Bruno Schulz, Moses Ephraim Lilien and the Archaeology of Polish Jewish Modernism

• In Event: High and Low Jewish Literary Cultures

Abstract

This paper offers an introduction to and interpretation of a remarkable, previously unknown piece of writing by one of Poland’s leading modernist prose writers, the Galician Jewish artist Bruno Schulz, that has emerged as a result of recent advances in the digitization of Interwar Polish periodicals. This essay or FEUILLETON by Schulz, published over 8 installments in a local 4-page weekly newssheet entitled THE SUBCARPATHIAN REVIEW in Schulz’s hometown of Drohobycz, offers a discussion of the artwork of Moses Ephraim Lilien -- widely recognized among his Jewish contemporaries for his iconic Zionist-themed graphic works in the secessionist style. As the first and only extant document in which Bruno Schulz openly presents his views on the contemporary political and cultural, and spiritual concerns of his Jewish generation in Poland and Eastern Europe, the article has tremendous significance for reunderstanding Schulz’s aesthetic project. Treating the newly discovered Lilien essay as a key piece in a puzzle surrounding several individual short stories and essays written by Schulz in the years 1936-37, I present the argument that in these years Schulz began to realize an ambitious modernist project in the art of the Jewish book – one whose central conceit turns on the intentional combination of “high” and “low”, with respect to both content and form. This project to create a “TANDETNA HAGGADA” (“Kitsch/Trash Haggada”), I argue, can be read as a corollary to Walter Benjamin’s ambitious ARACADES PROJECT of the same period, but in reverse: if Benjamin’s project is based on COLLECTING, and seeks to collect into one opus magnum scattered fragments of the modern historical and cultural landscape, Schulz’s is based on DISPERSAL. Specifically, it entails the dispersal of his writings on Jewish spiritual renewal and Jewish messianism into the disposable and popular, non-literary printed media; the fragmentary and transient material of the modern world. The discussion goes on to place Schulz’s Galician Jewish experiments in “modernist midrash” – a form of feuilleton that intentionally combines elements of sacred and profane, high and low form -- in direct conversation with Karl Kraus’s critiques of the Jewish feuilleton.

Author

• Karen Underhill, University of Illinois at Chicago