Bruno Schulz

An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

Benjamin Balint

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Hardback

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English

WW Norton & Co
11 April 2023

Individual artists, art monographs; Individual photographers; Individual architects & architectural firms; Biography; Biography: general; Biography: literary

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR and, finally, the Third Reich.

Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life.

Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa—the last traces of his vanished world—into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furore summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

By: Benjamin Balint
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 239mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 589g
ISBN: 9780393866575
ISBN 10: 0393866572
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 11 April 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Benjamin Balint is the author of Bruno Schulz and Kafka's Last Trial, awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and is coauthor of Jerusalem: City of the Book. A library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, he regularly writes on culture for The Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications.

Reviews for Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

Spellbinding.... 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. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) A well-informed consideration of the life and legacy of the Polish Jewish writer and artist who died during World War II.... 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. -- Kirkus Reviews