Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Unfortunately, several of Schulz’s works were lost in the Holocaust and his fate was equally tragic. In 1942, when he was walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread, he was shot and killed by a German Nazi, a Gestapo officer.
#OTD 130 years ago Bruno Schulz was born. This year also marks the 80th anniversary of his tragic death. The ?? Senate established Schulz one of the patrons of 2022 to honor this phenomenal artist, who went down in the history of the international #literature of the 20th century. pic.twitter.com/hMSHnTqQIH
— Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland (@PremierRP_en) July 12, 2022
Schulz’s artistic output is relatively small but the quality of his works is very high. He also discussed relevent topics in his compositions.
Schulz’s body of written work is small; The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and a few other compositions that the author did not add to the first edition of his short story collection. A collection of Schulz’s letters was published in Polish in 1975, entitled The Book of Letters, as well as a number of critical essays that Schulz wrote for various newspapers. Several of Schulz’s works have been lost, including short stories from the early 1940s that the author had sent to be published in magazines, and his final, unfinished novel, The Messiah.
The worldwide fascination with Schulz’s literary output is confirmed by the growing number of translations, comments and literary studies regarding his works. Even some fictional works have been writen and the author of ‘Cinnamon Shops’ (in English-speaking countries, as above, it is most often referred to as ‘The Street of Crocodiles’) appears there as a literary hero (for instance ‘The Messiah of Stockholm’ by Cynthia Ozick).