‘For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?’
Whenever I buy a new notebook, I write this quote from the great Polish writer Bruno Schulz on the first page. My love for Schulz is nothing short of obsessive! And I am not alone…
An eighteen year old Jerzy Ficowski, stunned by reading ‘Cinnamon Shops’ by Bruno Schulz, wrote him a letter. The letter was never opened. This was 1942 and the Jewish Schulz had already been ‘relocated’ to the ghetto – shortly after to be shot dead on the street by a Nazi Gestapo officer. But Ficowski never forgot the impression made by his literary encounter with Schulz – he was to become his biographer and greatest champion, meticulously piecing together his missing work. In tribute to Schulz he wrote: ‘There are writers of one book, I am the reader of one book.’
I understand. It is impossible to define genius, but it is unmistakable when you see it. Schulz was also a great artist, as this self portrait shows, but his writing, collected together in two volumes, is touched by magic.
If his senseless death in his hometown of Drohobycz, then part of Poland, now part of the Ukraine, represents the very worst of humanity; his writing represents the very greatest we are capable of.
I urge you to listen to this short clip, by the writer David Grossman, who so beautifully summarises Schulz’s power. After reading Schulz ‘suddenly we want more’.
