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Last update - 17:13 21/05/2008 Fiction Child is father to the man By David Stromberg Tags: Street of Crocodiles  The Street of Crocodiles,and Other Stories, by Bruno Schulz (translated from Polish by Celina Wieniewska), with a foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer, and introduction by David Goldfarb Penguin Classics, 368 pages, $15 (paper) By the time of his introduction in 1977 to mainstream English-language readers, Bruno Schulz had already been a celebrated literary figure in Western Europe for two decades, having been rediscovered in postwar Poland and proclaimed one of its great 20th-century prose writers. This, even though his published creative works consisted of only two slim, if densely written, collections of stories and some surviving letters and drawings. Based on that output alone, Schulz (1892-1942) has sustained a premier yet under-recognized position in the mythology of 20th-century literature, inspiring creative works such as Philip Roth's "The Prague Orgy," Cynthia Ozick's "The Messiah of Stockholm" and David Grossman's "See Under: Love." Over the past three decades, Schulz has retreated back into, and then reemerged from, obscurity, as various hardcover and paperback editions of his works have gone in and out of print. Now, Penguin Classics has released a new edition, "The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories," which includes the title book, three uncollected literary sketches, and Schulz's out-of-print second publication, "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass," with improved reproductions of the author's original drawings. Introducing this posthumously designated stylistic master of complex texts into the popular English literary market required more than the standard review articles. To ensure the effective transference of his import, a small regiment of literary figures came forward to provide readers with adequate perspective and context. "Like Jorge Luis Borges," wrote John Updike, "he is a cosmogonist without a theology." Isaac Bashevis Singer famously stated, "He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust... " The poet Jerzy Ficowski, biographer and excavator of nearly all Schulz-related materials to have survived World War II, pointed to Thomas Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers" as "Schulz's favorite work." Philip Roth remarked, "Schulz could not keep his imagination from anything, including the work of other writers." And Cynthia Ozick compared him to Kafka, Babel and Singer in a single breath, maintaining that our understanding of European writing was as incomplete without Schulz as it would be without "The Metamorphosis." Actually, after Schulz became familiar with Kafka, he wasn't able to imagine himself as a writer without the older man's work. For Schulz, Kafka was not just a literary model, but also an artistic figure to reference, counter and hold imaginary dialogues with. Both men lived in a Slavic region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, grew up without speaking Yiddish, and were literate in both German and the local language (Polish in Schulz's case, and Czech in Kafka's). In fact, between his first and second books, Schulz edited Jozefina Szelinska's Polish translation of Kafka's "The Trial." But Schulz never imitates Kafka; rather, as Roth pointed out, "he re-imagines bits and pieces of Kafka for his own purposes." Father as his own victim The difference between the two writers is most clear in their common character of Father. Unlike Kafka's terrorizing Father, Schulz's Father is pitiful, causing anguish mostly to himself. For Schulz, the story's mythical action is not so much driven by Father as it surrounds him, and it is he, not the son, who is its foremost victim. Father is a source of anxiety for both Kafka and Schulz, but in the latter's stories, his authority is deflated by other characters, such as the gentle and humoring Mother, or the monstrous maid Adela. In Schulz, Father's pressure turns inward, is embodied within him, inflicting him with a physical transformation − into a cockroach in "Crocodiles" and into a fly in "Sanatorium." Schulz never writes about a young adult man trying to grow free emotionally and psychologically of his father's authority and sense of disappointment. Instead, his stories are about a child who observes the strange activities of an eccentric figure who alternately takes a sudden interest in hatching exotic species of multicolored birds, pores over his ledgers late into the night while trying to write business letters, or impulsively joins the ranks of the more affecting that effective volunteer fire brigade. Schulz was determined to make a career first as a graphic artist, and then as a writer, and concentrated all his efforts on the intellectual and artistic demands of these respective resolutions. He was caught up by the glamour he himself associated with others who had achieved greatness in their careers. Though he did receive recognition and attention for his Polish prose, he was fixated on being translated into a Western European language, and eventually undertook the writing of a novella titled "Die Heimkehr" (The Homecoming), directly in German. "The language poses no serious difficulty for me," he noted in a letter to Romana Halpern, "I move in it with almost perfect freedom." In 1938, he sent the typescript of "Heimkehr" to Thomas Mann, perhaps his most revered literary figure, after which a short a correspondence developed between them, cut short by the outbreak of a war that, like Schulz himself, neither the letters nor the novella survived. Died in ?tragic circumstances' Bruno Schulz was shot twice in the head by an occupying Nazi officer during the November 19, 1942, massacre in the Jewish ghetto of Drohobycz that became known as Black Thursday. But nowhere in the 1,628-word article devoted to Schulz by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which manages the Polish government's cultural website (www.culture.pl), does the word "Jew" or "Nazi" appear. There Schulz is described as an "exceptional writer, painter, illustrator and graphic artist. Born in 1892 in Drohobycz; died there in 1942 under tragic circumstances." And though he lived in a town more than 40 percent of whose residents were Yiddish-speaking Hasidim, in a country that for years was threatened by German invasion, it seems as though the words "Jew" and "Nazi" are also largely missing from Schulz's own writings. Schulz wrote almost exclusively from the point of view of his childhood -- the background onto which he projected his mature descriptive faculties, the aperture through which he accessed both memory and perception. Only traces of his adult life are present in his writings, in which he devised an ever-grander escape into the past. In a different letter to Halpern, he mentions that his German novella is "in its subject matter related to ?Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,'" which in its subject matter was related to "The Street of Crocodiles." Even the often lamented "Messiah," his lost unfinished manuscript, was to have been another book about a return to childhood's perfection. Schulz's adult life was plagued by self-consciousness -- manifested sometimes as self-flagellation, other times as self-aggrandizement -- so painfully acute that he was often paralyzed from taking any decisive action. He was powerless when it came to completing the practical steps necessary to move to Warsaw and make a final commitment to his fiancee, the same Jozefina Szelinska, fully admitting his practical incompetence and castigating himself for it. Like a penitent, he remained in Drohobycz, and on his small salary as an art teacher at the local boy's gymnasium supported his semi-invalid sister, her son and a cousin. In a conversation conducted about Schulz and published in 1977, Roth asked Singer whether he still felt, as he had written in a 1963 critique of "Crocodiles," that Schulz's lack of identification with the Jews led him to "expend energy on imitation, parody, and caricature" of his childhood memories. Singer said he maintained his position, and added that "Schulz had enough power to write real serious novels, but instead often wrote a kind of parody." Though the word "Jew" may be conspicuously missing, Jewish signposts do appear in Schulz's writing, mostly in relation to his father. In the story "Visitation," from "Crocodiles," he compares his father to an "Old Testament prophet ... stricken by God's fire." A couple of paragraphs later, the child Joseph sees "the terrible Demiurge ... resting on darkness as on Sinai ... his enormous face against the upper panes of the windows which flattened horribly his large fleshy nose." In a single sentence, Schulz creates a myth that incorporates imagery from the Torah, Plato and European anti-Semitism. In a story titled "Tailor's Dummies," from "The Street of Crocodiles," the Father writes a "heretical doctrine" in a fictional "Second Book of Genesis," in which he challenges the Demiurge's "monopoly of creation," in what amounts to a cry against God stemming from a sense of deep betrayal. Schulz's alienation from his own people may have made it difficult for him to write seriously about his life with or without them, concentrating instead on a characterization of his unquestionably Jewish father and using a learned lexicon of which he held considerable mastery. But regardless of his variety of terms and attitudes, the engagement rests on a struggle with the Jewish God. Much as Singer's own pre-war work -- a historical novel called "Satan in Goray" (1935) -- dealt with events that seemed to foreshadow the oncoming European tragedy, so there is a clear preoccupation in "Sanatorium" (1937) with the danger of a confounded political and military situation. Early in the nearly 60-page story "Spring," Schulz refers to the rule of Franz Josef I, whose likeness was on each stamp, every coin, and on every postmark-confirm[ing] its stability and the dogma of its oneness." The child, Joseph, attributes his enlightenment and freedom from "that prison" to God, thanking Him for the stamp collection that opened his eyes to the existence of locales around the world not controlled by "that authoritarian old man." Among narratives about his friend Rudolph -- jealous of Joseph's rich experience with his stamp collection; and Bianca -- Joseph's beloved, for whom he waits in the suggestively budding spring gardens as she takes her daily walks accompanied by her governess -- Schulz interweaves a conspiracy between Napoleon III and Franz Josef that leads to Archduke Maximilian's execution in Mexico. To stand up against this injustice, the boy Joseph plans an uprising at the Wax Figures Exhibition, employing as his regiment Europe's most famous historical military figures, and setting off on an insurrection. Insistent on ruling with Bianca at his side, he ambushes the carriage in which he believes she has been kidnapped by her father, M. de V, but finds her inside holding Rudolph's hand. Seeing that the couple have chosen each other, Joseph pronounces a forlorn and dignified abdication; and while he tries to dissolve his precarious and stubborn mannequin army, a bullet rings out: Bianca's father is found with a smoking gun in his hand and a bullet in his heart. The tragedy is lamented by several speeches, and everyone eventually disperses, crying "Long live Rudolph and Bianca!" In a final private moment, Joseph puts his own pistol to his head, but -- in a chilling reverse-premonition of the way Schulz would die -- his gun is knocked away by an officer of His Majesty the Emperor-and-King. Joseph is then arrested for dreaming "the standard dream of the biblical Joseph," who eventually became Pharaoh's prime minister and ruled over his brothers. The story is a farcical and personal treatment of war and intrigue. It deals with the historical circumstances that preceded Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, standing as evidence of Schulz's concern with the relation between politics and warfare, as well as his obsession with a state of affairs that could be viewed as adolescent or childish in comparison to the scope of devastation wrought during World War I. Today, Schulz's long meditations on the reign of Franz Joseph and the dreamlike innocence of pre-war Europe read like wishful fantasies brought on by a concrete, imminent threat. In the title story of "Sanatorium," published in 1937 but likely written in the late '20's, Joseph goes to visit his dead father in a town where time has been slightly turned back, putting the old man at the point just before death. In the midst of a peaceful walk through this strange black town, Schulz writes, "We heard the incredible news that an enemy army had entered the town." Whether an example of Schulz's foresight, or an expression of his perennial fear of looming violence, its inclusion in the collection reflects an awareness and sensitivity regarding Europe of the mid-'30s. Like many others, he sensed but did not discern that he, as a Jew, would be one of the war's main targets -- as Joseph asks no one in particular: "A war against whom, and for what reason?" David Stromberg is assistant editor at Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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