Bruno Schulz

By Benjamin Balint A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life. Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa—the last traces of his vanished world—into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter. By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.Hardcover320 pagesW.W. Norton & Company, 20236.3 x 9.4 InchesISBN 9780393866575Biography

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

By Bruno SchulzTranslated by Celina WieniewskaForeward by Jonathan Safran Foer “Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but coherent idealistic aesthetic, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were unique and startling productions, seeming to come out of nowhere. . . . Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual power.”—J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books “A masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive, shy, and never raw.”—The New York Review of Books “Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words. . . . [His] verbal art strikes us—stuns us, even—with its overload of beauty.”—John UpdikeThe untimely death of Polish writer Bruno Schulz at the hands of a Gestapo officer stands as one of the great losses to modern literature, but since his death, word of his extraordinary literary voice has won him an international readership. This volume brings together Schulz's complete fiction, including The Street of Crocodiles, praised by the New York Review of Books as "a masterpiece... marvelously inventive"; his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass; and three short stories. Illustrated with Schulz's luminous original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.Paperback335 pagesPenguin Classics, 2008﻿The Street of Crocodiles ﻿was originally published in 19345.1 x 0.4 x 7.7 InchesISBN 9780143105145Short Stories, Fiction

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Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

Shop at Neue Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

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Bruno Schulz