Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

Karen Underhill

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780253069931
• eBook ISBN: 9780253057297
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bruno Schulz and the Archaeology of Polish Jewish Modernism
• 1. Leading the Word Out of Its Golus: Rokhl Korn Reads Cinnamon Shops
• 2. “A Creation Born of the Longing of Golus”: Schulz’s “E. M. Lilien” and the Jewish Renaissance Movement
• 3. The Sunday Seminars of Bruno Schulz and Debora Vogel: Rachel Auerbach’s “Un-Spun Threads” and Vogel’s “Human Exotics”
• 4. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass: Reading Schulz with Kafka, Manger, and Ahad Ha’am
• 5. Acculturation without Assimilation: Polish Contexts for a Translational Poetics
• 6. “What Have You Done with the Book?”: Schulz’s Exegetical Encounter from the Book of Idolatry to the “Mythologizing of Reality”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author