works of both artists, hope springs eternal; it is a hope emanating from the mystical realm of life as it relates to the magic of creation and the cosmic logic of the Creator. Artist and story-teller sail between hard-core reality and the yearning for redemption, between Judaism and universal values, between exile and revelation.

This book draws parallels between literature and the arts, and between drama and painting, in terms of Time and Symbolism, as they appear in the play The Lady of the Castle by Leah Goldberg, and in a group of selected paintings by Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Paul Klee and Edward Munch. Discussion focuses on the connection between the written play-text and the paintings through their common visual qualities and in terms of their common thematic, structural and stylistic characteristics. In a world dominated by science and technology, which renders belief in any "absolute" problematic, two seminal events have left a permanent mark on the contemporary concept of time: Einstein's theory of relativity and Bergson's philosophy of duration (simultaneite and duree). In their wake, Time has become relative and fragmented -- a central theme in the play and in the selected works of art under discussion. Objective, scientific and chronological time is contrasted with inner, psychological time (duration), which differs from individual to individual and from culture to culture. Four categories of time are assessed: historical, physical-chronological, psychological and eternal. The primary meaning behind a symbol makes the basic assumption that a particular object or entity may represent another essence. In attempting to understand the temporal/symbolic linkages of the text and paintings, much importance is attributed to the relationship between representer' and represented' and between concrete and abstract. Through symbolic abstraction one is able to better comprehend the human and cosmic phenomena the symbol seeks to decipher. The book deals with a castle. This central symbol of the play and the paintings is multifaceted, representing what is manifest and what is hidden within the castle, revealing a magical encounter between the world of words and the world of colour.