The Street of Crocodiles Read Online

Street of Crocodiles, The

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

THE STREET OF CROCODILES

Bruno Schulz was one of the most remarkably gifted writers to have been produced in Eastern Europe in this century. Little known outside his native Poland, his work nevertheless—and despite official disapproval—continues to exercise a profound influence over young Polish writers. His life and work are discussed in the Translator's Preface and in Jerzy Ficowski's Introduction, written especially for this Penguin edition. Penguin Books also publishes Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.

Jerzy Ficowski is a poet, translator, and essayist. Born in 1924, he studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw. An early admirer of Bruno Schulz's prose, Ficowski was dedicated to finding Schulz's letters, which was a difficult task, since the majority of the addressees did not survive the war. In 1956 Ficowski published a book about Schulz, The Regions of Great Heresy, and in 1975 he edited the collection of Schulz's letters. Jerzy Ficowski lives in Warsaw.

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Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Originally published in Poland with the title
Cinnamon Shops 1934
English translation first published in the
United States of America by Walker and Company 1963
Published in Penguin Books 1977

10 9 8 7 6

Copyright © C. J. Schulz, 1963
Introduction copyright © Viking Penguin Inc., 1977
All rights reserved

Originally published in Penguin Books as part of the
"Writers from the Other Europe" series (general editor: Philip Roth)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Schulz, Bruno, 1892-1942.
The street of crocodiles.
Translation of Sklepy cynamonowe.
I. Title. II. Series
[PZ3.S39St7] [PG7158.s294l]                 891.8'5'37 76-48335
ISBN 014 01.8625 5

Printed in the United States of America
Set in Videocomp Garamond

The characters in these stories are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
INTRODUCTION by Jerzy Ficowski

Translator's Preface

He was small, unattractive and sickly, with a thin angular body and brown, deep-set eyes in a pale triangular face. He taught art at a secondary school for boys at Drogobych in southeastern Poland, where he spent most of his life. He had few friends outside his native city. In his leisure hours—of which there were probably many— he made drawings and wrote endlessly, nobody quite knew what. At the age of forty, having received an introduction through friends to Zona Nalkowska, a distinguished novelist in Warsaw, he sent her some of his stories. They were published in 1934 under the title of Cinnamon Shops—and the name of Bruno Schulz was made. Three years later, a further collection of stories, with drawings by the author, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, was published; then The Comet, a novella, appeared in a leading literary weekly. In between, Schulz made a translation of Kafka's The Trial. It is said that he was working on a novel entitled The Messiah, but nothing has remained of it. This is the sum total of his literary output.

After his literary success, he continued to live at Drogobych. The outbreak of World War II found him there. Together with other Jews of the city, he was confined to the ghetto and, according to some reports, "protected" by a Gestapo officer who liked his drawings. One day in 1942, he ventured with a special pass to the "Aryan" quarter, was recognized by another SS man, a rival of his protector, and was shot dead in the street.

When Bruno Schulz's stories were reissued in Poland in 1957, translated into French and German, and acclaimed everywhere by a new generation of readers to whom he was unknown, attempts were made to place his oeuvre in the mainstream of Polish literature, to find affinities, derivations, to explain him in terms of one literary theory or another. The task is well nigh impossible. He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation— a volcano, smoldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town.

The world of Schulz is basically a private world. At its center is his father—"that incorrigible improviser... the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city." Father, bearded, sometimes resembling a biblical prophet, is one of the great eccentrics of literature. In reality he was a Drogobych merchant, who had inherited a textile business and ran it until illness forced him to abandon it to the care of his wife.