The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

Description

The collected fiction of “one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe” (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz’s untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz’s original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century’s most gifted and influential writers. 

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.“[Schulz’s] very beautiful, sensitive, meaningful stories raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language.” —Olga Tokarczuk, The Guardian

“Every time I open his books, I’m amazed anew to discover how this writer, a single human being who rarely left his home town, created for us an entire world, an alternate dimension of reality. . . . His [stories] create a fantastic universe, a private mythology of one family, and are written in a language that brims with life, a language that is itself the main character of the stories and is the only dimension in which they could possibly exist. . . . On every page, life [is] raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of its name.” —David Grossman, The New Yorker 

“Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other 20th-century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.” —Sjón, Vulture

“A masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive, shy, and never raw.” —The New York Review of Books 

“Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words. . . . [His] verbal art strikes us—stuns us, even—with its overload of beauty.” —John Updike

“One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick

“Schulz cannot be easily classified. He can be called a surrealist, a symbolist, an expressionist, a modernist. . . . He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached. . . . If Schulz had been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer 

“Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but coherent idealistic aesthetic, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were unique and startling productions, seeming to come out of nowhere. . . . Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual power.” —J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of BooksBruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.

Celina Wieniewska (translator) was awarded the 1963 Roy Publishers Polish-into-English prize for her translation of The Street of Crocodiles.
 
Jonathan Safran Foer (foreword) is the bestselling author of the novels Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Here I Am. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 
David A. Goldfarb (introducer) taught for eight years in the Slavic department at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written on a range of writers and subjects, including Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and East European cinema.

INTRODUCTION
In The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz’s collection of interlinked stories, the most prosaic elements of everyday life become fantastic, full of mystery, capable of containing and at times revealing the deepest secrets of existence. For example, as the narrator, his family, and the shop assistants sit down to lunch, “it was only when a dish appeared on the table containing two large fish in jelly lying side by side, head-to-tail, like a sign of the zodiac, that we recognized in them the coat of arms of that day, the calendar emblem of the nameless Tuesday: we shared it out quickly among ourselves, thankful that the day had at last achieved an identity” (p. 27). An article of clothing, a ray of light, wind, a cloud, a stray dog, a cockroach—any of these things can send the book’s narrator on the most lyrical, at times disorienting, flights of description, reminiscence, or metaphysical speculation. On the other hand, descriptions of incredible events, absurd landscapes, and bizarre animals make them seem matter-of-fact. When the narrator’s father, Jacob, begins to keep birds in the attic of their house, the narrator perceives a growing resemblance between his father and a particular condor: “I could not resist the impression, when looking at the sleeping condor, that I was in the presence of a mummy—a dried-out, shrunken mummy of my father. I believe that even my mother noticed this strange resemblance, although we never discussed the subject. It is significant that the condor used my father’s chamber pot” (p. 22). Once filtered through the narrator’s consciousness, the real and the unreal become indistinct from each other.

What accounts for the narrator’s leveling of different orders of experience? One way of answering this question is to note thatThe Street of Crocodiles is the product of the narrator’s memory, the operations of which can as easily be called invention as recollection (as seen in Proust, to whom Schulz is sometimes compared). Direct access to what really happened is impossible, which makes the question of what is believable irrelevant. But there is also the suggestion that the narrator’s mode of presenting the world of his childhood is a reaction to it. In the book’s first story, “August,” the narrator wishes that Emil, his exotic cousin, would notice him and liberate him from “the tortures of boredom” (p. 10). Whether the attention he gets from Emil has a desirable outcome is unclear. His cousin shows him a collection of pornographic photographs, and their effect on the narrator seems not entirely pleasurable.

The narrator frequently contrasts his boredom with various possibilities for relieving it, but these possibilities always possess ominous, if not dangerous, qualities. The tension between the safety of boredom and the potential for chaos lurking within its antidotes is most explicit in “The Comet.” The town becomes convinced that a comet is about to obliterate the earth. But, instead of inspiring fear, the prediction is cause for celebration: “Something festive had entered our lives, an eager enthusiasm. An importance permeated our gestures and swelled our chests with cosmic sighs” (p. 106). When the disaster fails to materialize, the narrator observes that the people were “richer by one more disappointment” (p. 111). How can a disappointment enrich them? Might it be that what actually happens in this provincial place could never be as exciting as what its inhabitants are capable of imagining? Schulz does not, however, depict the products of imagination as necessarily benign and therefore unquestionably preferable to the daily reality.

Throughout the book, the father seems to function as a counterweight to the boredom that oppresses the narrator. Looking back on the period when his father kept birds in the attic, the narrator notes that the “affair of the birds was the last colorful and splendid counteroffensive of fantasy which my father, that incorrigible improviser, that fencing master of imagination, had led against the trenches and defenseworks of a sterile and empty winter” (p. 25). Standing against this counteroffensive is Adela, the family’s servant, who chases the birds from the attic in a “dance of destruction” that renders the father “an exiled king who had lost his throne and his kingdom” (p. 23). The rest of the family wonders if she’s been given “some commission and assignment from forces of a higher order” (p. 25).

The Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies that Jacob recites (in “Tailors’ Dummies”) can be read as an explanation of the aesthetic philosophy at the heart of Schulz’s method. “The whole of matter,” Jacob proclaims, “pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself. . . . Anyone can mold it and shape it; it obeys everybody. All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve” (p. 31). The narrator seems to treat the substance of his memories as his father here describes matter. Near the beginning of “The Gale,” the narrator tells us that “one night the regiments of saucepans and bottles rose under the empty roofs and marched in a great bulging mass against the city” (p. 77). It is difficult to make sense of this until, several paragraphs later, we learn that a fierce wind is blowing through the town, and we realize that what he has been recounting is what the wind initiated in his imagination.

As the stories progress, it seems as if madness gradually overtakes Jacob, but it is a madness measured not so much in how he perceives the world as in how radically isolated from it he becomes. In “Visitation,” the narrator recalls that “we did not count him as one of us anymore, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real” (p. 17). In “Cinnamon Shops,” the narrator says his father “was already lost, sold and surrendered to the other sphere” (p. 53). The narrator tells us that he now understands his father as a “lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city” (p. 25). Is Jacob’s isolation the cost he pays for saving his family? If so, does the narrator believe the price is fair? suggests that our individuality, if given full expression, fulfills the somewhat contrary ends of giving shape and color to an otherwise dreary world while separating us from those with whom we would share the pleasures to be found in a world so completely alive.

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