Karen Underhill has produced a spectacular, immaculately argued addition to the vast archive of Schulzology. Across 200 pages and six chapters, she crafts a compelling argument concerning the two main motive forces that animated Bruno Schulz’s adult biography, proffering a new kind of organizing logic that may well revise how scholars approach the life and work—and particularly the spiritual life and the artistic permutations—of Drohobycz’s best-known writer. Along the way, she reconsiders both the mythos and the key nodal points of Schulz’s career and the publication history of his main texts, discovering hidden (or at least partly occluded) topoi and connections the writer developed with (and within) Austrian-Hapsburg culture, Jewish modernity, and the Polish national cause as the latter materialized between the two world wars. The work’s specific strength is to reprioritize the blocks of Schulz’s formative Jewish, Galician, and Polish identities into new alignment, all staged in, and within, the twin guiding discourses of golus, or exile and exposure to the unforgiving winds of diaspora, and tikkun, the principle of repairing the broken world.

The book’s six chapters are the following: “Leading the Word out of its Golus,” where Underhill re-reads the early 1930s breakthrough collection of semi-autobiographical tales Cinnamon Shops; “A Creation Born of the Longing for Golus,” an examination of Schulz’s essay on Drohobycz-born Art Nouveau illustrator Maurycy Lilien (1874–1925); “The Sunday Seminars of Bruno Schulz and Debora Vogel,” where Underhill illuminates the artistic and personal entanglements of these two innovators, laying to rest a host of misunderstandings as to the nature of their relationship; “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,” wherein she reads Schulz in the ambivalent context of Franz Kafka’s earlier experimentation with subjectivity, space, and belonging; “Acculturation without Assimilation,” a short chapter that articulates the discontents of the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of deterritorialized minor literature in the context of Schulz’s memory of Galicia; and, finally, “What Have You Done with the Book?,” in which Underhill synthesizes the main topoi of her earlier explorations into a three-part concluding statement, to which I return below. The chapters unfold largely chronologically, though in the final one she returns to Schulz’s earliest (known) published text, the 1920s “Undula,” which appeared pseudonymously and was uncovered only several years ago, and which is repositioned as an uneasy urtext.

While all six chapters offer compelling readings, it is Ch. 3, “The Sunday Seminars …,” that forms the centerpiece of the work. Based on substantial archival research, Underhill’s close reading adumbrates key sources, textual correspondences, and mutual influences, all part of the dynamics of inspiration between Vogel and Schulz, and offers a persuasive explication and a historicist justification for their choice of language. Vogel ultimately elected to write in Yiddish (occasionally self-translating from Polish or German [102–3]) for a cubist-constructivist enunciation of the crisis of modernity and the hopes of a Jewish futurity in the context of that crisis. Schulz, treating many of the same themes, such as the figure of the mannequin, the topos of tandeta, the banalities of the patois of advertising slogans in a pastiche of neo-Romanticized “Jugendstil and fin-de-siecle” aesthetics (101), nonetheless remained wedded to Polish. Importantly, Underhill traces the development of a portmanteau lexicon that sought to incorporate the hopes of a universal modern Jewish identity, in and through that Slavic language, in a sense against Yiddish or Hebrew, though without any formal renunciation (102–5).

Though compelling, the book’s argument is slightly marred by several liabilities. One is repetition of themes, almost a set of beginnings that appear passim (for example, one of Schulz’s crucial interlocutors, the polymath S.I. Witkiewicz, is introduced to readers at least three times in different contexts, with the most formal presentation coming only in Ch. 3 [91–96]). Further, while some writers and artists from that vanguard did indeed “disappear” during the PRL era (1952–89), at least during the initial period of Stalinist homogenization, this omission hardly involved a “large swath of the intellectual landscape” (94). Finally, as Underhill explores the foundations of Schulz’s local habitus and notes the presence of Polish antisemitism and corrosive nationalist discourses, she does not pause to address the Ukrainian national cause, nor, indeed, locate the presence of Ukrainian culture or its language anywhere within this matrix (a short mention is made on 156). As recent studies of life in the interwar years in these regions have shown (B. Balint’s 2023 biography of Schulz being one), understanding the Ukrainian component is crucial to explicating the social spaces and cultural/political identities that were possible in Drohobycz and the Lemberg/Lwów/Lviv region, both during the Galician interlude of Schulz’s early life as well as later.

The project really comes together as Underhill works through the key precepts of what she terms Jewish modernity (within the European or western model), in particular the enunciation of the word as an amulet against death/dissolution, and the binary, so central to Schulz’s works, of absence vs. manifesting co-presence, which enables the subject to take possession of the prevailing “social and cultural imaginary” (even, or perhaps especially, in the lands of exile) (195). These themes are extensively analyzed as well as complicated in the final chapter, leading to a brilliant summation. Underhill notes, first, that Schulz was a “metaphysical modernist, interested in substance or spirit and the processes by which that substance enters into and moves through form” (205). This revelation is followed by her claim—whose proof of concept is the book’s chief argument—that “Polish … was a form, a medium, capable of giving profound expression to the modern Galician Jewish experience.” The final element assembles these two constructs into a dazzling motto of extraterritorial belonging, as she posits the diasporic as both formative and endlessly generative for both thematics and discourse: “[a]s his aesthetic philosophy matured, [Schulz] leveraged the fact of … writing in Polish to develop a luminous poetics of golus … and of redemptive exegesis” (2–5). For anyone who has meditated on Schulz’s literary or visual texts, this conclusion is well-nigh inescapable, but it has rarely, at least in my own readings, been expressed in so clear and powerful a form.