Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History PDF Author: Benjamin Balint
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393866580
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. 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 furor 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.

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History PDF Author: Benjamin Balint
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393866580
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A fresh portrait of the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, and a gripping account of the secret operation to rescue his last artworks. 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 furor 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.

The Street of Crocodiles

The Street of Crocodiles PDF Author: Bruno Schulz
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140186253
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno 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.

The Drawings of Bruno Schulz

The Drawings of Bruno Schulz PDF Author: Bruno Schulz
Publisher: First Glance Books
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The first complete collection of the known artwork of Polish writer and artist Schulz (1892-1941). Drawing from the Viennese Expressionists and the Old Masters, Schultz portrays his sense of personal and cultural degradation through scenes of grotesque eroticism and masochism. About 200 bandw drawings and sketches are reproduced. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz PDF Author: Bruno Schulz
Publisher: Bosz Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) was a Polish Jewish author, graphic designer and draftsman from Galicia. During the Soviet occupation (1939-41) and the Nazi occupation that followed, he created most of his graphic works, in part under orders from the occupying powers that controlled Poland. But in secret he portrayed his people and their suffering, especially that of the Jews in the ghetto during the two occupations. This book concentrates on the private drawings he made during his last years.

Running Commentary

Running Commentary PDF Author: Benjamin Balint
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1586488600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In the years of cultural and political ferment following World War II, a new generation of Jewish- American writers and thinkers arose to make an indelible mark on American culture. Commentary was their magazine; the place where they and other politically sympathetic intellectuals -- Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and many others -- shared new work, explored ideas, and argued with each other. Founded by the offspring of immigrants, Commentary began life as a voice for the marginalized and a feisty advocate for civil rights and economic justice. But just as American culture moved in its direction, it began -- inexplicably to some -- to veer right, becoming the voice of neoconservativism and defender of the powerful. This lively history, based on unprecedented access to the magazine's archives and dozens of original interviews, provocatively explains that shift while recreating the atmosphere of some of the most exciting decades in American intellectual life.

Kafka's Last Trial

Kafka's Last Trial PDF Author: Benjamin Balint
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9781509836734
Category : Inheritance and succession
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal also led to an international legal battle over which country could lay claim to Kafka's legacy: Germany, where Kafka's own sister perished in the Holocaust and where he would have suffered a similar fate had he remained, or Israel? At once a brilliant biographical portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts - brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled with Kafka's papers at the last possible moment from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It describes a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a fascinating and hotly contested trial. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question: who owns a literary legacy - the country of one's language and birth or of one's cultural and religious affinities - and what nation can claim a right to it.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem PDF Author: Merav Mack
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
A captivating journey through the hidden libraries of Jerusalem, where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words In this enthralling book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem’s libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world’s most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world over, are not usually thought of as a distinct school; their stories as Jerusalemites have never before been woven into a single narrative. Nor have the stories of the custodians, past and present, who safeguard Jerusalem’s literary legacies. By showing how Jerusalem has been imagined by its writers and shelved by its librarians, Mack and Balint tell the untold history of how the peoples of the book have populated the city with texts. In their hands, Jerusalem itself—perched between East and West, antiquity and modernity, violence and piety—comes alive as a kind of labyrinthine library.

Collected Stories

Collected Stories PDF Author: Bruno Schulz
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810136619
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Winner of the 2019 Found in Translation Award Collected Stories is an authoritative new translation of the complete fiction of Bruno Schulz, whose work has influenced writers as various as Salman Rushdie, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip Roth, Danilo Kiš, and Roberto Bolaño. Schulz’s prose is renowned for its originality. Set largely in a fictional counterpart of his hometown of Drohobych, his stories merge the real and the surreal. The most ordinary objects—the wind, an article of clothing, a plate of fish—can suddenly appear unfathomably mysterious and capable of illuminating profound truths. As Father, one of his most intriguing characters, declaims: “Matter has been granted infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms.” This comprehensive volume brings together all of Schulz's published stories—Cinnamon Shops, his most famous collection (sometimes titled The Street of Crocodiles in English), The Sanatorium under the Hourglass, and an additional four stories that he did not include in either of his collections. Madeline G. Levine’s masterful new translation shows contemporary readers how Schulz, often compared to Proust and Kafka, reveals the workings of memory and consciousness.

The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories

The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories PDF Author: Bruno Schulz
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781517543655
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
In The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories, Bruno Schulz describes in fantastical, mythologised terms the cloth merchant's shop where he grew up and the bizarre antics of his father, such as turning the attic into an aviary and expounding strange theories on mannequins. Two sides of the Galician town of Drohobycz are seen: the old town full of ancient mystery is contrasted with newer districts that have sprung up in response to oil mining in the area. The language is poetic, heady and oneiric, employing a rich system of imagery incorporating books and labyrinths.

Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II

Gentile Bellini's Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II PDF Author: Elizabeth Rodini
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838604820
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In 1479, the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, where he produced his celebrated portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. An important moment of cultural diplomacy, this was the first of many intriguing episodes in the picture's history. Elizabeth Rodini traces Gentile's portrait from Mehmed's court to the Venetian lagoon, from the railway stations of war-torn Europe to the walls of London's National Gallery, exploring its life as a painting and its afterlife as a famous, often puzzling image. Rediscovered by the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard at the height of Orientalist outlooks in Britain, the picture was also the subject of a lawsuit over what defines a “portrait”; it was claimed by Italians seeking to hold onto national patrimony around 1900; and it starred in a solo exhibition in Istanbul in 1999. Rodini's focused inquiry also ranges broadly, considering the nature of historical evidence, the shifting status of authenticity and verisimilitude, and the contemporary political resonance of Old Master paintings. Told as an object biography and imagined as an exploration of art historical methodologies, this book situates Gentile's portrait in evolving dialogues between East and West, uncovering the many and varied ways that objects construct meaning.