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Across those 50 years, he produced a small body of literature marked by profound and miraculous transformations. (Just two collections and a handful of uncollected stories survive.) “Nocturnal Apparitions,” a selection of 14 stories newly translated by Stanley Bill, provides an accessible, exhilarating introduction to Schulz’s oeuvre. In these stories, the calendar sprouts “a false, thirteenth month,” a neighborhood dissolves into paper, a storm bursts forth from the overstuffed attics of Drohobycz. Junk shops are portals to mythological realms, and religious visions emerge from quack medicine ads. Schulz’s long, sinuous sentences pulse with possibility, flexing reality through their adjective stacks, their activation of inanimate objects, until the years freeze in place and begin to flow backward. “Could it be,” he wrote in “The Age of Genius,” “that time is too narrow for all events?” His literature attempted to carve out a sanctuary on the margin of time.
It is unclear when exactly Schulz began to write. He briefly studied architecture in modern-day Lviv, and initially dedicated himself to visual art. He appears to have published the story “Undula,” his first, under the pseudonym Marceli Weron in 1922. Yet he did not publish anything more until his first collection, “Cinnamon Shops,” in 1933. During this time, he taught drawing and handcrafts at the Drohobycz State Gymnasium, a job that the shy Schulz despised but could not quit. (“There was lavender water in him,” recalled a friend, “where there should have been bile.”) He also produced a good quantity of sketches, etchings and paintings displaying Schulz-like men prostrated in various sadomasochistic scenes before the women of Drohobycz.
Schulz was raised in a tightknit family, forever on the precipice of financial disaster. His mother, Henrietta, taught him German, while his father, Jakub, ran a series of largely unsuccessful shops from the ground floor of their house on the market square. This household, with its older siblings and servants, became the cradle of Schulz’s literary mythology. His stories are told by the child Joseph, who narrates as if craning his neck upward toward the familial phantasmagoria: exasperated mother, erotically domineering servant Adela, and especially Jakub, the ailing father who shimmers at the center of so many stories, transforming into a fireman, a cockroach, a merchant magician.
By the time Schulz published his first stories, the world of his childhood was long gone. Jakub Schulz died in 1915, and the home on the square burned along with many others during World War I. Schulz’s literary work became a project of resuscitating the past, and returning the dead to life. In the title story from his 1937 collection “The Sanatorium Under the Hourglass” (as Bill translates it), Joseph finds the deceased Jakub at a health resort where time has rewound itself, like a scarf unraveling into a ball of string. “We have reactivated past time with all its possibilities here,” explains the presiding Dr. Gotard, “which also means the possibility of recovery.” Yet Jakub lives a wan and denuded life. “From the point of view of your home, from the perspective of your homeland, your father has already died,” Gotard says. “His death throws a certain shadow on his existence here.” Recovery does not mean resurrection.
You will learn a bit of all this in Benjamin Balint’s new book, “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History.” Balint’s is the second biography of Schulz to appear in English, after the 2003 translation of Polish writer Jerzy Ficowski’s “Regions of the Great Heresy.” He runs through the facts of Schulz’s childhood and artistic life, but he devotes the majority of the book to Schulz’s life under the Nazi occupation, his relationship with the Austrian SS officer Felix Landau and the aftermath of his death.
Recognizing Schulz’s talent, Landau granted him status as a “necessary Jew,” giving Schulz access to extra rations in exchange for demeaning artistic work. This included painting a group of fairy tale murals in the room occupied by Landau’s children. In 2001, these murals were rediscovered by a German documentary filmmaker, only to be “repatriated” to Israel by representatives of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center, occasioning an international controversy (their transfer violated the laws of both Ukraine and Poland, as well as international law) and plenty of soul-searching about to whom the works properly belong.
“Bruno Schulz” covers similarly vexing questions as Balint’s “Kafka’s Last Trial” (2018), and he narrates in detail the discovery, removal and eventual public display of the murals in contention. Balint uses the events to probe questions of cultural and ethnic ownership, in particular the idea that Israel represents both the interests and the home of the Jewish people, and must therefore gather in all remnants of Jewish culture. In the epilogue, he quotes a range of parties, Jewish, Israeli, Polish and Ukrainian, each of whom believe they have the superior claim on Schulz’s legacy.
Much of this is welcome — Ficowski’s biography spends relatively little time on Schulz’s final years, and Balint’s reportage on the murals scandal is both briskly written and thorough; his ill-advised flights of pseudo-Schulzian prose are less successful. Yet this new book frequently feels like a missed opportunity. Unlike Kafka, Schulz still does not have his own full-dress biography originally written in English, something he has surely earned. But Balint is more interested in the great writer’s enslavement and the aftermath of his death than in the vast majority of his life, including those years in which Schulz composed all of his published work. He devotes 72 pages to the first 47 years of Schulz’s life (1892-1939) and 50 to the final three. Schulz’s artistic peers, his influences, the circles in which he ran, the literary and artistic culture of the Second Republic, even the impact that Schulz’s Jewishness had on his literary reputation and opportunities during his lifetime — these and other relevant points of context go either underexplored or unmentioned.
Balint’s imbalance poses a genuine problem. To focus so intensely on Schulz’s death without giving readers a proper sense of his life and world is to say that this man is significant for what he represents to us in our time, rather than to himself in his own. It turns life and literature into mere prelude. Who was the man who wrote those miraculous stories? What was the nature of that life destroyed on Nov. 19, 1942? “Bruno Schulz” doesn’t do enough to answer these questions.
Even Balint seems to recognize this, concluding his epilogue by wringing his hands over “the myopic hindsight” of all those contesting Schulz’s legacy. To act “as if his end were somehow inscribed in his beginnings, as if his fate were foreordained,” leads us to emphasize the wrong things. Ultimately, anyone engaged in the act “diminishes and flattens [Schulz’s] life.” He could be describing his own book.
Robert Rubsam is a writer and critic whose work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the Baffler and the Nation.
An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History
By Bruno Schulz; translated by Stanley Bill
Pushkin Press. 236 pp. $18
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