From “Dedykacja” (ca. 1920–22) | Bruno Schulz / National Museum in Kraków / Public Domain Mark
For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition.” Recently, Underhill sat down with Alex Rossen to discuss her new book, Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2024).
Alex Rossen: This book is a fascinating intellectual microhistory that centers interwar Galicia as the setting and the artist and author Bruno Schulz as the main character, in a saga that explores his participation in Jewish modernism. Can you give us a brief window into interwar Galicia as the setting and how as your main character, so to speak—Bruno Schulz—fits into this narrative?
Karen Underhill: First I should explain what Galicia is—in Central Europe, not Spain! This refers to the part of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that was annexed by the Austrian Empire during the partitions of Poland, in the late eighteenth century. Today, that territory stretches across Southeastern Poland and Western Ukraine, including Krakow and L’viv. In a Jewish cultural context, Habsburg Galicia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was characterized by the continued growth of Hasidism, by multilingualism as a fact of daily life, by the early rise of autonomous Jewish cultural and political movements—including cultural Zionism and diaspora nationalism—and also by a high degree of Polish patriotism among Jewish residents. These elements are key to the story, and I love that you called it a microhistory and a saga, which is a nice way to describe it.
I guess the defining event in this saga for Galician Jewish communities is that they move from being citizens of the relatively progressive Habsburg Empire, where they’re one among many minorities in a multi-ethnic, pluralist empire, to being a visibly otherized minority in a new, post-WWI nation-state that is now defined along ethno-national terms.
Schulz is born in 1892, a citizen of the relatively progressive Habsburg empire. And he grows up in that environment with Polish as a native language—like many of his Galician generation. In his childhood, the story is one of Jewish entry into modernity. And for a secularizing intellectual and artistic elite, it’s a period of flourishing creativity, and the creation of modern, secular forms of Jewish art and expression—what Nathan Birnbaum described as the modern Jewish renaissance—associated, for example, with Martin Buber’s journal, Ost und west. I argue that while Schulz has primarily been read by critics within the context of Polish modernism, the formative impact on his development as an artist was the fin-de-siècle modern Jewish renaissance movement.
But his generation is going to live through the war, and the transition from empire to nation-state; they will experience the rise of ethnonationalism and antisemitism on the Polish right, and find themselves facing a new question: What is the future of Jews in the new Polish nation-state? For writers: What does it mean to write in Polish in this context?
Rossen: Let’s move into one of the biggest themes of the book, which is language. This is something that really seems to be a centerpiece to your theory—as you note, the “raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience.” So why is it important to explore Jewish life at this time, through this lens?
Underhill: What I am drawing attention to there is that for Jewish writers, this period was defined by the question of language choice. The choice of language in which one writes literature became aligned with political affiliation, and with a concept about where the future of Jewish cultural continuity lies. Is it with Zionism, cultural or political, in which case writers may make the choice to write in Hebrew and to develop modern Hebrew literature? Is it in a commitment to Yiddishism? To developing modern Yiddish literature, and to affirming Jewish belonging in Eastern Europe, in Eastern Europe, and affirming Yiddish as an equal and equally European language in which to enter modern literature?
In the book, I place Schulz and his work in conversation specifically with a number of his Galician friends and colleagues, the poets and writers Debora Vogel, Rokhl Korn, and Rachel Auerbach, all of whom made the choice to become Yiddish writers, though Polish was their native language. For Vogel and Korn, this was a difficult choice, and required learning literary Yiddish, but they were committed to Yiddishism as a cultural project. Schulz chose differently. We can say he doubled down, creating a “poetics of golus,” that embraces and affirms the language of his Galician diaspora—Polish. And that was also about the experience of diaspora or exile. Schulz expands the concept of exile from the individual or community—living in diaspora, we could say—in exile in the forms of the new nation-state—and applies it to language in general. For him, the “primordial word” is scattered, in exile, divided up into the spoken languages of communication—vernacular languages. This becomes central to his poetics. The poet has to release the word from exile, and return it to its home, in myth.
Rossen: Bruno Schulz, as you hinted at a little bit already, was very much a diasporic thinker who developed what you call a poetics of golus—a poetics of exile. In your book, diasporism also reads as a distinct identity, with important political and ideological connotations. How might you contrast this identity with other Jewish artistic, social, and political movements at the time?
Underhill: Schulz is really idiosyncratic here. He doesn’t openly align himself with existing political affiliations. When I describe his poetic project as “diasporist,” it is not because he is aligned with diaspora nationalism as a political project, but because he creates an art form or poetics that is of and about Galician diaspora existence.
I should clarify that the term “diaspora nationalism” describes the political project of the Jewish Socialist Party of Poland and Russia, the Bund. It is associated with the term doikeyt, or “hereness.” This is the affirmation that Jews belong here, where they live, in Eastern Europe or Poland, and they should work to build a just society together with other minority groups, with other workers, and should struggle for the rights of all citizens. And so that would be a socialist commitment. Schulz probably was sympathetic with socialism, as most Jews were in this period, but he doesn’t take any stand on politics within his writing—except in one fascinating essay on the Zionist artist Ephraim Moses Lilien, published in 1937. This essay was unknown until 2015. In it, he identifies his own artistic awakening with the aspirations of cultural Zionism—with the desire to combine Jewish content with new European art forms, as Lilien did.
But it is fascinating to read his description of Lilien’s trajectory—and the shift from his early art, produced in Habsburg Galicia, to the paintings he made while visiting Palestine. Schulz describes this as a move from an original, vital form of creativity “born of the longing of golus,” to a form of completely “realistic” art. In Schulz’s language, realism signals resignation—a resignation from myth, or from the mythologizing transformation of reality that is so central to his own poetics. It means to resign oneself to the political realities and the demands of history—and of nations. By in a sense bemoaning this shift in Lilien’s art, he signals that for him that move is impossible. His own art is only possible as an art of messianic longing from a condition of diaspora.
Rossen: Many readers today may also be interested in how Bruno Schulz’s legacy can be reinterpreted within the context of Jewish life in 2025. I myself have been very interested in exploring this question within the context of my own Galician Jewish ancestry. Do you think Bruno Schulz has something important to say for future generations too?
Underhill: Absolutely. I believe that the kind of questions Bruno Schulz was asking in his literature—about how we transform the mundane world into the world that was promised to us, and about what it means to write in and about diaspora, are relevant for today. Bruno Schulz has also taken on a very immediate relevance in the context of the Russian War in Ukraine and the rise of authoritarianism.
For the organizers of the biannual Schulz Festival in Drohobych, his work represents an affirmation that poetry has the potential to provide a kind of shelter, a space of solidarity, for communities that reject the premises—the ethnonationalist premises, and the authoritarian premises—of today’s politics. This is a kind of use of the Jewish past to dream about, to dream about an East European future.
And I do think there’s a connection here, to a search today for new forms of Jewish identity that also reject borders, and that are affirmatively diasporist. A search for a new grounding for identity, other than the two pillars, which for a couple of generations after World War II defined American Jewish identity: the pillars of the Holocaust and Zionism. Now there’s an attempt to ask: How can one shape a Jewish identity that is not defined by the Holocaust, but that is affirmative? And that asks, What does it mean to connect to the centuries-long theological—and I would say textual—traditions that come out of Eastern Europe, out of Ashkenazi culture? More than 75 percent of American Jews have their roots in Eastern Europe. And I think that yes, this makes the world that’s opened up by a writer like Schulz, who is profoundly immersed in and a product of his Eastern European environment, very relevant.
He has been read by many American Jewish readers as a writer that gave a kind of nostalgic access to a lost world, one that has gained greater relevance in recent years. Schulz saw the condition of diaspora as the source of all of his artistic abilities, but also his dreams of justice, his dreams of a world where boundaries dissolve and the sky is rich with a million stories. That speaks to, I think, the way we can imagine the sources of our own creativity in the United States today and in the diaspora generally.
Click here to read an excerpt from Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity, reprinted courtesy of Indiana University Press.
