The bicycle as an image of technology is not something I had expected when I first began to read Bruno Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles, yet it appears in “The Comet,” that volume’s final short story. The trope of bicycling as a fad, the new way to move about the city, culminating in an image, I swear, of bicyclists ascending into the night sky, a scene that to an American can only invoke E.T. It made me wonder if Steven Spielberg, the director, or Melissa Mathison, who wrote the screenplay, had ever read Schulz.

 

Schulz is an odd duck who arrived in one of those doomed places in literature & history.  Born in Drohobycz, a small provincial city, in what was once Galicia, later Poland, now the Ukraine, Schulz spent his adult years there as a high school art teacher before gaining fame for his short stories, of which there were only two collections. Of the 10,000 Jewish residents of Drohobycz, only some 400 appear to have survived World War 2. Schulz himself was “protected” by one Nazi admirer only to be shot & killed by another Nazi with a grudge against the first. He was only 50 at the time.

 

At one level this book is a series of stories concerning a single family in a single small city, so that characters are more or less continuous from tale to tale. More or less in the sense that, in “The Comet,” which was originally published not as a part of Schulz’ volume Cinnamon – as the rest of these pieces were – but as a serialized novella in a newspaper, a brother & uncle appear rather as if from nowhere. But unlike, say, the Glass family stories by J.D. Salinger, this is hardly a portrait of a family. There are really one three substantial characters in the whole book: the father, who runs a shop in the town; a servant, Adela; & the narrator, obviously a young boy. Mothers and others appear only as needed – & only briefly as needed – against this landscape.

 

Schulz’ prose makes me wish I could read Polish, because it’s apparent throughout that his interest isn’t so much in the narrative side of these stories as it is in exploring issues that a creative writing teacher might characterize as atmosphere. Some of the tales are preposterous, as when the father takes to raising rare birds from mail order eggs in the apartment, only to have the servant open some windows and set free the aviary of condors & eagles. In another tale, the boy leaves his parents at the theater in order to run a short errand which turns into an hallucinatory walk through the night streets of the city. Celina Wieniewska seems like a serviceable translator, but this is very much like the questions surrounding the different versions of Proust’s cycle of novels, Remembrance of Things Past or, in a more recent reworking, In Search of Lost Time. As those radically dissimilar titles suggest, the simplest difference can completely recast one’s vision of the work. How much of it is about memory, how much about loss? In such translations, the question is not whether the character dips the Madeline into the cup of tea, but how, something that may be answered only at the levels of prosody.

 

One can see in Schulz the same instincts that in South America one generation later turn up as magic realism, and Schulz sometimes is depicted as an example of “absurdist” writing in modernist Europe. Among the ancillary tragedies of contemporary history are the discontinuities imposed over the arts that are just one consequence of the punctuating interruptions of war & genocide. World War 2 erased modernism off much of the face of Europe. Whatever survived was profoundly different from what had existed before. Reading Bruno Schulz, you catch a glimpse of what was lost.