Schulz criticism is a veritable industry within Polish academia, and new discoveries in the ongoing search for lost Schulz artifacts are widely publicized and discussed in the Polish press. His two slim volumes, Cinnamon Shops (translated into English as The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, are modern classics, widely read and taught in schools. Schulz’s stories, phantasmagoric portraits of small-town life during the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian empire, are told in a lush, lyrical prose that is widely credited with reinvigorating the Polish literary language of the 1930s. Yet in his native Poland, Schulz’s Jewishness and the manner of his death are side notes to an extraordinary reputation based on the accomplishments of his life. This modest chapter of history, a commentary on the fragility of life and art in the face of unequivocal evil, has become inextricable from Schulz’s increasingly global standing as a late-Modernist master. “You killed my Jew,” Günther is reported to have told Landau later. Some accounts specify that Schulz’s murderer was Karl Günther, Felix Landau’s rival in the local Gestapo, who wanted to get back at Landau for killing his Jewish dentist. But on this day in November, which would become known locally as Black Thursday, the SS shot more than 250 Jews at random in the street, Schulz among them. It has been said that, shortly before his death, Schulz was planning to leave Drohobycz, a provincial Polish town now located in western Ukraine, once and for all-so-called Aryan papers had already been prepared for him. During the last year of his life, Schulz received special permission to leave the ghetto to paint Landau’s frescoes.
Landau was fond of Schulz’s drawings, which frequently depict dreamlike scenes of sexual humiliation, and he had ordered Schulz to decorate his son’s playroom with images from fairy tales. The author of two critically acclaimed short-story collections and a graphic artist of growing renown, Schulz had survived the Nazi occupation as long as he did under the protection of Felix Landau, a vicious Gestapo officer who fancied himself a patron of the arts. On November 19, 1942, the great Polish author Bruno Schulz left his home in the Jewish ghetto of Drohobycz-according to the generally accepted version of the story, he had gone to fetch a ration of bread-and was shot to death by a German SS officer.