On Schulz – Boris Dralyuk in TLS:

‘It’s more than a little discomfiting to read the great Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz’s description, in his diary from the early 1960s, of his not-quite-friend Bruno Schulz: “A tiny gnome with enormous head, appearing too scared to dare exist, he was rejected by life and slouched along its peripheries”. Written for publication two decades after Schulz was gunned down by a Nazi just outside the ghetto of his occupied native town of Drohobych in November 1942, these words cannot help but seem impious. Gombrowicz knows this, but he concludes that he has to “risk being distasteful” if he is to abide by the motto that every writer – even, or perhaps especially, one as experimental as himself or Schulz – should embrace: “optimal proximity to reality”.’

(…)

‘ As the poet Adam Zagajewski puts it in his preface to the Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz (1990), the author never turned his attention away from the people of Drohobych, “for their dilemmas and conflicts were an emblem of the peripheral, of everything that was borderline and provincial – and Schulz needed to be bound to the provinces the way he needed air to breathe”.’

(…)

‘Masochism, metamorphoses, paternal crises – these are obsessions that link Schulz to two other figures from the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his fellow Galician Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Franz Kafka. Indeed, Schulz once claimed that The Booke of Idolatry was a set of illustrations for von Sacher-Masoch’s novelVenus in Furs (1870), but this may have merely been a sign of his reluctance to take full credit for his fantasies. It is more tempting to draw parallels between Schulz and Kafka, another Jewish author with an ambiguous relationship to Judaism whose fiction reshaped the boundaries of modern literature and of the language in which he worked. There is, of course, much that separates them. Whereas Kafka’s imagination often shuts the doors around us, Schulz’s rapturously swings them open, revealing through his child’s-eye narrator, Józef, the hidden grandeur and malleability of the familiar. One needn’t – indeed, cannot – leave one’s Drohobych if one wishes to spy on the limitless, ever-shifting vistas that lie on the other side of reality’s humblest peepholes. Still, the similarities between these two authors in both the artistic and biographical realms are pronounced. And in recent decades each has been the subject of an unsavoury, protracted international dispute.’

(…)

‘During the Nazi occupationhe was granted the status of “necessary Jew” for his artistic skills and lived under the tenuous protection of Drohobych’s sadistic SS overseer, Felix Landau. Landau ordered Schulz to paint fairy-tale scenes – perhaps inspired, Balint suggests, by the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs(1937) – on the walls of his young son’s nursery in his “villa”. Covered up for decades, the murals were rediscovered by a German film-maker in 2001, in what was by then a private flat. Only months later a team of Israeli agents removed large portions and spirited them away to Jerusalem, where they are now on display at Yad Vashem.’

(…)

‘In his selection from the two mature collections Bill tightens the focus on the core drama of Schulz’s oeuvre: the power struggles, resentments, betrayals, desertions and odd affections within Józef’s household. He excises stories in which Schulz’s mind lingers too long on non-recurring characters or on scenes that, for all their loveliness and strangeness, add little to our mental map of his dreamlike Drohobych. He also avoids stories in which Schulz, largely through Jakub, does more telling than showing, discoursing on the nature of matter, on time and on the porous boundary between the living and the dead. That boundary is explored more vividly, with more genuine feeling, in the selection from Sanatorium, which centres on the death and polymorphous returns of Jakub. The real Jakub died in 1915, but Schulz never entirely lets him go in his fiction. Like the doctors at the titular sanatorium, he repeatedly “reactivated past time with all its possibilities”. Few authors could make these possibilities feel so relentlessly haunting.
Bill is the third translator to produce a book-length selection of Schulz’s work in English. As he notes in his elegant foreword (and as Balint chronicles in his book), the first appeared in 1963: an acclaimed translation of Cinnamon Shops by the Warsaw-born Holocaust survivor Celina Wieniewska (1909–85; see TLS, July 26, 1963). This collection – retitled, after another story, The Street of Crocodiles – was then republished in 1977 as part of Penguin’s “Writers from the Other Europe” series, edited by Philip Roth, helping Schulz to reach a far wider audience. In 1988 Wieniewska’s translations of the stories of Sanatorium were published together with The Street of Crocodiles.’

(…)

‘When translating Schulz one is bound, as he was bound, to navigate the border regions, to find freedom in the limitations of one’s task. In characterizing him as a man slouching along the periphery of life Gombrowicz might have been paraphrasing Schulz’s own words – namely, Józef’s description of Jakub in the story “Cockroaches”: In private, I resented Mother for the ease with which she had shaken off the loss of Father. She had never loved him, I thought, and since Father was not planted in the heart of any woman, then he could not take root in reality, and thus he was doomed to float eternally on the periphery of life, in half-real regions, on the margins of reality.’

Read the article here.

Too scared to dare exist, this summarizes what’s called the ghetto-mentality in five words.
It’s common and perhaps unavoidable to criticize this mentality. The Jew as a being who doesn’t dare to exist might also be labeled anti-Semitism.
Even though I never managed to understand Schulz completely – I do understand his drawings, his prose is much more difficult to enter I would say – this article makes me want to return to his writings. Perhaps this time it’s the right time.

As to Kafka, in one his letters to Milena he writes that he is nothing but fear, that if you want to love him you should love his fear.

Nowadays we learned to see fear or an abundance of it as a pathology, but it can also be seen as a source of pleasure. Desire not only is strongly connected to disgust, desire is nearly impossible without fear.

Freedom without fear is hubris.

And the fact you exist reluctantly is as far as I’m concerned, a sign of intelligence.

With great reluctancy I continue my life. (Kafka and Schulz didn’t have children of course. It could be a novella, Kafka’s daughter.)