Cover image for Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity by Karen Underhill (2024) | Indiana University Press
The small body of prose by Galician Jewish writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz that was published between 1934 and 1938 has entered into, transformed, and enriched Polish, Jewish, and Central European modernisms, stretching the boundaries of how each of these bodies of modern literature is understood. It has also earned a place, together with Schulz’s graphic works, within the field of Holocaust studies. Born in 1892, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bruno Schulz died in 1942, murdered by Gestapo officer Karl Günther during the wartime occupation of his hometown Drohobycz, today Drohobych in Western Ukraine, even as plans for his escape had been prepared. His maturing artistic goals and projects, as his friend and supporter Rachel Auerbach would write after the war in “Nisht-oysgeshpunene fedem” (“Un-Spun Threads”), her memoir of both Schulz and Yiddish/Polish poet Debora Vogel, would remain unrealized.
The final works of art that Schulz produced before his death were fairytale themed frescoes that he painted on the walls of a children’s bedroom in the wartime Drohobycz home of SS Commander Felix Landau, who had taken Schulz under his temporary protection in order to exploit his artistic talents. Discovered under layers of paint in 2001, the frescoes, which offer a striking metonymy for a buried and overwritten Jewish past that is in the process of returning to visibility, and to memory, in Poland and Ukraine, were partially removed to the Yad Vashem museum in Israel, where Schulz is memorialized as a Jewish artist and Holocaust victim. The circumstances of Schulz’s last years in the Drohobycz ghetto, and his death, speak lastingly to his fate as a Jewish artist and victim of the racist politics of the twentieth century. Yet they can tell us little about the early twentieth-century and interwar sources that inspired his art, or the intellectual and cultural contexts that surrounded its emergence. For this reason, numerous critics have bemoaned the backreading of Schulz’s work from the perspective of his fate at the hands of the Nazis, asking that his work be read as the expression of a universally human, and not specifically Jewish, vision. It is also true that in the decades following World War II, knowledge of the modern Jewish experience in Poland was largely lost to a majority of readers of Polish literature. The destruction of prewar Jewish life in Poland produced a fabric of discursive absence that continues to inform the entire landscape of postwar and contemporary Polish literary and cultural studies. A full understanding of the complex sources and subjectivities that contributed to literary modernism in the Polish language, the product of a multilingual prewar context, was severely restricted for over half a century by a lack of access to and familiarity with the Jewish realities out of which so many of the seminal works of Polish modernism arose. This included familiarity with the Jewish cultural and political contexts and questions that informed the work of Jewish writers in all three major literary languages of Interwar Poland: Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew. With the murder of a great portion of the Polish-speaking Jewish readership of modern Polish literature written by Jewish authors, the polyphonic and often intentionally translational nature of this literature had slipped, if not out of reach, at the very least out of the dominant discourses on Polish modernism. This includes this literature’s complex resonances with Jewish public discourse of the interwar period, as well as with Jewish theological, hermeneutical, and exegetical tradition.
These resonances and conversations were also actively pushed out and suppressed. For over half a century within both Polish studies and Jewish studies, separately and for complementary reasons, there existed varying degrees of reticence about emphasizing or exploring the Jewishness of canonical works of Polish-language literature—particularly those that do not openly and directly focus on Jewish themes, or that employ veiled or allusive textual strategies, that intentionally allow the Jewishness of their subject matter and sources to be overlooked. As a result, the discourses of archaeology and spectrality and the evocative trope of the palimpsest offer themselves as productive tools in the study of Polish-language Jewish writing in Poland, and in the field of Polish Jewish studies more broadly. The decades following Poland’s transition to democracy in 1989 have brought a growing reintegration of knowledge about the Jewish past of Poland into scholarly, cultural, and public discourse in Poland; and thirty years on, Poland has become a world center for the study of East European Jewish history and multilingual modern Jewish culture and literature. As a result, and combined with the growing study of Yiddish language and literature worldwide, with the East European turn in Jewish studies scholarship, and with the renewed interest in diasporism and diasporic cultural formations, the Jewishness of the Polish physical and cultural landscape—and with it the Jewishness of Polish-language modernist writing—is becoming more legible.
This process, by no means specific to Poland, represents an interdisciplinary paradigm shift underway within scholarship on all aspects of multilingual pre- and post-WWII East European Jewish culture and history. For scholars of prewar Yiddish culture, it involves rediscovering and restoring a picture of the ways in which Yiddish literature and culture were in conversation with the other-language literatures and intellectual communities beside which, and against which, they developed. As Mikhail Krutikov had written in his study of Galician Jewish critic Meir Weiner, “Our picture of the past has become fragmented, with past relationships severed, and the separate pieces being reassembled into different, and often conflicting, narratives.”8 Indeed, the language of recovery and unearthing is widely used by scholars to frame the study of pre-war Jewish literatures. Yiddish literary scholar Karolina Szymaniak has pioneered multilingual and comparative methodologies in the study of prewar Polish and Yiddish literatures, in part by reconstructing and centering within scholarship of interwar Lwów the multilingual cultural production and pioneering Yiddish cultural activism of two women writers long marginalized or entirely ignored: Rachel Auerbach and Debora Vogel, a central figure in the present study.9 Kamil Kijek’s 2017 Dzieci modernizmu (Children of Modernism: Awareness, Culture and Political Socialization of Jewish Youth in the Second Polish Republic), an analysis of autobiographies submitted in three languages to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in the 1930s, is one of the first studies in Poland to give voice to a largely forgotten generation of Jewish youth. They were the first generation to grow up as citizens of an independent Poland, within what Chone Shmeruk has described as Poland’s “trilingual polysystem,” developing new and complex forms of Polish Jewish subjectivity.10 In their work on the poetic language of Yiddish writer Itzik Manger, which is also informed by a multilingual approach to Jewish literary history, Hana Kronfeld and Robert Peckerar explain that their research “aims to unearth the ideologically silenced dialogue between Hebrew and Yiddish modernisms in the first half of the 20th century.”11 Harriet Murav, in her study of Russian and Yiddish-language Jewish literatures in post-revolution Russia, Music from a Speeding Train, turns attention to “hidden quotations that can reanimate silenced voices.” Her study is presented as “a work of restoration”: “an attempt to recover Jewish literature and culture from the Soviet Union, in order to tell a story long overshadowed by the teleology of ‘hope to ashes.’”12 These are but a few examples of a generation of archival scholarship that is making visible a previously palimpsested, multilingual Central and East European Jewish cultural landscape.
Excerpted from Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity by Karen Underhill. Published by Indiana University Press in 2024. Published with permission from Indiana University Press.
Click here to read Karen Underhill in conversation with Alex Rossen about Bruno Schulz’s poetics of golus.
