BOOKS
Bruno Schulz Redux
THE DRAWINGS OF BRUNO SCHULZ. Edited by Jerzy Ficowski.
Northwestern University Press.
$59.95.
THE COMPLETE FICTION OF BRUNO SCHULZ. Edited by Jerzy
Ficowski.
Walker and Co.
$22.95.
LETTERS AND DRAWINGS OF BRUNO SCHULZ: WITH SE–
LECTED PROSE. Translated from the Polish by Celina Wieniewska.
Mterword by Jerzy Ficowski.
Harper and Row.
$25.00.
161
Bruno Schulz, the morbidly shy, reclusive, hypersensitive Polish-Jewish
writer, would surely be stunned to find he had, in his centenary, become
as mythical a literary presence as the exotic entourage he so ingeniously
invented in his own drawings and short stories. This unlikely object of
nearly cultish adulation would most likely find this fame as puzzling as his
admirers have found him. The recent flurry of books by Schulz that have
appeared in the space of two years - the volume of drawings, his letters,
and his collected fiction - shock, confound , overwhelm, and astonish
with their abundance of sensory data, voluptuous prose, and
halluci natory splendor. Yet, despite this impressive triptych, the man
behind these images seems as much a mystery as ever, an enigma whose
essence is better translated into fiction than biography, as his surfacing in
several contemporary novels attests. Cynthia Ozick's bewitching novel,
The Messiah of Stockholm ,
is a deeply felt and brilliantly imagined homage
to Schulz and to his lost novel,
The Messiah,
rescued and reimagined here
if only for a moment of fictional time. A. B . Yehoshua uses part of a
Schulz story as an epigraph in
A Late Divorce,
and David Grossman
devotes some hundred pages to "Bruno" in
See Under: Love.
Grossman's
fictive stand-in describes being bowled over by Schulz's
The Street of
Crocodiles
(which appeared in Polish as
Cinnamon Shops):
Suddenly, ten pages into the book , [ forgot everything and read in
breathless excitement. It was the first time I ever began to reread a
book as soon as I finished it, and I've read it a good many times
since. For months it was the only book [ needed.... And I did
something I haven 't done since I was a ch ild : I transcribed entire
paragraphs into my notebook. To help me remember.
Singled out for murder by an SS agent on "Black Thursday,"
November 19, 1942, Schulz was buried by a friend late that evening in
the Jewish cemetery in his small town of Drohobycz (then part of
