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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Naomi Sokoloff
Naomi Sokoloff
Affiliation:
University of WashingtonSeattle, Wash.
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Extract

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.

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Articles
Information
AJS Review , Volume 13 , Issue 1-2 , Spring 1988 , pp. 171 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1988

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References

1 Both works have been translated by Celina Wieniewska. The Street of Crocodiles (New York: Penguin, 1977) was originally published in Poland in 1934. Sanatorium (New York: Walker, 1978) first appeared in Polish in 1937.Google Scholar

2 Jerusalem: Hakibbutz hameuhad, 1986. All English translations in this essay are my own.

3 New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

4 For an account of this concept of plot in the Bildungsroman, see Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).Google Scholar

5 See Art and Ardor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), for example: The Lesson of the Master, pp. 291–297; The Riddle of the Ordinary, pp. 200–209; and Literature as Idol: Harold Bloom, pp. 178–199.Google Scholar

6 Ozicks own essay on Bruno Schulz in Art and Ardor (pp. 224–228) is informative in this regard. Identifying in his art a religion of animism through which things come alive with spiteful spirit force, this essay directly associates Schulzs fiction with idolatrous qualities.

7 To be sure, Ozick has discussed these matters mainly in connection with what she perceives as the parochialism, superficiality, and inauthenticity of much American Jewish life. Her treatment of the Swedish locale in this novel should be understood as an echo of such concerns with assimilation. Not only is the protagonist a highly assimilated Jew; in addition, Sweden as a whole here represents a small nation or people torn between its own genuine traditions and the allure of a larger, cosmopolitan culture.

8 Alter, Robert, Defenders of the Faith, Commentary 84, no. 1 (July 1987): 52–55.Google Scholar

9 In a paper presented at the 1987 MLA Convention in San Francisco (Bruno Schulz and Cynthia Ozicks The Messiah of Stockholm), Sarah Blacher Cohen dealt with the novel as fiction protesting the amorality of fiction. However, she saw Larss relation to Schulz less as an evasion of the Holocaust than as an attempt to claim a pedigree of suffering.

10 Grossman pursues similar themes–the distance between words and actions; the search for a secret, highly personal and intimate language; and the difficulties of narrating ones life– also in his earlier novel, Hiyukh ha–gedi [The smile of the lamb] (Tel Aviv, 1983).

11 The association of the child with the artist is one well entrenched in Western tradition. George Boas presents a history of this concept in The Cult of Childhood (London, 1966). Ozicks other works do not always proffer the same stance on the child as artist. In The Cannibal Galaxy, for instance, a young girl served as a triumphant if somewhat ambivalent symbol of artistic expression, nonconformity, and undefined potential. For discussion of that character and two different views of her function in the novel, see my essay Interpretation: Cynthia Ozicks Cannibal Galaxy, in Prooftexts 6 (January 1986): 239–257, and Burstein, Janet Handler article Cynthia Ozick and the Transgressions of Art, in American Literature 59, no. 1 (March 1987): 85–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Wassermans name indicates that he, too, is a man of the water and the depths. Early in chapter 1, perhaps foreshadowing Shlomos sense of identification with both Anshel and Bruno in the sea, Wasserman is described as gesticulating his arms wildly, swimming like a fish in the air (p. 9).

13 In a review of Ayen erekh: ahavah after the novel first appeared, Gershon Shaked succinctly analyzed the relationship of each narrative segment with the central thematic tensions between imagination, innocence, and horror. Yediol ahronot, July 3, 1986.

14 For a discussion of chapter 1, Momik, see my essay The Holocaust and the Discourse of Childhood: David Grossmans See Under: Love. Hebrew Annual Review, in press.