The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People's Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR and, finally, the Third Reich.

Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him "one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz's art became the currency in which he bought life.

Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa-the last traces of his vanished world-into multiple dimensions of the artist's life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furore summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

By re-creating the artist's milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

About the Author
Benjamin Balint is the author of Bruno Schulz and Kafka's Last Trial, awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and is coauthor of Jerusalem: City of the Book. A library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, he regularly writes on culture for The Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications.

Reviews
"Excellent...An absorbing, terrifying history of a special writer who deserves to be known for reasons entirely apart from the historical nightmare that engulfed him." -- Scott Bradfield - The Spectator
"Engaging and provocative...This biography, which weaves well-chosen, colourful threads from Schulz's writings into the threadbare fabric of his days, stands as the best brief introduction to the author currently available in English" -- Boris Dralyuk - The Times Literary Supplement
"Balint does a fine job of capturing Schulz's life and his world before the war, his deeply peculiar mind and the fascinating figures in whose orbit he moved" -- Joe Moshenska - The Observer
""The clearest, most evenhanded account to date of the tangled afterlife of the Master of Drohobych....An unflaggingly curious and fastidious critic, the Jerusalem-based Balint has forged a career out of examining cases like this one....Balint excels at distinguishing the possible ownership of artifacts from the impossible ownership of legacies, and demonstrates with sensitivity how in the clash between so-called intellectual property rights and so-called moral rights, the only sure loser is the artist himself, especially if he is no longer around to defend (or define) himself."" -- Joshua Cohen - The New York Times Book Review


Awards
Winner of National Jewish Book Award 2024.



Book Information
ISBN 9780393866575
Author Benjamin Balint
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 589g
Dimensions(mm) 239mm * 160mm * 28mm