In 2001, researchers discovered frescoes painted by the Polish-Jewish artist Bruno Schultz (1892–1942) in Drohobycz, Ukraine, images of fairy tales ordered by the SS officer protecting him. (Schulz was murdered shortly thereafter by a rival officer.) Within weeks, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem swooped in, carved out, and whisked away under highly suspicious circumstances most of the pieces, leading to an outcry by scholars and others, some of whom called it a theft of national artifacts. Schultz is widely considered one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century based on two volumes of short stories, Cinnamon Shops (1934) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). The debate over the ethics of Yad Vashem’s action hinged in part on whether Schultz should be considered a Jewish artist or a Polish one, categories often viewed as distinct. Benjamin Balint, in an award-winning book on the murals (Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History [New York, 2023]), suggested that they may belong in Drohobycz because Schultz’s work, he argued, lacked Jewish content.
Now Karen Underhill has produced a detailed study demonstrating not only the centrality of Jewish themes to Schultz’s work but also the extent to which his deep embeddedness in Jewish literary conversations shaped them. These included not only religious themes inspired by Kafka, neo-Hasidism, Kabbalah, and Zionism but also a vision of Jewishness deeply grounded in his multilingual Galician background. Indeed, his texts’ “polyphony” drew on material from multiple cultural traditions and spoke simultaneously to multiple audiences. She demonstrates, in short, that he was both fully Polish and fully Jewish. Far from suggesting his assimilation, his embrace of the Polish language was an act of Jewish construction. It was specifically through Polish that he promoted a vision of Jewishness at home in the Diaspora. Polish, for Schultz, was a language as Jewish as Yiddish or Hebrew, and it was in Polish that he reimagined Jewish continuity in a secularizing age.
A centerpiece of Underhill’s study is a recently discovered essay Schultz wrote about the Zionist artist E. M. Lilien, a fellow native of Drohobycz, whose work “The Creation of Man,” which depicts Theodor Herzl as an angel, adorns her cover. In the essay, Schultz rejects both political and cultural Zionism as well as “realistic” concerns about rising ethnonationalism and instead advocates a diasporic vision of Jewishness. Underhill uses the article to uncover Schultz’s broader project of an exilic vision of Jewishness in Polish, a “diaspora poetics” that celebrates Polish as a Jewish language and the Diaspora as a Jewish place.
The book is organized around conversations happening during his lifetime. Chapter 1 follows the Yiddish poet Rokhl Korn’s review of Cinnamon Shops, which situates Schultz in his Galician milieu by recovering the prewar era of polyphonous “translationality” of his texts. (Like Schultz, Korn mixed the languages of the Jewish intelligentsia: Yiddish, German, and Polish.) Underhill argues that Schultz “encrypts” Jewish layers of meaning with universalist language, but that he intends for readers to extract them, a process akin to the Lurianic myth of hidden divine sparks waiting to be extracted from the world.
Chapter 2 turns to the newly discovered essay on Lilien, in which Schultz lays out his Polish-language diasporist ethos, his vision of a humanist Jewish renaissance in Poland. The essay appeared “in exile” in the Subcarthian Review, a journal of the local oil and gas industry, “linguistic/material fragments” waiting to be sifted out. Schultz shared with other modern Jewish political ideologies a sense of freedom from Jewish law combined with a rejection of assimilation. Unlike them, however, he sought to pour Jewish content into Polish to revitalize Jewishness but make it European. His “back-to-the-land” was textual and mythical, not territorial. Zionism, for Schultz, was a resignation from messianic longing, rather than its vital continuation as the source of cultural sustenance.
Chapter 3 focuses on his relationship with the poet Debora Vogel. These conversations shaped both of their modernist worldviews, says Underhill, and because of the importance of Cinnamon Shops, shaped the “landscape of Polish modernism” writ large (98). Much of the chapter focuses on Vogel herself, who moved from Polish to Yiddish, but she emphasizes their shared diasporist project that fought against the negative portrayal of East European Jews.
Like other modernist writers, Schulz at first concealed his politics but later engaged with political debates more directly. This is the subject of chapter 4, which turns to his most famous collection, Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Empowered with the insights of his Lilien essay, Underhill analyzes this great collection in dialogue with themes common throughout modern Jewish literature, especially Kafka, who provided Schulz, “a model of golus-writing in the European vernacular, born in the Jewish diaspora.” Here one finds the climax of her argument, an analysis of Sanitorium that “unfixes definitions of both fatherland and exile,” pushing readers to reconsider where they find exile, or if it’s even a geographical category (137). With this insight, she rereads his last known story, “Fatherland.” Often thought to differ dramatically in style from his earlier work, read in its Polish-Jewish context it instead represents a clear thematic continuation. For Schultz, it is escape from Poland to Palestine (on the minds of most Jews by this time) that represents superficial comfort, lost spirituality, and death.
Chapter 5 brings it all together, exploring how his Galician context allowed for “acculturation without assimilation.” Underhill contrasts Schultz with German assimilationism, but this is an outdated strawman fallacy. German Jews also developed a diasporist “subculture” (to quote David Sorkin) in German that at times called itself “assimilationist” but was not dissimilar from what she found in Galicia. Rather than contrasting the two, it would be fruitful to read them in dialogue with each other. As in Germany, Polish-Jewish intellectuals searched for a usable Polish past on which to build a Polish-Jewish future. Schultz’s writing in Polish—which many antisemitic Polish writers rejected as inauthentic—was vital not only for the content but for the medium itself. His Polish-language work sought to bring the “Austrian idea” of cultural multiplicity into the “center of Polish high modernism” (169). It was not an “assimilatory gesture,” she concludes, but an act of “ownership, defiance, and also courage” (176).
Underhill concludes with a final chapter analyzing Schultz’s self-image as an exegete, which she considers central to his “modernist, diasporic aesthetic.” Once again, she credits his relationship with Vogel and their shared grounding in Galicia for this development. Jewish themes are prominent. One of his final stories discusses a new “Book of Radiance,” a translation of the title of the Zohar. He even incorporated Frankism, the eighteenth-century heresy that mixed Jewish and Christian symbols, imagery, and theology and could not be understood without both. Here she brings in another recently discovered Schultz story (“Urdula”), which Underhill suggests may reflect further influence of Vogel. In the end, however, it is Schultz’s memories of his childhood in Austrian Drohobycz and elements of Jewish tradition drawn from kabbalah, Frankism, Hasidism, and interwar Polish-Jewish life that provides the “raw material for his mythologizing experiments” (203).
The book is enhanced by dozens of Schultz’s drawings and works that inspired them, bringing an entire Schultz experience to readers. The stakes here are bigger than this one man, however. As Underhill notes, Schultz is part of a contemporary project to “recover forms of Jewish cultural identification that fell out of dominant narratives following the Holocaust” (26). There is a rediscovery of the “necessity of exile”—to quote a recent book by Shaul Magid—and the value of diasporic visions of Jewishness, and Schultz is one portal to this conversation. A decade ago, Drohobycz’s main synagogue was beautifully refurbished and renewed as a Jewish space, now used for secular as well as religious functions. Reading Underhill’s story of Schultz, one can only think that he would have smiled at its reopening.
