Bruno Schulz
1892–1942
Biography
Bruno Schulz was born in 1892 in Drohobycz, a town in Austrian Galicia that is now Drohobych in Ukraine, and he spent most of his life there. He was of Jewish descent and wrote in Polish, although he was also fluent in German and knew little of Yiddish. He studied architecture at the Lwów Polytechnic, and from 1924 until 1941 he taught drawing and crafts at a secondary school in his home town. He drew and painted as well, and he illustrated his own books.
His first book, The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe), came out in 1934. It grew out of letters he had written to his friend Debora Vogel, which the novelist Zofia Nałkowska urged him to publish as fiction. English-speaking readers usually know the collection as The Street of Crocodiles, after one of its chapters. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass followed in 1937, and in 1938 he received the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature. Several of his works were lost in the Holocaust, including his unfinished novel The Messiah. In 1942, during the German occupation, he was shot dead in the Drohobych ghetto.
The Cinnamon Shops is on this site in its Polish original. Its stories turn a small provincial town into a place of myth, where streets, shops and family life take on dreamlike forms, and his father, a cloth merchant, is a recurring presence. Readers who know it as The Street of Crocodiles will recognise the same world.
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Books
Sklepy cynamonowe
by Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz's first book, a cycle of linked stories set in a small Galician town much like his native Drohobycz and seen through the eyes of a boy. His father, a cloth merchant drifting into mania, breeds exotic birds in the attic and lectures the seamstresses on the life of…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.