He then retired to ten years of enforced idleness and his own world of dreams. Father surrounds himself with ledgers and pores over them for days on end—while in reality all he is doing is putting colored decals on the ruled pages; Father who has zoological interest, who imports eggs of rare species of birds and has them hatched in his attic, who is dominated by the blue-eyed servant girl, Adela; who believes that tailors' dummies should be treated with as much respect as human beings; Father who loathes cockroaches to the point of fascination; who in a last apotheosis rises above the vulgar mob of buyers and sellers and, drowning in rivers of cloth, blows the horn of Atonement. . . . Then there is Mother, who did not love her husband properly and who condemned him therefore to an existence on the periphery of life, because he was not rooted in any woman's heart. There are uncles and aunts and cousins, each described with deadly accuracy, with epithets as from a clinical diagnosis.

These were Schulz's people, the people of Drogobych, at one time the Klondike of Galicia when oil was struck near the city and prosperity entered it and destroyed the old patriarchal way of life, bringing false values, bogus Americanization, and new ways of making a quick fortune—when the white spaces of an old map of the city were transformed into a new district, when the Street of Crocodiles became its center, peopled with a race of rattleheaded men and women of easy morals. The old dignity of the cinnamon shops, with their aroma of spices and distant countries, changed into something brash, second-rate, questionable, slightly suspect.

One could continue to quote from the stories: somebody might perhaps attempt a psychoanalysis of Schulz on the basis of his writings. Polish and other critics have drawn attention to the influence that Thomas Mann, Freud, and Kafka exercised on him. This may or may not be true: although it is also said that Schulz first read The Trial when the book was sent to him for reviewing after the publication of Cinnamon Shops. What is undoubtedly true is that the atmosphere of both Kafka's and Schulz's lives in their respective provinces is not dissimilar. These distant outposts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, with the memories of the "good" Emperor Francis Joseph still a living tradition, looked up to Vienna as the center of cultural and artistic life much more than to Prague or Warsaw.

But whether or not these derivations existed in fact does not really matter, the stories still speak for themselves in the same voice as in the 1930s and there emerges from them in a sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history, an ordinary provincial city with ordinary people going about their daily tasks, a city scorched by the hot summers of every school child's holidays, sometimes shaken by unexpected high winds from the mountains, but mostly sleepy and lethargic—here brought to life by the magic touch of a poetic genius, in a prose as memorable, powerful and unique as are the brushstrokes of Marc Chagall.

Introduction

On November 19,1942, on the streets of Drogobych, a small provincial town that belonged to Poland before World War II (and now is in the U.S.S.R.), there commenced a so-called action carried out by the local sections of the SS and the Gestapo against the Jewish population. This was a relatively minor incident in an enormous genocidal undertaking; the day of November 19, remembered by a few surviving inhabitants of Drogobych as "Black Thursday," brought death to some one hundred and fifty passersby. Among the murdered who lay until nightfall on the sidewalks of the little town —who lay where the bullets reached them—was Bruno Schulz, a former teacher of drawing at the local high school. In vain had Polish writers, together with underground organizations, attempted to come to his rescue while he was still alive. They had furnished him with false papers and money to enable him to escape and hide in a safe place, but an attempt to escape was never made. At night, under cover of dark, a friend of the dead man carried his body to the nearby Jewish cemetery and buried him.

No trace remains of that cemetery, and the manuscripts of Schulz's unpublished works, given to someone for safekeeping, are lost. They disappeared along with their custodian. Thus perished, with a portion of his literary œuvre, one of the finest Polish writers of our century.

Bruno Schulz was the author of two books published before the war—Cinnamon Shops (1934), which has been translated into English and published under the title The Street of Crocodiles, and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937)—works that were recognized immediately by the Polish literary critics and honored by the Polish Academy of Literature, although they were discovered by the world only many years later. The literature of reborn Poland in the twenty-year period between the two great wars abounded in outstanding authors such as Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz, who are today widely known and translated into many languages, but first and foremost is Schulz, who is a phenomenon thoroughly apart in the sphere of Polish literature. In its outline the biography of Bruno Schulz appears unassuming and bare. This bard of his native town never left the streets of Drogobych for long. For almost twenty years he worked there as a teacher of drawing and handicrafts, otherwise leading the life of a recluse and maintaining contact with those near to him through letters. In this way he alleviated his isolation without having it disturbed by any outside presence. These letters to his friends, so few of whom survived the war, were in fact the genesis of his writing; for a period they constituted his sole literary activity. In other respects the topography of his life's journey is uneventful. His art grew out of his perceptions of his native town and his childhood.

He was born July 12, 1892, into a merchant family. His father, Jakub, was a bookkeeper and owner of a dry-goods shop, a shop that later was to become in the son's writing the repository of an elaborate fantasy, the sanctum of Schulzian mythology. This mythic resurrection of the shop and the reconstruction of childhood with all its emotional riches would take place only after the father and the business were long gone.

Schulz's Drogobych was a town in Galicia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which more than a hundred years earlier had helped to eradicate Poland from the map of Europe. In this part of the conquered land Bruno Schulz—the youngest of three children, educated at home and in a school named after Emperor Francis Joseph—did not grow up in the dominant traditions of German-speaking Austria, nor did he remain in the sphere of traditional Jewish culture.