The Jews who hide in little rooms
Bruno Schulz lived as a Jew, died as a Jew of his time — executed for no reason — and was buried in a Jewish cemetery. Yet his name, and his works, will live on for generations, while that worthless Gestapo officer who shot him has been long since forgotten.
Jews throughout the Western world are beginning to contemplate the possibility that they may soon be forced to choose between making Aliyah or hunkering down in their own communities in the face of spiraling antisemitic hostility. So it’s worth re-examining what happened to one great writer who “hunkered down” both in a physical sense and also in terms of his relationship with God.
The great Jewish-Polish short story writer Bruno Schulz lived quietly, cautiously and unobtrusively in the shadows of his small town, but nonetheless despite his best efforts died most definitively, and even explosively, as a Jew who could escape neither God nor history.
Bruno Schulz paradoxically embodied in his writing and in his life two of the most common, and contradictory, stereotypes of the Jewish character: The meek and solitary scholar who wants only to commune with his books and religious tracts; and the world-encircling, star-treading Jew of limitless ambition, a Jew in the tradition of the great intellectual architects of our age, Einstein, and Oppenheimer, and Freud, and Kafka.
The dichotomy between Schulz’s straitened life and his posthumous literary influence is emblematic of the dilemma facing every Jew today, in and out of the diaspora: To hide, to assimilate and to go to ground; or to break free of the haters’ constraints and to continue bestriding the world.
Schulz took the former path. He was an exemplar of the influential pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer’s admonition, “There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.”
Influenced as he was by Schopenhauer’s philosophy — and more to the point, by his enforced ghettoization by the Nazis — Schulz’s great ambition was also a narrowly defined one, to find a living God not in the Tanakh or the Talmud or in the heavens, but in the crooked streets of the little town from which he rarely ventured in his too-short lifetime. His ambition was as expansive as his daily circuit was constricted. He wanted to see God everywhere, without wanting to go anywhere — and, after 1939, without in fact being able to go anywhere.
Every page of the works of Schulz, who was agnostic and at best uncertainly Jewish, nonetheless is suffused with a longing for God, whether manifested as the Hebrew God or a godlike immanence, or is dominated by the personality of Schulz himself, playing the role of the author as God (as all writers of fiction do to one degree or another.)
Schulz was born in the small town of Drohobych, Ukraine, a town that was once part of the Polish Kingdom, and spent nearly his entire life there, being averse to travel even in the pre-war years when he was free to do so. Instead, he treated Drohobych and his memories of his childhood there as a microcosm of the world, and indeed of the entirety of Creation.
Schulz didn’t know Yiddish (he spoke Polish and German), was engaged to a woman who converted from Judaism to Catholicism, briefly considered conversion to Catholicism himself, and was by all accounts a non-observant Jew. At the primary school where he taught (the very same school he himself attended as a child), he entertained his students with Polish folk tales and was known to make the sign of the cross for his students.
Schulz was evidently not in any way a “self-hating Jew,” in the contemporary parlance, nor was he either a meshumad (מְשֻׁמָּד), one who deliberately rebels against or renounces Judaism, nor an anusim (אֲנוּסִים), one who is forced to renounce Judaism. And he was known to participate in certain Jewish cultural activities, including exhibitions for Jewish painters.
What is more likely is that Schulz, by all accounts a timid and unprepossessing man — one article about his legacy is entitled “Bruno Schulz: Writer, Artist, Masochist” — had absorbed the pervasive and unexamined antisemitism of his age, and unconsciously adjusted his personality and his predilections, while not entirely erasing his Jewishness, to continue to exist in as “safe” a manner as possible.
In a 2004 article about Schulz, the novelist Jaimy Gordon wrote, “Long before Germany invaded Poland, Schulz had learned to live with a visceral popular anti-Semitism that is hard to imagine today; he wrote an elaborate, polyglot Polish in which Jewish reference (among others) is always oblique and kaleidoscoped into a sort of fey, uneasy harmony with other elements of the conglomerate Jewish and Christian culture in which he worked. It is not hard to understand how a profoundly idiosyncratic genius with a cosmogonist’s inner drive for scale and an outward habit of deference would instinctively look to the cul-de-sac for a way out, or rather, for a way deeper in—a way to imaginative space and freedom, however fantastical and short-lived.”
Indeed, Schulz’s writing is allusive, metaphorical, poetic and fanciful. Surrounded by antisemites, he retreated to his Edenic childhood, remained cloistered in his small town, and wrote at oblique angles and from an apolitical, non-religious and miniaturized perspective about his Jewish upbringing and sensibility.
Given that Schulz’s two books were published between 1933 and 1937, a “cul-de-sac” in which he could write in relative peace despite the lengthening shadow of European fascism must have been seen by Schulz as not only comforting but essential. Schulz comments in one of his stories on this indirect allusiveness in a passage that is itself poetic, indirect and allusive:
“Some people compare these days to apocrypha inserted secretly between chapters of the great book of the year, to palimpsests covertly incorporated among its pages, or to those blank, imprinted sheets onto which one’s eyes, sated with reading and replete with content, can bleed images and shed colors onto their empty pages, making them paler and paler until at last they repose upon their nothingness before being drawn into the labyrinths of new adventures and chapters.”
Schulz’s historical predicament — to be a Jew, and a Jewish writer, at a time in history when one could safely be neither one — led him instinctively to the practice John Keats called “negative capability,” a state in which “a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Or, in Schulzian terms, a state of dwelling in a dreamlike Jewish sensibility without making any direct representations of, or arguments for, either Jewish historicity, Jewish religious practice, or the current plight of the European Jew.
If Schulz can’t quite be placed in the first rank of European or Jewish writers, it is only because his output was so small (he published only two short story collections, a handful of uncollected stories and some essays) and his range of subject matter so relatively narrow. Nonetheless, he was an astounding literary craftsman and visionary, with a Talmudic attention to detail, whose finest passages deserve to be ranked with the works of Borges, Calvino, Garcia-Marquez, Kafka, Nabokov and Proust.
Thus, it should be self-evident that Schulz was not a “naive artist” in any sense of the term, nor did he unwittingly and unconsciously reveal himself with any phrases with double meanings for the reader, that he, the writer, was unaware of. Nor was his work merely “aesthetic” in character, a simple if exceptionally sensuously rendered evocation of the life he remembered growing up in his small town.
Schulz, in other words, knew exactly what he was doing. Thus, when he engages in metaphorical fights of fancy relating to his Jewishness, he is doing so for a reason: To hide in plain sight as a Jew.
The way in which an artist hides in plain sight is to use metaphors, dreams and visions. As Schulz writes in one uncollected story, “The River of Dreams,” “It occurs to me that no dream, no matter how absurd and preposterous, goes to waste in the universe. A kind of hunger for reality is enclosed in dreaming, a kind of pretension that obligates reality, grows imperceptibly into a liability and a claim, a bill of indebtedness that demands to be covered.”
Broadly speaking, Schulz’s stratagem in his published fiction, translated in English as The Street of Crocodiles (also known as Cinnamon Shops) and The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, took on two distinct forms. In one, he used metaphors and surreal visions to express a highly idiosyncratic, idealized, dreamlike, and aestheticized representation of Jewish life in a small town in Poland. In the other, he eschewed representations of Judaism, and indeed religion, entirely, instead going directly to the source, as it were: Writing of God, or a God-like presence, or a demiurge.
The God fixation in Schulz’s work is omnipresent. At times, Schulz almost seems as if he perceived everything surrounding him — trees, houses, rocks — as alive and possessed of an animating spirit and a soul:
“An immense sunflower, held up on a powerful stem and sick with elephantiasis, awaited in yellow mourning dress the final, sad days of its life, sagging beneath the excess growth of its monstrous corpulence. But the naive suburban bluebells and the modest little muslin flowers stood there helpless in their starched pink and white little shirts, with no understanding of the sunflower’s great tragedy…And over near the fence a sheepskin coat of grasses rises like a protuberant hillock-hump, as if the garden had turned onto its other side in its sleep and its thick peasant shoulders are breathing the silence of the earth.”
Obviously, this animistic, if not pantheistic, vision of the world has nothing specifically Jewish about it. But like a time-traveler, Schulz is descending to his own past, an early childhood when everything did indeed seem alive and sentient, as well as to the world’s ancient past, when animism and polytheism ruled human sensibilities before the first monotheistic religion, Judaism, came along.
While the thought of melancholy sunflowers is fanciful, in other cases, Schulz’s infatuation with living things takes on a more realistic, but equally poetic, form:
“Throughout August of that year I played with a splendid little puppy that had turned up one day on our kitchen foor, feeble and whimpering, still smelling of milk and infancy, with an unformed, roundish, trembling little face, its molelike paws sprawled along its sides, and with the most delicate, downy fur. At first sight, that little speck of life captured all the rapture, all the enthusiasm of my boy’s soul…The secret of life, its most essential mystery, reduced to this most simple, most convenient and entertaining form, was exposed here to insatiable curiosity. It was inexpressibly interesting to have for one’s own such a tiny bit of life, such a particle of the eternal mystery in such an amusing, new form…”
Here, Schulz is expressing his appreciation — his love — for one of God’s creations, if not explicitly acknowledging God himself. Yet, in his roundabout way, Schulz acknowledges that his existence, past, present and future, is inexorably bound up in his cultural and religious heritage. He writes:
“In the dim vestibule with its old oleographs eaten away by mold and blind from old age, we would discover a familiar smell. In that reliable old odor the life of these people was contained in a marvelous simple synthesis, a distillation of race, the blood type and secret of their fate, enclosed imperceptibly in the quotidian transience of their own distinct time. The old, wise doors, whose dark sighing admitted these people and let them out, silent witnesses to the comings and goings of the mother, daughters, and sons, opened noiselessly like a wardrobe’s doorframe, and we entered into their life. They sat as if in the shade of their own fate and did not defend themselves; in their initial awkward gestures they revealed to us their secret. Were we not related to them by blood and fate?”
Is this not a highly poeticized way of saying, simply, “while I see the life and souls in everything that surrounds me, I am first and foremost the product of my own upbringing, related to those closest to me by blood and by fate, and in particular the fate of the Jews?”
But while Schulz invokes the presence of a Godlike being, God himself is largely absent from his stories. Instead, Schulz creates a fantastical version of his real-life father, here called simply “Father,” and described as “the Atlas on whose shoulders rested the weight of an immense Testament,” who creates beings ex nihilo:
“Here my father began constructing before our eyes an image of his dreamed-of generatio aquivoca, a generation of beings only half organic, a kind of pseudoflora and pseudofauna, the result of the fantastic fermentation of matter…these primitive forms were as nothing in comparison with the wealth of shapes and the magnificence of pseudofauna and flora that sometimes appear in certain narrowly delimited environments. These environments are old apartments, saturated with the emanations of many lifetimes and events — worn-our atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human daydreams, and rubble, abounding in the humus of reminiscence, nostalgia, sterile boredom. On such soil the pseudovegetation sprouted rapidly and superficially, parasitized abundantly and ephemerally, pushed out short-lived generations that burst into bloom abruptly and magnificently only to suddenly fade away and vanish.”
In another passage, his father, or “Father,” is even more godlike:
“Father strolled among the folds and valleys of a fantastic Canaan, taking large steps as he strolled, his arms outstretched prophetically in the clouds, and gave form to the land with strokes of inspiration. And down below, at the feet of this Sinai that had risen up from Father’s anger, the people were gesticulating, cursing, and worshiping Baal, and trading. They scooped up full armloads of soft folds, draped themselves in endlessly colorful cloth, wrapped themselves in improvised dominoes and robes, and babbled incoherently and endlessly. My father, stretched taller by anger, was suddenly rising above these groups of hagglers and thundering from on high at the idolaters with his mighty word.”
In addition to the numerous passages wherein the “Father” comes to represent a god-like or demiurgical figure, Schulz also writes of other godlike creators:
“Once, I saw a prestidigitator. He was standing on a stage, slender, visible from all angles, demonstrating his top hat, showing everyone its empty, white bot-tom. Having thus, beyond any doubt, guaranteed his art against suspicions of fraudulent manipulation, with his wand he drew in the air his tangled magic sign and immediately, with exaggerated precision and clarity, began extracting from the top hat with his wand paper ribbons, colorful ribbons, by cubits, by fathoms, and finally by kilometers…Someone predestined to receive the deepest meaning of that demonstration walked home pensive and inwardly illuminated, penetrated to the core by the truth that had entered into him: God is innumerous…”
Again, Schulz was not a naive writer. He had complete control of his artistic means. Nonetheless, he was a human being as well, and like all human beings, he was controlled by impulses that he could not help but express in his art. And here, in these passages, we see two overlapping and complementary impulses. In the first, in which he sees the sunflowers as alive and possessed of emotions (“sad…sagging…mourning”) he finds in the remembered Drohobych of his childhood a melancholy but human-like beauty everywhere he looks. In the other three quoted passages, he — or more specificallly, the fictionalized “Father” figure and “prestidigitator” he has created — posits a Creator, a demiurge, a pseudo-God, who serves as a stand-in for the actual God of the Hebrews.
In both cases, he sees the world as alive with the immanence of a creative spirit, but only in the latter case does he name that spirit: A thinly disguised version of God himself.
Just as God did, Schulz’s “Father” figure creates, and exists among (the distinction between the two isn’t always clear) an atmosphere of overwhelming profusion. Schulz writes of the shops on Podwale Street in the town of his childhood as a kind of “multum in parvo,” in which the entire Universe is contained:
“Their dimly lit, dark, and formal interiors were redolent of the deep odor of dyes, sealing wax, incense, the aroma of distant lands and rare materials. You could find Bengal lights there, magic boxes, stamps of long-vanished countries, Chinese decals, indigo, colophony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake root, windup toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in flowerpots, microscopes and telescopes, and above all, rare and unusual books, old folios full of the strangest etchings and stunning stories.”
Here, through the power of memory and the gift of precision, it is Schulz himself who has a Godlike quality, creating — or re-creating, or resurrecting — for us a world that would otherwise have been lost in the darkness of a Europe soon to be consumed by the most horrible war in human history.
Even before the war itself, Schulz seemed to be well aware of the death that awaited, “the bill of indebtedness,” in his own words, and the responsibility of the artist to keep the world alive, even when such efforts were hopeless, too late, and distinctly morbid and unsettling:
“Martens, weasels, and mongooses wove their way silently through the brush-wood, furry, snuffling litte beasts with stinking pelts, stretched out on low paws. We suspected that among them were specimens from the classroom that, although eviscerated and balding, were feeling in their empty innards on this white night the voice of ancient instinct, the call of the rut, and were returning to their lairs for a short, illusory life.”
Schulz’s worldview, if not insistently religious, is certainly Biblical in tone and intent. In his story “The Windstorm,” Schulz writes:
“…at last the caravans approached, the powerful trains of the gale drew near and came to a standstill above the night. An immense encampment, a black, movable amphitheater, began to descend in mighty circles toward the city. And the darkness exploded in an enormous, agitated windstorm and raged for three days and three nights…(the roofs) that the gale entered rose up in inspiration, grew higher than the neighboring houses, and prophesied beneath the disheveled sky. Then they collapsed and died away, unable to restrain any longer the powerful breath that flew on and filled the entire expanse with tumult and horror. Then again other houses rose up with a shriek, in a paroxysm of clairvoyance, and prophesied. The enormous beech trees near the church stood with upraised arms, like witnesses to terrifying revelations, and screamed and screamed.”
These horrible screams cuts knife-like through all of the allusiveness, poeticizing, nostalgia, disguise-making, world-worship, and attempts at transcendence that characterize Schulz’s brief oeuvre. He survived the Soviet occupation of his village and then, after Operation Barbarossa, the Germans forced Schulz into a Jewish ghetto in Drohobycz. Most of the Jews in this newly formed ghetto were exterminated at the Belsen concentration camp, but Schulz, passive and timid as he was, nonetheless was able to survive for a time because a Gestapo officer took a liking to his artwork.
That relatively fortuitous connection came to a sudden end on November 19, 1942, the very day that Schulz had planned to attempt an escape from the ghetto. That day, as described in Jerzy Ficowski’s book, Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait, was also the day of what Ficowski calls a Gestapo “wild action,” when Jews were shot at random on the street, instead of being rounded up and sent to the death camps. According to Ficowski’s account, the Gestapo agent who protected Schulz was feuding with another Gestapo agent and had shot the other Gestapo agent’s own “protected Jew,” a dentist. The other Gestapo agent then took revenge by shooting Schulz. He declared, in Ficowski’s account, “you killed my Jew — I killed yours.” He was shot twice in the head with a revolver.
In the end, Schulz’s uncertain Judaism and his metaphorical and nostalgic version of a Jewish upbringing were irrelevant to the Gestapo: A Jew was a Jew. And so this most poetic and sensitive of writers was shot down in the street like the worthless and defenseless nonentity he was assumed to be.
And yet the “disintegrating pages” of which Schulz wrote, the “covert palimpsests,” live on, translated into numerous languages for contemporary readers around the world. For all of his delicate evasions, Schulz lived as a Jew, died as a Jew of his time — executed for no reason — and was buried in a Jewish cemetery. Yet his name, and his works, will live on for generations, while that worthless Gestapo officer who shot him has already been long since forgotten.
Most important of all, the love of God’s creation that Schulz so beautifully expressed, and the beautiful Jewish tradition from which it arose, remain, in his pages, as fresh as the day when he wrote it. For all of Schulz’s oblique and symbolic evasions of a direct expression of his Jewish sensibility, we know exactly what he meant when he wrote as he did.
In the end, the crack of a revolver brought Bruno Schulz back to earth. His story reminds us, I think, that there are no secret hiding places small enough, or safe enough, for the Jew that is threatened — not in a European ghetto or in an attic in Amsterdam, and not in the kibbutz blast shelters and Nova Festival privies on October 7, 2023. Thus, if you are a Jew, you might as well be big about it, whether searching for God, or making great things that change the world, or just dancing, creating, and living a life.
