Bruno Schulz - The passers-by, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin 2008)

"Bruno Schulz has sustained a premier yet often unrecognized position in the mythology of twentieth-century literature, famously inspiring authors and artists from Philip Roth to the Brothers Quay despite the fact that, since his mainstream English introduction in 1977, only his first publication has been consistently available. Thirty years later, Penguin Classics has released a new edition titled The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, which includes the title book, three literary sketches, and Schulz’s second collection, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, with his original drawings.
In Schulz’s dreamlike stories, the provincial—that which is banal, in-between, unnoticed—becomes the universe itself. Schulz takes images or scenes ignored by many but primary to him, and purposefully confounds them with pleonastic descriptions, complicated explanations, and philosophized word-dances." - David Stromberg


"I love Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), whose The Street of Crocodiles aka Cinnamon Shops & Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass are two of the greatest works of 20th Century fantasy. They are works of love infused with sadness. They are works that find an extraordinary beauty in dark landscapes of mind & place. But any tendency to imagine Bruno depressed & isolated like the lad in Street of Crocodiles must be tempered by the mood of his decadent, aesthetic drawings that reveal a man who is not miserably trapped, but exultantly fascinated by the dark.
I think I could've had a joyous time hanging out with Bruno, conversing on art & the short story. I might even have condescended to tie him up & place my foot upon his face, since he enjoyed that sort of thing so much. Anyone who has seen his self-portraits & other drawings, such as in The Book of Idolatry (Warsaw: Interpress, 1983), knows how often he places himself amidst domineering amazons, with, however, often an edge of generosity & sweet melancholy that makes his artworks rather more than pornographic oddities of deviance. While one easily imagines Kafka unobtrusive in his job & disempowered in his own home, my image of Bruno is one of energy, motivation & willfulness that merely disguises itself as quietude.
A Polish Jew, Bruno was born into a merchant family, & was a high school art teacher in the city of Drohobycz, which was at the time in Poland though it is now in the Ukraine. In The Street of Crocodiles the Drohobycz shtetl is transformed into a phantasmagorically doom-laden universe finite but eternal, wherein an autobiographically imagined boy's spectral wizened father haunts every private thought & passageway.
The curious blend of masochism & heroism in his fantasy art & tales was shown truly to be one & the same with his actual spirit, by his boldness in leaving the ghetto to get food for his family & friends, even when Gestapo or SS officers were shooting Jews on sight. Eventually shooting even Bruno. He transcends his own martyrdom by having become more like a beacon of aestheticism in the midst of so dark a passage of modern history.
David Goldfarb rightly takes exception to Bruno having been retrofitted to a cliche of "brilliant, frail, passive, tragic" that many would impose on all European Jewry — for one thing, Goldfarb doesn't think the retrofit is a good one since the man's great works predate the great tragedy. But if that limited view of Bruno as arch martyr is really abroad, I never noticed it, because no one sensible would mistake his personal masochistic lust for passivity — he pursued that aggressively — let alone mistake his Aesthete wispiness for frailty of spirit. His spirit was magnanimous & gigantic. The intense devotion of fellow artists to Schulz — Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Ligotti, Philip Roth, John Updike, Danilo Kis, the brothers Quay, &c &c — is not because they found anything of weakness or fatalism in him. He found beauty in darkness because there is beauty in darkness; what in Kafka is a plaint in Schulz is a celebration." - Jessica Amanda Salmonson

"Writer and graphic artist, whose brief career ended tragically during World War II, when he was gunned down by a German officer in the ghetto of Drohobycz. Schulz is best-known for his short stories. His is considered one of the finest Polish prose stylists of the 20th century. The American writer John Updike has called Schulz "one of the great transmogrifies of the world into words."
"I am simply calling it The Book without any epithets or qualifications, and in this sobriety there is a shade of helplessness, a silent capitulation before the vastness of the transcendental, for no word, no allusion, can adequately suggest the shiver of fear the presentiment of a thing without name that exceeds all our capacity for wonder." (from 'The Book' in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1937)
Bruno Schulz was born in Drohobycz (now Drogobych, Ukraine), a small town in Galicia, into a Jewish family. The area was then part of the Austrian Empire. His father run a clothing shop, but left it to the care of his wife due to his poor health. Also a very important figure in the house was the sadistic maid. Schulz studied architecture at Lvov University and fine arts in Vienna, specializing in lithography and drawing. After returning to his native town, he worked from 1924 to 1939 as an art teacher in the local gymnasium. One of his students has later recalled that Schulz was considered strange; he was laughed at behind his back. Schulz always wore a flannel jacket and a scarf around his neck. After his friend Wladyslaw Riff died in 1927, Schulz stopped writing prose for years.
Schulz did not start his literary career until the 1930s. His reviews appeared in literary magazine Wiadomosci Literackie, he corresponded with such avant-gardists as Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), but mostly Schulz lived far from the literary circles. In the mid-1930s he spent some time in Warsaw and visited also Paris. Although Schulz's correspondence with the Yiddish poet Deboah Vogel and other women was intense, he never married.
In 1938 Schulz was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the West and the remainder of the country was occupied by the Soviet Union. Between 1939 and 1941 S chulz lived in the Soviet-occupied territory, but when Germany attacked the U.S.S.R., Drohobycz was occupied by the Nazis. A Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, liked Schulz's drawings, arranged him a pass out of the ghetto, and commissioned him to paint frescoes in his house. Landau killed a Jewish dentist who was protected by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. In the "Aryan" quarter Schulz was spotted by him, and shot in retaliation, on the street in November 19, 1942. The manuscript of his novel, entitled Messiah, is said to exist in the KGB archives relating to the Gestapo.
"On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passers-by, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat - as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces - the barbaric smiles of Bacchus." (from 'August' in The Street of Crocodiles, 1934)
Schulz wrote in Polish although he knew both Yiddish and German. As a writer Schulz made his debut with Sklepy Cynamonowe (1934), a collection of short stories, which was published at the urging of the novelist Zofia Nalkowska. Its title can be translated as "Cinamon shops". The book was followed by Sanatorium pod Klepsydra (1937, The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass). With these two collections Schulz became one of the most original figures of polish avant-garde. In 1938 he was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature. Schulz's prose reflected the influence of Franz Kafka, but in spite of their threatening atmosphere, they had surrealistic humor and realistic details, which tied them to everyday family life. Kafka was a very close author to Schulz, but according to some sources he did not translate Kafka's novel The Trial into Polish, but lent his name to a work made by his fiancee, Jósefina Szelinska.
After the war Schulz was "rediscovered" and a comprehensive collection of his stories, Proza, was published in 1964. It included also letters and literary reviews. Schulz's erotically suggestive paintings and drawings have been compared to those of Utrillo, de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, and Chagall. A selection of his drawings was published in Druga jesien (1973). Schulz's drawing and paintings were discovered in 2001 and shipped to Israel, to the Holocaust memorial.
In his short stories Schulz created a mythical childhood world which combined autobiographical elements with fantastic elements and occasionally masochist bursts. His central character is the Father, Jakub, whom the narrators describes through the eyes of Józef, his son. Other characters are Adela, the servant girl, and the narrator's mother. Schulz's stories leave much unsaid, he doesn't rely on conventional plot development, and often there is not much events. Life in Schulz's world follows its own logic and undergoes transmutations, and his characters live parallel realities. In Dr. Gothard's sanatorium the clock is put back to postpone the Father's death. At great cost he imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, and soon the house if full or exotic birds. He is a great believer in metamorphosis and his obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. When a son is changed into a giant cockroach in one of Kafka's most famous stories, The Metamorphosis, Schulz turns the Father into a crab-like being, who climbs curtains, eats crumbs of bread and little pieces of meat from the floor, and sleeps under a table. Eventually Józef's mother cooks the creature for the dinner, but nobody wants touch the gray crab. The Father spends some days in his bowl and then disappears, l eaving behind one leg in the tomato sauce and jelly." - Petri Liukkonen