★ 02/06/2023
Cultural critic Balint (Kafka’s Last Trial ) probes the inner world of Polish Jewish artist and writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) in this spellbinding biography. Raised in Drohobycz, Poland (present-day Ukraine), Schulz gained entry into Eastern Europe’s thriving literary and art circles only to have his career cut short when the Red Army invaded Poland in 1939. During the subsequent Nazi occupation, Schulz’s erotic drawings, depicting “masochistic scenes... of men groveling at women’s feet,” attracted the attention of SS officer Felix Landau, who made Schulz his “personal Jew”—entitling the artist to protection and extra rations—and forced him to paint a series of murals on the walls of Landau’s villa and other buildings. Though Schulz’s friends in Warsaw conspired to help him escape Drohobycz, he was shot dead on a street corner in November 1942. Balint describes how Schulz’s “phantasmagoric” stories influenced Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others, and details the international furor when Israeli agents pried Schulz’s murals from the walls of Landau’s former villa and sent them to Yad Vashem for display. Throughout, Balint’s dogged research and lucid analyses shed light on the interplay between Schulz’s psychology and his art. It’s a fascinating portrait of the artist in extremis. Illus. (Apr.)
"Balint reflects on the meaning of the controversy over who owns Schulz’s murals—a debate about the location of Jewish memory and the question of its legitimate home-land. ‘How does Schulz’s orphaned art,’ he asks, ‘figure in the politics of erasure?’ It is a poignant, cosmic question with no easy answers."
Jewish Book Council - Donald Weber
"Balint does a fine job of capturing Schulz’s life and his world before the war, his deeply peculiar mind and the fascinating figures in whose orbit he moved."
The Observer - Joe Moshenska
"A perfect sequel to Balint’s previous book, the award-winning Kafka’s Last Trial ."
New Republic - Adam Kirsch
"Excellent.... An absorbing, terrifying history of a special writer who deserves to be known for reasons entirely apart from the historical nightmare that engulfed him."
The Spectator [UK] - Scott Bradfield
"Fascinating.... [A] book of unique importance regarding national memory and commemoration."
Jerusalem Report - Ephraim Zuroff
"A literary-historical feat. [Balint] has stepped beyond the legend of Bruno Schulz as a writer and artist to explore the nature of legend itself, especially its historical, cultural, and political implications.... Aside from Balint’s deft handling of Schulz’s life and artwork, his meticulous treatment of the murder—the lead-up to it and its aftermath—is crucial to the central questions of the book: whether Schulz’s greater cultural legacy comes from his writing or his art, and how his martyrdom as a victim of the Holocaust figures into his reputation.... Balint challenges us to look beyond our own noses and cultivate a perspective that spans decades, centuries, or even millennia."
The Hedgehog Review - David Stromberg
"I’ve never before read [a biography] that caused me to bolt upright midway through, as if its subject had just come back from the dead."
The New Yorker - Kathryn Schulz
"Balint’s thoroughly researched book, its notes as engaging as its text, does full justice to his complex subject, placing Schulz in context while advocating sensitively for his place in the pantheon of the great creatives of the mid-twentieth century."
The Critic - Mark Glanville
"[Schulz’s] reach, eventually, was global. The cult of Schulz, counting literary household names like Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (who, Balint gossips, liked Schulz better even than Kafka), proves it.... Schulz gets compared to Kafka because of his dreamy, disconcerting stories, but in Balint’s book, a version of Schulz emerges that is closer to one of Kafka’s characters."
The Millions - Leo Lasdun
"Balint’s account of Schulz’s life and art is rich and captivating. . . . Schulz the visual artist is still too little and too imperfectly known. Much work remains to be done on this aspect of his creativity, and to recentre our understanding of his artistic legacy alongside his legacy as a writer. Bruno Schulz makes a significant step in this direction, and will be of interest to both the scholarly and the casual reader. For the success of this effort, Balint merits much praise."
Jewish Quarterly - Marta Figlerowicz
"Balint tells this story—which turns out to be multiple stories, obscured by the fog of war and rumor’s sfumato—and virtuosically relates them to Schulz’s own tales, while providing the clearest, most evenhanded account to date of the tangled afterlife of the Master of Drohobych.... [Balint is] an unflaggingly curious and fastidious critic.... and demonstrates with sensitivity how in the clash between so-called intellectual property rights and so-called moral rights, the only sure loser is the artist himself, especially if he is no longer around to defend (or define) himself."
Joshua Cohen (Editors' Choice)
"An important new account that sheds light on many previously unknown aspects of Schulz’s life and posthumous existence.... A welcome addition to our fund of information about a remarkable European master."
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbroughn Scholar
"Balint vividly, insightfully, and affectingly casts light on long-shadowed Schulz and his startlingly original work, composing a freshly enlightening, harrowing, and invaluable chapter in the perpetual history of genocide and the courage and transcendence of artists."
"Engaging and provocative.... This biography, which weaves well-chosen, colourful threads from Schulz’s writings into the threadbare fabric of his days, stands as the best brief introduction to the author currently available in English."
Times Literary Supplement [UK] - Boris Dralyuk
"An impassioned narrative.... A gripping, nuanced portrayal of Schulz’s world."
Artillery - Barbara Morris
"Offers not just an astute biographical portrait but an investigation into the contested rituals of remembrance.... Balint’s meticulous account of the ‘fresco fiasco,’ which saw Schulz’s last works forcibly claimed by the Israeli state, raises grave issues about ‘the stewardship of suffering.’"
Wall Street Journal - Boyd Tonkin
"What a wonderfully empathetic biography Balint has written, so vividly does he bring Schulz back to life, both as a writer and an artist of prodigious, otherworldly talents."
"Schulz’s destiny is terrifying and exemplary, and Balint retells his life in captivating fashion."
"Balint tells this story—which turns out to be multiple stories, obscured by the fog of war and rumor’s sfumato—and virtuosically relates them to Schulz’s own tales, while providing the clearest, most evenhanded account to date of the tangled afterlife of the Master of Drohobych.... [Balint is] an unflaggingly curious and fastidious critic.... and demonstrates with sensitivity how in the clash between so-called intellectual property rights and so-called moral rights, the only sure loser is the artist himself, especially if he is no longer around to defend (or define) himself."
New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) - Joshua Cohen
"An important new account that sheds light on many previously unknown aspects of Schulz’s life and posthumous existence.... A welcome addition to our fund of information about a remarkable European master."
American Scholar - Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
2023-01-11 A well-informed consideration of the life and legacy of the Polish Jewish writer and artist who died during World War II.
Often compared to Kafka in background, “father fixations,” and “self-sacrificial devotion to literature,” Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) toiled mostly in obscurity as an art teacher in Drohobych, Poland (now Ukraine)—except among those intellectuals who had read his two volumes of stories published in the mid-1930s, Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass . The books were highly praised for their flights of meteoric prose as well as morbid sensuality and undercurrents of masochism. Balint, author of Kafka’s Last Trial , awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, describes Schulz’s work in his own words and those of critics. The author’s prose is sensuous and often lavish: “Schulz sought in his art a confirmation of his existence; art for him was something sacerdotal….In time he became inextricably bound up with his art and its disinhibiting effect.” Largely confined to his hometown, which featured a diverse mix of Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian ethnicities in a region of shifting nationalities, Schulz and his fellow Jews were caught in the vise grip between the invading Soviets and the Nazis in 1939. During his last tortuous months, he was employed by Felix Landau, a sadistic SS officer, to paint portraits for fellow Gestapo officers as well as a series of fairy-tale murals. On Nov. 19, 1942, Schulz was shot in the streets, and different accounts of the murder have been subject to “the polyphony of memory.” Balint’s narration of Schulz’s life is brief compared to his fascinating discussion of the controversy surrounding the discovery of his murals in 2001 and their spiriting away to Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial by Israeli agents. In this incisive portrait, Balint also delves into the enormous influence of Schulz on Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Jonathan Safran Foer, among many others writers.
A poignant, passionate revisiting of an important literary and artistic voice.