Ruler of the compensatory myth [Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz: A Biographical Portrait]

• Published in: Books in Canada Vol. 33; no. 1; p. 16
• Main Authors: Ficowski, Jerzy, Mierau, Maurice, Robertson, Theodosia
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto Canadian Review of Books Ltd 01.01.2004
• Subjects: History & criticism; Polish literature; Schulz, Bruno
• ISSN: 0045-2564

So it is quite shocking to read a critic say things like this: "My own enchantment with the writing of Bruno Schulz lies at the heart of this book," or "...I did not know Schulz personally and am not engaged in literary theory or literary criticism..." Yet that is exactly what Jerzy Ficowski writes in his book on the great Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz; he prefers to think of himself as a "disciple" rather than a literary critic. Regions of the Great Heresy is a story of an obsessive personal mission to rescue the work of this writer from the oblivion of war, politics, and Hitler's very willing civilian executioners. Schulz was shot dead on a street corner of his hometown on November 19, 1942 by a Gestapo thug named Karl Gunther. In a dreadful irony, this was the same day he planned to escape the area, aided by friends in Warsaw. Gunther shot Schulz as retaliation against his rival and Schulz's Gestapo protector, Felix Landau. Landau had incensed Gunther by shooting a Jewish dentist who was under Gunther's benevolent protection. After Schulz's brutal murder, Gunther said to Landau, "You killed my Jew--I killed yours." Schulz was born, lived and died in Drohobycz, a town in what was called Galicia and is now part of western Ukraine. In 1892, when he was born, Drohobycz was part of the Austrian empire. Schulz was educated in Polish and learned German at home from his mother. His father, a shopkeeper, died in 1915. Just before his father's death, Schulz dropped out of architecture school because of poor health and his worsening financial situation. In 1924, after some years of unemployment, Schulz became an art and handicrafts instructor at the local high school, working hard and unhappily to support his family. He published two collections of fiction in his short life, Cinnamon Shops in 1934, and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass three years later. He also produced many remarkable drawings, paintings and illustrations. Schulz worked in obscurity and poverty as an artist, but even during his lifetime James Joyce learned Polish expressly to read Schulz's fiction in the original. English readers are best advised to pick up the 1998 Picador volume, The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz, edited by Jerzy Ficowski, and containing all of Schulz's extant fiction and a selection of his visual art, much of which is now lost.