The Stories of One of Poland’s Most Acclaimed Jewish Authors Come to English Readers

The Jewish writer and author Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) was born and spent most of his life in Drohobych, a city in what is now Ukraine, before he was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Although Schulz has long been one of Poland’s most acclaimed authors, his work—composed almost exclusively in Polish—was entirely unknown in the West until one of his stories appeared in English in 1977. Often surreal and unsettling, Schulz’s fiction drew praise from such figures as John Updike, who described him as “one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words,” and Isaac Bashevis Singer, who deemed him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” David Herman reviews a new English-language collection of his works: