Review of Karen Underhill’s Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

As its title promises, Karen Underhill’s Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity undertakes two major projects in one book: it offers a detailed exploration of the creative works of the great Polish Jewish writer, critic, and graphic artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), and it presents an intellectual history of a modernist, Jewish, diasporic poetics that emerged in pre-World War II Galicia. Each chapter weaves together readings of specific works by Schulz with various cultural trends and ideas that were current in 1920s and 1930s Drohobycz (now Drohobych) and Lwow (now Lviv), the two locations most important for Schulz’s biography. These include the language wars over Yiddish and Hebrew (Chapter 1), Cultural Zionism and the Jewish Cultural Renaissance (Chapter 2), the high modernist aesthetics of diaspora Judaism (Chapters 3 and 4), the cultural politics of Polish as a Jewish language (Chapter 5), and the recuperation of biblical and Talmudic exegesis for modern art (Chapter 6). Underhill’s goal is never to paint Schulz as a representative or proponent of a specific movement or ideology, but rather to demonstrate how various cultural, political, and religious strains flowed in and out of his writing and graphic art.

Throughout the manuscript, Underhill is highly attentive to the profound literary and personal influence of other writers and thinkers on Schulz. For example, Chapter 3 is devoted to Schulz’s intellectual and artistic exchange with the avant-garde Yiddish and Polish poet and aesthetic theorist Debora Vogel, and Chapter 4 explores three major modern Jewish writers from Eastern and Central Europe whose work also reflects the vagaries and promises of diaspora existence: Franz Kafka (German), Itzik Manger (Yiddish), and Ahad Ha’am (Hebrew). Underhill thereby shows that Schulz is at once a singular voice in the modern Jewish literary landscape and that his work encodes a multiplicity of debates and questions that shaped intellectual and cultural life in Galicia at the time. This, in turn, supports the book’s central aim of reading Bruno Schulz’s work as a post-secularist expression of both “a modernist, universalist and ethical individualist ethos” and “an affirmatively diasporist, Jewish ethos” (26).

It is worth examining how this plays out in closer detail. In Chapter 3, rather than delineating similarities between Schulz’s Polish stories and Vogel’s Yiddish poems and theoretical writings, Underhill argues for a “shared artistic and poetic vocabulary” (92), as if they were working with a common set of raw materials that each artist shaped according to his or her inclination and vision—a concrete style and an investment in avant-garde formalism in Vogel’s case, and a “baroque agglomeration of metaphor and mythic allusion” in Schulz’s (115). What was the shared raw material of their writing, the experiential and ideological substrate that fueled these artists? It included the effects of commodification and commercialization on human life; Galician cityscapes, including domestic and exterior spaces; urban detritus, advertising, and popular literature; a sensitivity to the natural world and especially changing seasons; and the figure of the mannequin, a personal obsession for both writers. By inviting us to inhabit their relationship—which also involved a romantic attachment that did not result in marriage—Underhill allows us to imagine how a common background and set of experiences could generate two such distinct yet mutually illuminating bodies of work.

In the chapter on Kafka, Manger, and Ahad Ha’am, the connections are far less intimate—Schulz had no personal relationship with them—but the links are no less significant. Underhill explores certain shared themes (diaspora, displacement, Jewish cultural continuity), figures (the father, the shopkeeper), and locations (the shop, the sanatorium) among these four writers. A true high point is the reading of “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” after which Schulz’s second volume of short stories is named. According to Underhill, Schulz’s figure of a father living in a sanatorium, at once awaiting death and already dead, reflects the idea of “the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe as terminally ill, doomed to an unknown fate, not able to survive much longer in the current political and economic climate” (128). Thus, the sanatorium is also a mausoleum, and the story serves as a reflection on ways of burying and mourning—and perhaps also reviving—an already dead Jewish tradition. As in Kafka, the Jewish content in Schulz is largely submerged. Indeed, this is just one among many shared features of their writing, which also includes a preoccupation with animals, hybrids, and other liminal figures; an interest in the legacy of the Habsburg Empire, including inscrutable institutional and bureaucratic forces; and above all a “matter-of-fact realism, displaced […] into an uncanny realm outside of normal time” (136). Underhill draws different but equally fruitful connections between Schulz’s anxious diasporism and Manger’s creation of a Yiddish midrashic literature rooted in Galicia and Ahad Ha’am’s turn away from political Zionism toward earlier forms of spiritual and cultural renewal.

The book’s comparatist impulse goes beyond its exploration of related literary works in Polish, German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Indeed, perhaps its most intriguing and innovative feature is that each chapter is dialogical in its own way: a conversation is set up with other literary texts and writers, art works and artists, or religious movements and figures. ^{1 1} The only exception is Chapter 5, which does not discuss a specific work by Schulz, though it provides essential background on issues and debates surrounding the idea of Polish as a Jewish literary language. The chapter challenges readers to think about the place of Jews and Jewish culture in interwar Poland in terms other than minorityhood and assimilation, given Poland’s large and well-established urban Jewish population and hence the limited relevance of the West European model of acceptance and embourgeoisement through assimilation. Instead, Underhill shows that linguistic and cultural politics in interwar Poland were driven more by Jewish attachment to the values of pluralism, tolerance, and universalism, which were challenged and undermined from different sides—by nationalists who sought to exclude Jews from the official Polish cultural sphere, and by Jews who insisted that Jewish writers employ Yiddish or Hebrew and address Jewish themes. Chapter 2 analyzes Schulz’s essay on the graphic artist E. M. Lilien, who was also from Drohobycz, but who devoted himself explicitly to Zionist causes. In Underhill’s reading, Lilien becomes a cipher through which to grasp Schulz’s own attachment to Jewish mythic and folk traditions, his interest in combining text and image, and his commitment to Jewish spiritual renewal in the diaspora. Chapter 6 is also focused on visual art, this time Schulz’s own early graphic work collected in The Book of Idolatry, whose messianic-erotic imagery Underhill links to ancient Jewish textual practices, Frankist messianism, and the modern production of advertising, kitsch, trash, and lowbrow entertainment. In both chapters, the interpretation of images is complemented by multi-layered stories about their reception and production in the political, intellectual, religious, and cultural context of interwar Galicia.

I will offer one final example of this dialogism, perhaps the book’s most compelling and original instance of it. Chapter 1 approaches Schulz’s literary debut, the 1934 short story collection Cinnamon Shops through contemporary reviews of the work, with particular emphasis on one penned by the Yiddish poet Rokhl Korn for the literary journal Literarische bleter. Thus, rather than beginning from the question of what Schulz’s stories mean for us today, Underhill embeds them in a richly layered cultural-historical context that allows us to grasp what they meant for his Polish Jewish contemporaries. In the case of Korn, her own use of biblical imagery and language to elucidate Schulz’s stories reflects their layering of myth and metaphor, and “offers us almost a glimpse of what his writing might sound like had it been written in, or translated into, Yiddish” (33). This analysis allows Underhill to shift into a more theoretical and productively speculative mode, drawing on Waïl Hassan’s notion of “translational literature”—literature that works through its condition of linguistic exile by returning it to a “home” it never knew. Moreover, by reading Schulz’s stories through a Yiddish literary lens, Underhill (via Korn) is able to demonstrate how Jewish textual and religious traditions infuse Cinnamon Shops, from general themes (e.g., suffering, exile, and redemption) to specific narratives (e.g., the kabbalistic creation myth of tikkun, or repair). The point, however, is not to deny the universalizing tendency of Schulz’s writings or their investment in the laden materiality of modern existence, but rather to unearth the Jewish meanings — whether theological, cultural, or historical — buried within the rich tapestry of objects, people, and places evoked in his works. By reading Korn (in Yiddish) reading Schulz (in Polish), Underhill can elucidate the project of forging a diasporic Jewish culture across multiple languages and traditions.

This dialogical approach reflects a genuine interpretive humility. Schulz’s writings are so evocative, layered, and strange that Underhill could easily have brought any number of current critical trends to bear on them, from new materialism to decolonialism, from posthumanism to post-critique. This would be in line with the recent tendency to lay claim to Schulz to pursue independent interests, whether literary (e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes) or national (e.g., Israel’s acquisition and relocation of Schulz’s Holocaust murals to Yad Vashem). Instead of bringing Schulz to us, so to speak, Underhill engages in the far more laborious, courageous, and gratifying task of bringing us to Schulz—allowing readers to engage with his entire cosmos, rather than treating individual stories as test cases for our newest critical theories or personal projects. Ultimately this immersive approach does bring Schulz to us, and does so in a far deeper and more provocative way than would otherwise have been possible. As Underhill notes toward the end of the book’s introduction, ethno-national models dominated both Polish and Jewish literary studies in the twentieth century. It is only in the last few decades that literary scholars have become open to and interested in “diasporic, hybrid, and translational models of culture and identity,” and have therefore begun to pay “post-secularist attention to cultural projects that arise at the intersection of materialism and theology” (27). Underhill’s book demonstrates how our moment has finally caught up with a literary and aesthetic ethos that was vibrant and generative a century ago in Bruno Schulz’s Galicia.