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| A city as heroine • 16-06-2010 |
 As one of many writers who found themselves changed by Bruno Schulz's tiny literary legacy, I finally made it to his hometown of Drohobycz, Poland, which he could not stop writing about.
By Amir Gutfreund
Photo: Amir Gutfreund in Schulz's Office, the so-called Preliminary Version of Bruno Schulz Museum - the former Władysław Jagiełło Gymnasium, 2010
The fourth international Bruno Schulz Festival that was held this week in Schulz's hometown, Drohobycz, did not disturb the serenity of its permanent residents, nor was any excitement registered in the distant cities of Israel.
Bruno Schulz. He left two very thin collections of stories.
Schulz, a Polish Jewish writer whose very brief literary career was cut short when he was murdered at age 50 by the Nazis in November 1942, never got to be a favorite of the masses, and reaped most of his short success in European artistic circles prior to World War II. He left us two very thin collections of stories, which in Hebrew are combined into one book published by Schocken and called "The Cinnamon Shops."
That's all. But miraculously, Bruno Schulz's literary world is still seen as mysterious and hidden, lean but strong, and not a year goes by without some artist somewhere in the world publishing a new work inspired by him. It's almost 70 years since he was killed, but Schulz continues to excite book lovers. Indeed, every year another young man opens his book, and something takes place in his soul which I myself experienced 20 years ago, when I came upon someone who had already described all my hidden secrets, even though I was born many years after his demise.
For over 20 years I have continued to read Schulz's few stories, once again trying to decipher them for myself. For over 20 years I have dreamed about the day when I would stand in Schulz's city, Drohobycz, the place where he was born, lived, worked, wrote and where his life ended. Every time Schulz tried to leave his city, he suffered from illness and aches and pains, and hastened to return to it. To write from within it. Even at the height of his short-lived fame, when he was invited to European capitals, he was incapable of leaving his hometown for more than a few days. Not even when he had an opportunity to leave the ghetto in Drohobycz, with the help of false papers that his fans procured for him. The city of Drohobycz was everything to him, the heroine of his stories, and the only place where he could exist.
And now I have fulfilled my dream as a guest of the festival. But I'm not convinced I really have fulfilled any dream, and even the word festival requires an explanation.
Bruno Schulz, who knew how to turn the nondescript Drohobycz into a dizzying and colorful carnival, would certainly have enjoyed the distance between reality and what is implied in the word festival - i.e., celebratory events, masses of people including loud and nimble peddlers. Our festival was actually an encounter between several dozen researchers, writers, translators and various artists from countries around the world, from Japan to Brazil.
We roamed around Drohobycz, we listened to lectures and viewed works of art. All the while the residents of the city ignored us almost completely, with the possible exception of when our air-conditioned Volvo bus passed their beat-up outdated vehicles with a delicate gurgling of its motor.
Drohobycz of Bruno Schulz's time was a peripheral city at the edges of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today, after all the upheavals, it's a marginal and nondescript Ukrainian city, which suffered the blows of the Nazi occupation and the Soviet period. Everything in it is poor and meager; it is hard to imagine Schulz's time here. Is that why I feel that nothing is becoming clear to me?
If I expected that during this journey some part of the secret of Bruno Schulz would become clear to me, nothing is happening. The Holy Trinity Church is nothing more than a church, and I don't see the "cloak of God flung down as a mottled canvas at the threshold of heaven ... " The night skies are night skies, and I don't see the "rungs of the infinite ladders of the night ... plundering the immense heap of the stars." The city square is nothing more than a city square. Here I'm standing just like him, in the place where he stood, and like a total golem, I don't see a thing, where he saw an entire world.
Should I be disappointed? I convince myself that I shouldn't be. Actually - what did I expect?
I'm excited by the short, minuscule distances that separate the important places in his life. The house where he was born and the place where he was murdered in the street are separated by a few steps. And not far from there, a few houses separate the house in which he lived and wrote (a small plaque on the wall notes this fact ) and Villa Landau, the house where he was held at the end of his life by a German officer, Felix Landau, so that he would sort looted art for him and paint pictures for the officer's children (a little old lady on the ground floor angrily points out that she has no connection to "that Landau" ).
In the big synagogue in Drohobycz, one of a dozen that once stood in the city, there is a photo exhibit. We gather in the huge, abandoned space of the ruined building. On the walls there are still shades of pinkish blue, and you can see erased passages of prayers in Hebrew. "Fulfill my wishes for good, and satisfy my desire and grant my request ..." During the Soviet period, the place was turned into a furniture store. In the place where the holy ark stood, they broke through the wall to make room for an iron door, through which they probably took out ugly furniture to the homes of the buyers.
Rabbi Baruch Brenner, a Jerusalemite who is active in theater, and also a guest of the festival, suddenly lifts his voice in a Hasidic song of prayer. Brenner's voice, the sight of the synagogue and the huge cathedral-like space come together - and all of us, Jews and non-Jews, get the chills. Here, unexpectedly, is the most moving experience I have during the journey to Drohobycz. When Baruch Brenner ends his singing we all fall silent. Nobody wants to be the first to break the silence.
On each day of the festival, I made sure to slip away from some of the events and to wander alone among the stations of Schultz's life. The final evening, I go once again to the place where he was murdered. I sit in silence a few steps from there. Ukrainian girls pass by tapping in their stiletto heels, wearing skirts lighter than air. Above, on the treetops, at twilight, the crows gather in order to quarrel about good places to sleep. They call out loudly, rending the darkening skies, and suddenly I think how close the sound of the crow's cries, is to "kriat kri'a" - which in Hebrew (depending on the spelling ) means both "calling out" or "tearing" (as in the Jewish symbol of mourning). And that is how my journey in Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz ends.
Amir Gutfreund's novels "Our Holocaust" and "The World, a Moment Later" were both published in English by Toby Press.
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| autor: ola | źródło: www.haaretz.com/magazine/week-s-end/a-city-as-heroine-1.294071 | skomentuj (0) | drukuj |
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BRUNO SCHULZ
(1892-1942)
ŻYCIE I TWÓRCZOŚĆ
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