The Street of Crocodiles

The Street of Crocodiles is the story of a year of Schulz' childhood, an obviously fictional year, but a time that was mundane yet fantastic, commonplace and bizarre. Through his child's eyes, events, sensations, ideas and thoughts are conveyed with brilliant, dazzling imagery, vivid, almost too-bright pictures are painted with words in a way that is both surreal, magical and ordinary. The novel is split into thirteen chapters, each of which focuses on a different part of the Polish city of Drogobych, or on an aspect of Schulz' home life. 'Birds', for instance, is the story of his father's obsession with the winged creatures, beginning with the importation of rare bird's eggs from Africa, Holland, Hamburg, and ending with a vast aviary in the attic, with arranged marriages between different species of birds and, finally, with his father joining the birds, perching and squawking and flapping his wings. Or, 'The Street of Crocodiles', the false namesake of the book - which was actually titled 'Cinammon Shops' in Poland - a decadent, dirty arrangement of streets and buildings where anything and anyone is a commodity for purchase and use. However, The depravity, the immorality, the cheapness of the Street of Crocodiles is so great that they fail even at being depraved, revealed to instead be a mockery of a corrupt suburb, a sham crudity, a false crime. The other stories are similarly bizarre, by turns brilliantly insightful - The Birds chapter, while suitably odd, could also quite easily be read as a man's attempt to occupy himself upon a forced retirement, and failing because he doesn't know of any other life but work - or delightfully, guiltily weird and interesting. As an author, Schulz had an amazing gift for painting pictures with words. In addition to each little story having a main, plot-driven theme, they all have a secondary, emotional theme. An early chapter, describing Schulz' wandering through an abandoned part of his home which opens up into a field of flowers - yes, you read that correctly - is brilliantly depicted: the golden field of stubble shouted in the sun like a tawny cloud of locusts; in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed; seed pods exploded softly like grasshoppers. Or there is, in a later experiment of Schulz' father gone awry, this homage to animals: Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance. The narrator's useage of adjectives, verbs and nouns - or more specifically, the selection of these words - changes as the focus of the chapter changes. While awaiting a dirty train in The Street of Crocodiles, the vocabulary changes from a mild array of purely cataloguing words to 'snake', 'squat', 'coal dust' 'heaving breathing' 'strange sad seriousness'. The 'Gale' chapter

Simon McBurney's London theater company produced this play in the 1990s with material from Bruno Schulz' novel of the same name, for which the Polish Jewish writer was best known. That brilliant 1990s staging, easily one of the 20th century's most remarkable, taught perhaps tens of thousands something about this otherwise obscure artist and author, whose life the Nazis prematurely snuffed out. Schulz' 1934 novel included several of his masterful drawings and etchings, some of which also appear in other books. He painted in words and pictures. One vision of meals at his family's home obviously influenced McBurney's script, which includes a wonderful scene at a Schulz dinner featuring the family's many colorful relations and friends. The play reflects Schulz' surreal brilliance, through amazing antics--chairs hanging from a wall, tablecloths floating in air and an uncle walking on the ceiling. The play opens with a remarkable scene: The disconnected hands and feet of many Holocaust victims wave helplessly through a trap door while Schulz feeds books into a pot-bellied stove, downstage right. This evokes the era's wholesale terror, its destruction of untold millions of Jewish civilians--and its fierce war on ideas. Indeed, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Schulz was forced to sort and burn those titles they had banned. Schulz was born on July 12, 1892, the third and youngest child of a Polish merchant in Drohobycz, where he lived a life tragically abbreviated by the Holocaust. He reflected this town (and his close connections to family) in all his written and artistic works. When the Soviets occupied eastern Poland (and Drohobycz) in 1939, Schulz avoided the deportation suffered by hundreds of thousands of other Jewish Poles, although the USSR prohibited him from working. But Polish Jews experienced far worse hardships with the June 1941 Nazi occupation of eastern Poland. Schulz was then enslaved for a year by Felix Landau, the infamous Viennese Nazi and Jew murderer. He survived on one daily bowl of soup and slice of bread. Gestapo officer Karl Guenther shot Schulz in the head on Black Thursday, Nov. 19, 1942. A devoted friend buried him at night in a Jewish cemetery, which has since disappeared, along with Schulz' grave. Most of his artistic and written work also disappeared into the Holocaust's maw. But thanks to McBurney's extraordinary play, part of Schulz' incalculable brilliance was vividly revived. --Alyssa A. Lappen

Bruno Schulz's fictional world is as strange, unique, and fascinating as any you'll ever encounter. He builds each story from a physical, natural detail or a phenomena, and imbues it with such hypnotic and poetic intensity, that what should be an ordinary world is transformed into a dream-drunk and febrile one. There is no gratuitous surrealistic maneuver, but an original world view, and this alone, would you agree, is a rare and treasurable thing in literature.The stories all deal with the narrator (Bruno) and his family when Bruno was a child. Each story starts out with a beautiful description of the milieu, then moves into stranger grounds where psychological unease mixes with facts. Kafkaesque would be the word applicable to describe Schulz's work (as there even is a story about a man turning insect-like... in this case, the father, not the son) but as researchers surmised, there is no real evidence that Schulz was influenced by Kafka. What makes Bruno Schulz's prose so heartbreaking is its ceaseless and painful yearning to remember the past; almost every description is a metaphor that is drenched in almost extrasensory feeling. In consequence, every object, every motion, and every emotion remembered by Schulz throbs with a realism that is hot-wired to our subconscious, to our collective and private myths.If you like reading, you must read Schulz.

To me, truly sophisticated writing lies in the writer's skill in using inventive and colorful similes and metaphors to communicate with his reader. The point of figurative language is not to veil the message but to elevate it from the mundane and create fresh new worlds of images and perspectives. Bruno Schulz not only understood this concept but was one of its greatest practitioners. In his short but incredibly rich "The Street of Crocodiles," summer has a "senile intemperance...[a] lustful and belated spurt of vitality," rays of August heat form a "flaming broom," the moon acquires "milky reflexes, opaline shades, and the glaze of enamel," a cockroach's sudden emergence from a crevice is described as "a crazy black zigzag of lightning," and newly hatched baby birds are "lizards with frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks...[a] dragon brood." Every page of this magnificently odd little book is filled with such gems.Not quite a novel, but more than just a collection of stories, "The Street of Crocodiles" is a set of loosely connected chapters about Schulz's boyhood in the small Polish town of Drogobych in the earliest years of the twentieth century. His use of figurative language instills his recollections with a dreamlike quality that hovers between reality and fantasy, such as in the chapter entitled "Cinnamon Shops," where the young Schulz's errand home to get money for his family waiting at the theater becomes an exotic journey into the intersection of his mind and the city. In "Nimrod," Schulz writes about the puppy he adopts and its delicate, meticulous process of learning about its environment. But the central episode would have to be "Tailors' Dummies," in which Schulz's eccentric father declaims eloquently on the relationships between God and Man, and Man and Mannequin.Beautifully translated into English by Celina Wieniewska, this book belongs on every shelf of intelligent bizarre fiction next to the likes of Kafka, Borges, and Thomas Mann.

In this diminutive collection of stories, Schulz paints a complex portrait of the landscape in his childhood in Poland. The stories evolve more from the physical landscape than that of the characters, giving an intense life to inanimate objects. A sense of hidden madness, and threads of unspoken desires and fears permeate the book. Schulz writes of his father's creeping insanity, the strange landscape of his small shop, and the forboding accompanying the end of the world with the approach of a comet. While Schulz's imagery and simile get a little repetitive, the atmosphere of living objects and mysterious confluence of life is compelling and hypnotic.His input continued to illuminate not only the character of his uncle but also the world in which he wrote and lived. There is often a lyrical, often somewhat pastoral quality to much of Bruno Schulz's writing. The external reality so closely associated with the subjects and settings of his work are widely regarded as bleak and burnished. The world he represents in his stories is not necessarily in keeping with the images often associated with Poland during his lifetime, he was a writer influenced by the imagination...