T
he life of the Polish Jewish author
Bruno Schulz was, by pedestrian
measures, a small one. It ended
prematurely in 1942, when he was
murdered in the street at the age
of 50 by a Gestapo officer, and it was
almost entirely confined to his provin-
cial hometown of Drohobycz. Schulz
drew compulsively, and in his brooding
sketches crammed big-headed figures
into cramped frames and rooms with
low, clutching ceilings. Schulz himself
was short and hunched. In photographs,
he glowers. “He was small, strange, chi-
merical, focused, intense, almost fever-
ish,” a friend, the Polish novelist Witold
Gombrowicz, recalled in a diary entry.
His fiction, too, was small and strange.
Schulz’s surviving output consists of just
two collections of short fiction, some
letters, a few essays, and a handful of
stray stories. His longest work spans
about 150 pages.
But these slim volumes have earned
Schulz a soaring stature. In death, hehas been enlarged beyond the bounds
of his claustrophobic biography. He was
beloved by John Updike, V.S. Pritchett,
I.B. Singer, and Czesław Miłosz. He has
been the subject of novelistic homages
by Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stock-
holm), Philip Roth (The Prague Orgy),
and David Grossman (See Under: Love).
Long before his acolytes brought him
back to life, however, Schulz was busy
resurrecting himself. His two loosely
autobiographical collections, Cinnamon
Shops (1934) and The Sanatorium Under
the Hourglass (1937)—newly and capablyBecca Rothfeld is a PhD candidate in philoso-
phy at Harvard.
TERRITORY OF DREAMS
by BECCA ROTHFELD
The world of Bruno Schulz
Books & the Arts.
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON