Only in the last 25 years or so has Bruno Schulz become recognized in the English-speaking world as one of the leading European writers of the first half of the 20th Century. His recent rise to acclaim in this country mirrors, with a lag of only a few years, that of Joseph Roth. By one of those strange quirks of coincidence, Schulz and Roth have some very similar biographical facts. They both were Jewish and born in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in western Ukraine). By my calculation their hometowns of Drogobych (Schulz) and Brody (Roth) were about 100 miles apart. Schulz was born in 1892, Roth in 1894. They both attended the university in Lvov, at times that may have overlapped. They also both spent time in Vienna between 1914 and 1918. And, sadly, both were victims of the Nazis: Schulz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in the streets of German-occupied Drogobych in 1942; Roth, in despair and exile in Paris, drank himself to death in 1939. (Roth had fled to Paris from Berlin on the day Hitler assumed power in 1933. Schulz visited Paris for three weeks in the summer of 1938. Did perchance they ever meet, either in 1938 in Paris, or earlier in Lvov or Vienna?)
But that's the extent of the similarities. Roth wrote in German and his fiction is rather firmly entrenched in the German literary tradition. Schulz wrote in Polish and his fiction is pretty much sui generis.
Schulz published only two books. The first is THE STREET OF CROCODILES, originally published in 1934 under the title (in Polish) "Cinnamon Shops". The book actually is a collection of short stories -- or, more accurately, fictional episodes -- all set in Schulz's hometown of Drogobych. All are narrated in the first person, and many feature the narrator's father, an elderly and extremely eccentric (even loony) cloth merchant, which was the occupation of Schulz's real father. No doubt the episodes are autobiographically informed, and probably they also have some psychological roots in Schulz's relationship with his father.
But otherwise the stories or episodes of THE STREET OF CROCODILES bear little resemblance to reality. Instead, they are woven from, to borrow Schulz's words from one of them, "a fabric of nightmares and hashish." CROCODILES is the product of an extremely fecund and wide-ranging imagination. Again and again reality dissolves or disintegrates and is replaced by dreams, fantasies, and myths. Schulz's fictional universe is especially rich in its visual imagery, which, in turn, is especially characterized by a profusion of colors.
This is my first experience reading Schulz, and I will have to let it ferment for a while before formulating opinioins about what CROCODILES might mean and whether it is great literature. My initial sense is that Schulz created CROCODILES as an imaginary world much more interesting and exciting -- titillating, even -- than the rather drab reality in which he was existentially imprisoned. I also am confident that Schulz is a significant author of the 20th Century, for literary reasons above and beyond the tragic facts of his life and death. But whether he is in the pantheon of literary greats is for me still an open question.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 20, 2020