Bruno Schulz

The work of Bruno Schulz reminded me of several authors - all of them Jewish: for its distinctly 'European' qualities, I thought of Joseph Roth; for its command of language, I thought of Stefan Zweig; and for its mysticism, I actually thought of Kafka. 

The Street of Crocodiles - the collection of Schulz's stories which I've recently finished - is a complicated thing: for every paragraph that mirrors the realities of provincial Poland, there's another that breaks free of that reality, following a path toward two extremes: solitude and fantasy. 

That, it seems, is where Schulz made his mark: between the loneliness of intellectualism, and the fantastic, frenetic qualities of a father come undone, a society on the verge of catastrophe wrapped up as military conflict. 

Schulz perished amidst that catastrophe, executed in 1942 by SS troops stationed in his native Galicia. His life, like his literary remains, ranks among the most opaque of modern authors. He's a ghost: a ghost enmeshed in tragedy. 

That tragedy is a part of The Street of Crocodiles, a book that contains moments of sheer artistic wonder. But it's also an unfinished work: one that hints - cruelly - at that which Schulz was capable, both in terms of style and voice.

Reading Schulz made me appreciate all the more Cynthia Ozick, whose Messiah of Stockholm attempts to uncover what was lost when Schulz met his end. Her book, like The Street of Crocodiles, assigns meaning to those dark days.