Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is
considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between
the two world wars.
Celina Wieniewska (translator) was awarded the 1963 Roy
Publishers Polish-into-English prize for her translation of The
Street of Crocodiles.
Jonathan Safran Foer (foreword) is the bestselling author of
the novels Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close, and Here I Am. He lives in Brooklyn, New
York.
David A. Goldfarb (introducer) taught for eight years in the
Slavic department at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has
written on a range of writers and subjects, including Bruno Schulz,
Witold Gombrowicz, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev,
Leo Tolstoy, and East European cinema.
“[Schulz’s] very beautiful, sensitive, meaningful stories raised
the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but
I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s
the genius of the Polish language.” —Olga Tokarczuk, The
Guardian
“Every time I open his books, I’m amazed anew to discover how this
writer, a single human being who rarely left his home town, created
for us an entire world, an alternate dimension of reality. . . .
His [stories] create a fantastic universe, a private mythology of
one family, and are written in a language that brims with life, a
language that is itself the main character of the stories and is
the only dimension in which they could possibly exist. . . . On
every page, life [is] raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly
worthy of its name.” —David Grossman, The New
Yorker
“Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to
publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other
20th-century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis
Borges.” —Sjón, Vulture
“A masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically
plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive,
shy, and never raw.” —The New York Review of Books
“Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great
transmogrifiers of the world into words. . . . [His] verbal art
strikes us—stuns us, even—with its overload of beauty.” —John
Updike
“One of the most original imaginations in modern
Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick
“Schulz cannot be easily classified. He can be called a surrealist,
a symbolist, an expressionist, a modernist. . . . He wrote
sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded
in reaching depths that neither of them reached. . . . If Schulz
had been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us
untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to
make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever
lived.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer
“Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living
world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but
coherent idealistic aesthetic, The Street of Crocodiles and
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were unique and
startling productions, seeming to come out of nowhere. . . . Schulz
was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which
is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and
his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and
freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual
power.” —J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
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