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

by Benjamin Balint

A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. 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 furor 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.

8 pages of color illustrations

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Jewish, Art, Poland, Book Club

307 pages, Hardcover

First published April 11, 2023

Reviews

[Jolanta (knygupė) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bruno Schulz (1892 – 1942) - lenkų literatūros meistras, dailininkas, literatūros kritikas, dailės mokytojas. Žydas, gimęs Habsburgų valdomoje Galicijoje (dabar Ukrainos teritorijoje), mokėsi Lvive, Vienoje. Mąstė ir kūrė lenkų kalba. Gimė ir buvo nacių nužudytas Drohobych miestelyje, kuris keliavo per imperijų, valstybių ir santvarkų rankas (Austrija, Ukraina, Lenkija, TSRS, Vokietija). Atviras mazochistas, nesuprastas, nepripažintas nei to meto savo miestelio žydų bendruomenės, nei ukrainiečių ar lenkų. O va dabar, jo trokšta visos trys valstybės.
Ši nauja (2023) knyga ne tik apie Bruno Schulzą, bet ir apie jo klaikų laikmetį. Apie žydų žudynes vykdomas tiek vokiečių nacistų, tiek paprastų miestelio gyventojų. Apie jo freskos, tapytos gete pagrobimą (2001) ir išvežimą į Izraelį.

Pirmą kart išgirdau apie Bruno Schulzą skaitant Witoldo Gomrowicz Dienoraščius. Ir minėjo jis ten Bruno su didžiule pagarba. O sulaukti iš arogantiškojo WG pagiriamojo žodžio kolegoms - labai jau išskirtinis dalykas. Greičiausiai dėl to ir susidomėjau Bruno. Susipažinau su jo išlikusiais piešiniais, o va, prozos vis nedrįsau imti. Kažkaip nujaučiau, kad man pirmiau reikia labiau pažinti (kiek tai įmanoma ;)) šį išskirtinį autorių ir jo aplinką.
Labai rekomenduoju.

[Jan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes and it'll change.

Often said about Atlanta and about various other locales.

What isn't said so often, though, is that if you don't like the flag you're living under, wait a few decades and that will change.

Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. His life began under the banner of the Austro-Hungarian double-headed eagle and ended in the genocidal dehumanization of Nazi occupation. Born a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, Schulz would--without moving--become a subject of the West Ukrainian People's Republic (November 1918 to July 1919), the Second Polish Republic (1919 to 1939), the USSR (September 1939 to July 1940), and, finally, the Third Reich.

----------------------
Moreover,

In Communist Poland, Jewish victims of the Nazis were tallied not as Jews but among the Polish victims of "The Great Patriotic War"; they were said to have been murdered not as members of a "race," as defined by the Nuremberg Laws, but as opponents of fascism. "The paradox of eight hundred years of Jewish presence in these lands," the Polish photographer Mikolaj Grynberg said of this conflation, "was that they were only allowed to be Poles once they were dead."

Bruno Schulz was born and lived most of his life in Drohobycz, a town located near Lviv, or Lvov, depending on which flag it was under at the time (currently Ukraine's). Before the events of the mid-twentieth century, Drohobycz was 40% Jewish with the rest Polish and Ukrainian Catholics. As a residual of its imperial past, the populace had a divided job description based on ethnicity; the Jews were the merchants, the Poles the gentry, and the Ukrainians the peasants. After the war and with Stalinist-era population transfers of Poles and Ukrainians, this polyglot pluralism was erased. But with time we can imagine vocational diversification would emerge, despite the new ethnic uniformity. So it is that not all Israelis are economists or doctors and not all Ukrainians are farmers, even if history has left its mark.

Another key fact is that in that oil had been discovered in the Drohobycz area, contributing to the economy and industrial status.

Bruno Schulz was wedded to Drohobycz, experiencing his hometown as a source of his creativity. His most serious love affair ended because he could not conceive of leaving Drohobycz.

Why I read this book:
Not because I'd read Bruno Schulz but because I'd read and liked Benjamin Balint's previous book, Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy. I had Bruno Schulz, the book, on audio, and thanks to my local library have had the hardback too. But where did I learn about the book? It must have been a review. An audiobook takes me a while these days, and I've gone and forgotten where I first learned of it.

I did read an essay by New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz, who knew the family lore that her grandfather was the illegitimate son of Bruno Schulz' older brother but had no idea the rumor was entertained in the wider world outside of her family until she was shocked to read about it in this book. So her article is both memoir and book review. I had forgotten about it, too, and have just reread.
(Kathryn Schulz, "Family Matters," The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2023, p. 72)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

His life:
Bruno Schulz was an artist as well as a writer. Like Kafka he was a neurotic and a real tortured poet, so to speak (in contrast to a certain contemporary pop star). His art tended toward sadomasochistic erotica, and again like Kafka his relationships did not thrive in the ordinary sense, although they did succeed by feeding into his writing. He earned a living by teaching school, where he mesmerized his students by his storytelling, the start of his writing. When history came for Drohobicz, he was ground under first by Soviet insistence on Social Realism (and met demands though he said such a phenomenon did not exist) and then Nazism. He became a "necessary Jew" working for Felix Landau, a murderous Nazi officer who considered himself an arts patron, and on Landau's orders painted fairy tale scenes on his children's nursery walls -- his final artwork. He was shot in the street on "Black Thursday," November 19, 1942, at the age of 50, under disputed circumstances, possibly because Landau had shot another Nazi officer's Jew.

His literary output was almost swallowed up by the war, the Nazis, socialist realism, and the subsequent nationalisms. Very little survived, consisting chiefly of two story collections that seem to have amazed all who came across them. The Polish rescuer of his work was Jerzy Ficowski, who spent a lifetime pursuing it. His writing inspired Philip Roth, David Grossman, Jonothan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss, among others. There is a missing novel, The Messiah, perhaps his masterpiece, which so far has not surfaced.

His afterlife
His small oeuvre is said to be so fantastically great that it has acquired a rescuer who The Polish rescuer of his work was Jerzy Ficowski, who spent a lifetime pursuing it. His writing has inspired Philip Roth, David Grossman, Jonothan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss, among others.

Controversy has entered re that last wall mural he painted on Landau's orders -- the fairy tale scenes in the nursery. A German father and son pair of documentary makers tracked down the house, which had been subdivided into apartments, and the paintings were now in the multiply whitewashed pantry of an elderly couple. The father, Christian Geissler was motivated by guilt because his own father had been a Nazi. The Geisslers informed the staff of Yad Vashem of the 2001 find in March of that year, and in May a team of Israeli art experts came and, having removed the pictures according to known techniques, spirited them out of Drohobycz, apparently having greased the hands of local officials and with the blessing of the elderly residents of the apartment with the formerly adorned pantry who, in search of peace, gave them the artwork gratis.

Although the find itself had attracted little notice, the heist provoked outrage. All involved supported their stances vigorously, the Israelis on the basis that Schulz had died as a Jew. According to the author, the claim...

...rests on a simple predicate: Having mourned their dead, commemorated their martyrs, and rebuilt their shattered cities, the Polish people had recovered from the war: Polish Jews--and their thousand-year-old culture--had not. As far as Jews are concerned, Yad Vashem maintained, Poland is a wasteland. Thus the rescue of Schulz's fragments was nothing lessthan a step in the redemptive over coming of the Jews' exile and fragmentation. For Yad Vashem--concerned with Schulzl's death as a Jew rather than his life as an artist--those fragments are witnesses to the Shoah by one of its countless martyrs. (The Greek word for witness is martis, or martyr.)

Balint notes the "elasticity" of Israel's moral claims, and that opinions of the few Jews remaining in Drohobycz were split. At the same time he describes the antisemitism seemingly ingrained in the culture and how it led to violence back during the war years and still influenced attitudes.

In Poland, the author also notes this controversy arose during the "fraught moment" when the country was beginning to face the fact of its own complicity in antisemitism, that is, that Poles hadn't on the whole been innocent victims of Nazism but had themselves been willing executioners. Only in the late 1980s did Polish intellectuals begin to face their own involvement.

In 1992 Poland issued a stamp in Schulz's honor. There were other celebrations including a three-day conference in Drohobycz. But the event received little publicity locally.

In that year, Polish Israeli Jews commissioned two busts of Schulz, one for Yad Vashem and one to be placed in Drohobycz. But both sites declined, Yad Vashem on grounds it didn't have room. As for Drohobycz, a city official feared residents would resent a monument to "a stranger." The city currently has monuments to four Ukrainian writers, none of whom died there.

Also in Ukraine, a Drohobycz city council meeting in June of 2001, soon after the heist, participants who resented foreign funds for a Schulz museum complained about all the concern over Schulz when insufficient attention had been paid to "our own historical figures" and "our own culture."

Schulz's gravesite is unknown, and the Jewish cemetery where he was probably buried was in vandalized condition. In 2006 a small copper plaque with its inscription in both Polish and Ukrainian was ceremoniously placed at the site of his murder. But it raised a chorus of antisemitic protest complaining of the loss of Ukrainian dignity and the "Judaization" of Ukraine. The mayor tried to tamp down on the controversy by reflecting the Drohovicz was made famous by Schulz and that, given its history, the town belongs to Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews alike. In 2008 the plaque was pried lost and sold for scrap metal by an illiterate locale who denied knowing its significance.

Asked if interest in Schulz's writing in Ukraine is growing,

Schulz scholar Andriy Pavlyshyn said, "Ukraine is not a literature-centric culture, unlike Poland and Russia,where they go crazy over hte written word.... In Ukraiine, even thke most inventive books sell hardly a thousand copies."

The paragraph goes on to cite quotes indicating a low level of education in Ukraine and a tendency to hold their geniuses and talented people with contempt, and in Drohobycz, at least, to ignore their spiritual heritage.

Here is a quote from one of Schulz's former students:

I have never been back to Drohobycz, and I don't want to. Wilek Tepper flew there to say good-bye and laid a plaque on one of those large graves in Bronica. And what happened? In broad daylight, people came with a bulldozer looking for gold and unearthed the bones.

A word about this input as to the supposed Ukrainian national character: the world is chock-full of facts. We pull out those relevant to the topic at hand and highlight them, while other facts remain in shadow in the meantime. I want to say I support Ukraine in their valiant resistance to Russian aggression. I read Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. I admire Ukrainian bravery. I know the current president is Jewish. I know little to nothing about how Ukrainians feel about that fact. Yet here are more facts. At present they sit alongside each other, unintegrated and inconvenient truths.

A further word as to the morality of the removal of Schulz's last artwork (or some of it) to Israel: Kathryn Schulz in her New Yorker article concluded the approved, univeralized version, that is, that Israel did wrong; that just because Schulz died as a Jew doesn't mean he lived as one, and that his art belongs where it was created.

But Ms. Schulz, although she read and reviewed the book, didn't consider those inconvenient facts, at least not in her review.

One can wonder if his work would be safe there.

But beyond that, can we say that Drohobycz as he knew it still exists? He was one of those Austro-Hungarian Jewish intellectuals who was a European while everybody else was a Pole, a Ukrainian, a Slav, or whatever. I think it was Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front who, when exiled from Germany, was asked if he missed Germany. His answer was something like this: "Why should I? I'm not a Jew." My point is that although a town by the same name is still on the map, his town is gone. His town was a bustling multicultural city that at the end of the nineteenth century was 48% Jewish. Almost everybody was killed or got out of Dodge.

(In this connection I frequently think Hannah Arendt maintained her relationship with Heidegger because he was all that was left of the entire social order, that is, all that was left of home.)

So, to where should Bruno Schulz's artwork be returned?

In conclusion:
I can't locate it in the text right now, but a settlement acceptable to all was reached whereby Schultz's last work is now considered on loan to Yad Vashem. Will add if I can find it.

While writing this review I located this 2004 essay, "Who Owns Bruno Schultz," by Benjamin Paloff, in the Boston Review. The author may not have all the information Benjamin Balint has, but it's a good discussion: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles...

The Polish film director Wojciech Has adapted Schulz's stories for the screen in his 1973 movie "The Hourglass Sanatorium." I haven't checked its availability yet.

Schulz's two story collections may be in my future.

Let's say 4 1/2 stars

[Robert Reinhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is much more than a "biography" of the great Jewish/Polish/Ukranian writer and artist Bruno Schulz. It's a penetrating story of art lost and found and disappeared against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the history of shifting nationhoods. Balint's prose and his detective work seeking out the far flung persons still available to add snatches of memory and witness are stunning. Just published, the book is able to thread history even into the fabric of today's war in Ukraine led by a Jewish president. The religion of art Schulz practiced in his brief career before his murder on the streets by the animal Nazi nightmare is one of the best examples of an artist who lived on in unimaginable ways and influenced writers ever after. The story of recovering some of his lost pictures and paintings and their clandestine transport to Israel reads like a thriller but also provides a means to spotlight the complicated forces of prejudices and appropriations fighting over the artist's legacy. Schulz himself could not be assigned to any one category and was made of many conflicting and uncharacteristic emotions. A warning: the brutality in the city of Drohobycz practiced by the Germans and the tormentor, Felix Landau, who called Schulz "my Jew"are difficult passages to read.

[Ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid history/biography that nevertheless couldn’t decide if it wanted to be about Schulz himself or about the dubious acquisition of his murals by Yad Vashem and the contested politics of space and national and cultural identity in the 20th and 21st centuries. I think it could have done both in a longer space, but the organisation simply wasn’t there in the book as it is.

[Dan Cassino · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a puzzle book, trying not to answer, but to set up, the question of who owns the art of Bruno Schulz. Despite not moving, staying in his corner of Galicia, he was Polish and Ukrainian and Austro-Hungarian. He was Jewish, even if he wasn’t at all observant, and didn’t claim any real affiliation to it. He was an artist very much tied to the inter-war period in Vienna, but he didn’t spend much time there.
The action begins with the discovery of long lost murals he painted in a nursery of a sadistic Nazi officer who kept him basically enslaved while his city was occupied, and the Jewish community there slaughtered. Who owns this work? The Germans who discovered it? The residents of the apartment where it was found, who want nothing to do with any of this? The Israeli government, which swoops in and claims them for a museum that can restore and better care for them?
To try and answer this question, Balint then walks us through Schulz’s life and art. Best remembered for his influential novels - thought not in his hometown, or home country, which has done its best to erase the memory of the Jewish community that once prospered there- he was also a talented artist, with working centering on men humiliated by stocking clad women as part of a complex mythology of related archetypes.
Can a country that has disowned its past lay claim to the genius that it produced? Does the fact that an artist was a Jew mean that Israel has a moral, if not a legal claim to his work? Can we separate the art he produced during the war from the horrific context in which it was produced? Balint doesn’t answer these questions, nor do I think he could, but he gives us the tools we need to try and answer them ourselves.

[Umar Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was primarily interested in reading this because I'd read The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. There isn't much fat on this book at all, and it moves at a fast pace, exploring the question of just who are the inheritors and caretakers of the legacy and work of Bruno Schulz? Poland? Ukraine? Israel? These questions bring us to more familiar questions. Polish and Ukrainian dismissal of The Final Solution and the unique targeting of Jews for extermination. We were all Polish! All Ukrainian! Posthumously, of course. Then there is the question : Is Israel, a modern nation-state not born until six years after the murder of Schulz, the rightful caretaker of the works of all murdered Jews in the Holocaust? Which brings us to the question as to why exactly was Schulz killed? Because he spoke Polish? Because of the borders he lived within? Or was it because he was a Jew? We all know the answer. As Yad Vashem has a mission to be the caretakers of the legacies of the millions of victims like Schulz, I think the answer is pretty clear. As to who the work of Schulz inspires? Who can claim him? Who has an affinity for his work? That has multiple answers and vantage points.

[Joanne Gass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruno Schulz is an enigma; we know he was an artist and an author, and we know that he was murdered by a Nazi. But the fascination with Schulz centers on his, often opaque, fictions and his "identity." Does he belong to Poland (he wrote in Polish); does he belong to Ukraine; does he belong to Israel? This book not only excavates the life (lives?) of Bruno Schulz but also the tragedy of his life and times, and, finally, the question of his place in literary, artistic, and political history. The issue revolves around the "liberation" of his murals from his hometown in Poland by the Israelies and thier reappearance in the Holocaust museum in Israel. So, whose history does he belong to? The question remains largely unanswered. But, it's an interesting mystery to explore.

[CarolineFromConcord · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a fan of Bruno Schulz since the Théâtre de Complicité brought a dramatic rendition of the wildly fanciful and profound "Street of Crocodiles" to Minneapolis in the late 1990s. Since then, I have read whatever I could find about his influential writings, his art, and his life and death.

The new Benjamin Balint book covers it all in the greatest depth yet, but I have to tell you, the details of the Holocaust in the part of Eastern Europe that grounded Schulz's writing were so vivid and horrendous, I almost gave up.

The town of Drohobych, in the area then known as Galicia, was part of Poland and is now in Ukraine. With the active participation of Poles and Ukrainians at the time, the Nazis exterminated what was a thriving Jewish population. In fact, as I learned, one quarter of Holocaust murders occurred in Poland, and even today, there is only a tiny, intense group of Bruno Schulz fans and intellectuals who care about his history or about Jewish culture in his town. If a Jewish oligarch spends a million dollars restoring a destroyed synagogue, as happened before the current Russian war, vandals break windows before the dedication. A plaque in the street on the spot where witnesses saw a Nazi shoot Schulz had to be replaced with a copy after a resident dug it up for scrap.

Meanwhile, according to Balint, the only interest Polish and Ukrainian officialdom has in the art and writing of a man many consider a literary giant is reclaiming wall paintings the Mossad stole (probably after paying bribes to willing officials) and took to Israel.

Schulz created the paintings for one of the most sadistic Nazis that ever existed (read the details if you are brave enough). Felix Landau allowed Schulz to stay alive as he obliterated other innocent people, sometimes hundreds in one day -- writing about it all with delight afterward -- because he wanted to use him to paint fantasy images in his children's bedroom. I'm not kidding.

Adjectives, nouns, verbs are too weak to convey the last days of the Jewish community in Drohobych. The strongest words I know feel like tissue paper, meaningless. The only way I could convey the horror to you would be to give you the details, and I'm not going to do that. I came to the conclusion that in a time that neo-Nazis are rising in the US and are even employed in a Arizona congressman's Capitol Hill office, a time that ordinary New Yorkers watch someone be murdered on the subway without intervening -- I came to the conclusion that it was my duty to read those details. Perhaps you will, too.

The literary and whodunnit aspects of the book are fascinating and sort of a reward for facing the history. In the end, I don't think Balint comes to any conclusion about where Schulz and his art belong. The artist/writer was utterly immersed in his geographic place, but in reality, that place no longer exists.

[Vic Lauterbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is part art and culture history and part biography. The former captures the lost world of multi-ethnic Eastern Europe that vanished in the cataclysm of war and post-war ethnic cleansing. The latter tells how an artist was rediscovered. It is a sympathetic portrait of a man with many afflictions who tried to draw the worlds he imagined. As Mr. Balint shows, Schulz had an inferiority complex, agoraphobia and hypersensitivity to sounds. He was also a masochist and fetishist of the harmless variety (harmless to others at least). An artist turned writer who was acclaimed as an avante garde genius in his lifetime, he was drawn to the West but stayed in his home town (Drohobych, then in Poland, now in Ukraine) due to his fundamentally inhibited nature. Trapped by the war, he died there along with 90% of Poland's three million Jews. The last third of the book tells how the rediscovery of Schulz's art stirred up old hatreds and the ghosts of all the victims never counted that still haunt Poland and Ukraine. The great tragedy of the Holocaust led directly to more tragedies as Stalin "solved" the problem of Polish-Ukrainian hostility by "cleansing" Galicia of 810,000 Poles and "cleansing" Poland of 630,000 Ukrainians. (The terrible human coast of Allied victory is fully documented in William I. Hitchcock's The Bitter Road to Freedom [2009].) The new Communist regimes set out transfer all guilt to "real" Germans and exculpate all others. All deaths were merged into the "suffering of all freedom-loving peoples" under the slogan 'Do Not Divide the Dead.' Ukraine's three million Orthodox Christian dead were counted, but not the Shoah, 1.5 million dead Jews. Records of Poland's numerous post-war pograms were suppressed, and official sympathy for the new Jewish state evaporated when the USSR officially switched sides after the Six-Day War. Poland's tiny population of Jewish survivors, denied the right to emigrate for 20 years, were purged from their jobs and "encouraged" to leave for "their country." As historian Lucy Dawidowicz wrote, "the anti-Zionist campaign put the finishing touches to the Final Solution to the Jewish question which the German had so efficiently accomplished for them." It was eerie to read this story now amidst surging anti-Semitism among Academic elites in the West (disguised in true Leftist form as "anti-Zionism"). Then, as now, hatred is always cloaked in victimhood. Anti-Jewish rioters from Munich to Kielce claimed to be resisting a global Zionist hegemony. The same fires that consumed Schulz and his world are now burning brightly in ours. Recommended to anyone interested in the history of Eastern Europe.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schulz is one of those authors who is likely your favourite author's favourite author - his dense, spiralling prose are imaginative and expansive. A troubled man, he was both something of an outside and minor cult figure in his own lifetime. He wrote in Polish, was killed in the Holocaust for being Jewish and is intrinsically linked to the town of Drohobych (in Ukraine), which he spent much of his life. Much of his archive - both as an artist and writer, has been lost, including his manuscript 'The Messiah'. That is not to say that still to this day some of it turns up from time to time - but where his works should be kept is hotly contested - Poland, Israel and Ukraine all stake claim to his legacy and yet none are deserving.

Ballint's argument is a complex one that avoids fully answering this question but it is judiciously argued in the way it brings complexity into the mix and doesn't shy away from difficult issues. Some of the testimony he collates is haunting just as others are vague and confusing. In the end, his legacy defies border and national identity. His research is detailed and it asks huge questions about museums, conservation, archives and identity.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not an avid reader of biographies, certainly not of people I'm not already familiar with. But this one was recommended by a book club and sounded interesting. It's a very tragic story, with many of Schulz's best works lost or deliberately destroyed during the Holocaust, along with his life.

As his life was cut short by the Nazis, the second half of the book turns to his legacy, including the controversial removal by Israeli agents of the frescoes that Schulz was forced by the Nazis to paint, whisking them away to be displayed in Jerusalem without consulting the Polish or Ukrainian governments. Was this a brazen theft of culturally significant art, or a repatriation of work that inherently belongs to the homeland of the Jewish people? Unsurprisingly, it depends who you ask.

Audiobook: For a book that centers around the Holocaust, the inability of the narrator to pronounce words like "Shoah" and "Yad Vashem" is disgustingly offensive. He effortlessly rattles off polysyllabic Polish, Russian, and German words and names [although I cannot vouch for their accuracy], yet mangles even the simplest Israeli names (up to and including Menachem Begin). It's inexcusably awful.

[Elsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

very impressed by this. the book is obviously extremely well researched while still being very readable and cohesive. I think the main strength of this book is that the author refuses to portray the debate surrounding the removal of schulz’s murals by yad vashim as a two-sided argument - but rather as an issue that encapsulates many different questions regarding bruno schulz’s own identity, whether art made under coercion should be considered part of an artists body of work, and who the memory of the holocaust truly “belongs” to. many times throughout the later chapters, the author will raise a question, present sources showing multiple different perspectives in response to it, then repeat the process coming from a different angle. I admire this approach because i believe it is really effective in helping the reader develop their own nuanced opinion - rather than letting them agree or disagree with the premise that the removal of the murals was “right” or “wrong”.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dictionary defines a biography as an account of someone’s life. Normally, that means outlining the events that took place between a person’s birth and death. However, two recent works are as much, if not more, interested ion the aftereffects of their subjects’ lives than they are of the details of those lives. In “Maimonides: Faith in Reason” (Yale University Press), Alberto Manguel offers far more information about Maimonides’ writings and how future generations were influenced by them than he does of his subject’s life. While Benjamin Balint does offer more details about Bruno Schultz’s life, he also focuses on the artist/author’s work and the debate over who should own his heritage in “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History” (W. W. Norton and Company).
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...

[Kristel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've finished this and also listened to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_SHj.... This of course is the second book I read by this author. The first, also read for the JBC was [Kafka's Last Trial]. I enjoyed that one and was often reminded of that one until I realized it was the same author. Again, this book looks at who does Bruno Schulz belong to, who has the right to his art, to his writing. Really this is an ethical look at issues of race, ethnic, culture, and globalization.
Of course I want to read [Street of Crocodiles] or also known as ]The Cinnamon Shop] because it is his book on 1001 Books. A lost work, called The Messiah is thought to maybe exist somewhere in Russia. His art work is in Israel and was basically stolen by Isreal and now is on loan to Isreal.

[Þorvaldur Sigurbjörn Helgason]

Mjög góð bók um Bruno Schulz. Fyrri hlutinn fjallar um ævi skáldsins og tragísk endalok þess. Balint notfærir sér ævisögu Jerzy Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy ítarlega, þannig ef maður hefur lesið þá bók er ekki mikið af nýjum upplýsingum. Seinni hluti bókarinnar fjallar svo um arfleifð bókmennta og listaverka Schulz og þá sérstaklega alþjóðadeilurnar sem sköpuðust eftir að Ísraelsmenn stálu veggmyndum Schulz frá heimabæ hans Drohobych og fluttu þær í Yad Vashem safnið. Sá hluti er mjög vel unninn og varpar nýju ljósi á enduruppgötvun bókmenntaheimsins á verkum Schulz og framhaldslífinu sem þau hafa hlotið.

[Alon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Benjamin balint the author of this moving and tragic biography succeeds in breathing life into the character of an artist who was tragically murdered in the Holocaust, and not much of his artistic heritage managed to survive, the writer succeeds with the help of, among other things, testimonies of Schulz's students to paint a deep and round character that is very relatable

[Jon Noble · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit disappointed, I was looking for more on Schulz's life and times, some parts are skipped over.

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Melissa]

Did not finish

[Diane DeSousa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another important artist I'd never heard of, obscured by Nazis (who murdered him), the Soviets, and anti-semitism. Tragic life, but his art lives on.