Called a ‘Polish Franz Kafka’ by Bashevis Singer, Bruno Schulz wrote two books of short stories before he shot dead by an SS officer in 1942. Now the Pushkin Press has released a new anthology of his work
December 5, 2025 13:33
Life explodes on every page he wrote,” once said David Grossman of the writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz was born in 1892 in the small town of Drohobycz, at the time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but later part of Poland. His family was Jewish, he wrote in Polish and many of his friends belonged to the Polish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia. He published two books of short stories in the 1930s. In 1939 Poland was invaded. In 1942 Schulz was shot dead by an SS officer.
Almost 40 years later he was discovered in the English-speaking world when his book of short stories, Cinnamon Shops, was published in the Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth. In the same year, in 1977, The New Yorker published one of his most famous stories. Then the floodgates opened. New translations of his work appeared, including The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz (1998) and the Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz (1990), Schulz himself appeared in novels by David Grossman and Cynthia Ozick and in 2023 Benjamin Balint’s acclaimed biography was published. John Updike called him “one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words”; Isaac Bashevis Singer regarded him as “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived”; and the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk confessed to loving Schulz but also to hating him, because no one could ever displace him as the supreme virtuoso of Polish fiction.
Now we have a new edition of Nocturnal Apparitions, a book of 14 short stories by Schulz, translated by Stanley Bill and published by Pushkin Press, who have done so much to champion Jewish writers from central and eastern Europe. The book includes some of Schulz’s most famous stories including Cinnamon Shops and The Street of Crocodiles, and includes nearly half of Schulz’s total literary output.
These stories are evocations of a lost world, part Polish, part Jewish, part Ukrainian. In an excellent foreword, Stanley Bill, who has translated these stories, writes, “Schulz draws on various traditions of Jewish religion and folklore” mixed “with the bathos of a shoddy, provincial modernity”. Our Town is a small world of markets, shops, evocative smells, distant memories, curious relatives, all described from a child’s point of view. The apartments are cluttered, “[f]illed with enormous wardrobes, deep sofas, pale mirrors, and trashy artificial palms”. One might say the stories themselves are similarly cluttered, full of words. One character, Adela, leaves behind her “stray hairs, combs, discarded slippers, and corsets”.
Breaking into this everyday world, there are curiously disturbing moments. In one, Emil, “teasing me with a playful wink”, shows his young cousin “images of naked women and boys, in strange positions”. The younger boy stares at the photographs “with distant, unseeing eyes”. Young shop assistants roll out of bed, ready for a new day, yawning, “a painful spasm of the palate, like a violent retching”. Elsewhere, “Huge cockroaches crouched motionless in the corners of the room, made enormous by their own shadows.” It’s not surprising that Bashevis Singer called Schulz “a Polish Franz Kafka”.
A key recurring figure, again as in Kafka, are the fathers of the young narrators, usually shopkeepers, often ill (“he spent whole days in bed, surrounded by flasks, pills, and accounts ledgers”). One description looks matter of fact (“The bitter odour of illness settled to the bottom of the room”) but then in the same sentence comes the familiar Schulz twist: “as the wallpaper thickened with an ever darker tangle of arabesques”.
This is the heart of Schulz’s genius. A very ordinary world and then suddenly something strange, even uncanny, erupts into the writing. Pornographic photos, huge headless cockroaches, “labyrinths” and “arabesques”. It is the unmistakable sign of modernism exploding into what had seemed a familiar world of “discarded slippers and corsets”. And yet at the same time, Schulz’s stories, as the poet Adam Zagajewski once commented, are about the people of Drohobych, “for their dilemmas and conflicts were an emblem of the peripheral, of everything that was borderline and provincial – and Schulz needed to be bound to the provinces the way he needed air to breathe”.
Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories, by Bruno Schulz, translated by Stanley Bill
Pushkin Press
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.