Reinventing Bruno Schulz: Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love

Abstract

Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish author of brilliant phantasmagoria, was gunned down by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He left behind a small corpus of narrative work, published in English under the titles The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. 1 Another manuscript to which he had devoted several years, The Messiah, remained unfinished. Presumably it perished in the Holocaust, for it has never been recovered. Two recent novels, David Grossman's See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah)2 and Cynthia Ozick's (The Messiah of Stockholm),3 both turn the influence of Bruno Schulz and an evaluation of the events of his life to explicit thematic focus as they engage, too, in an imaginative reconstruction of the lost work, The Messiah. Though they have written very different books in different languages, Ozick and Grossman both take the same constellation of tensions as the raw material of their texts, and they elaborate on this fundamental similarity of concerns as part of a meditation on the power of the imagination, the possibilities of artistic expression, and Jewish identity in the second generation after the Holocaust.