Who Owns Bruno Schulz?

Interesting article in The Boston Review (couple months old now) about Bruno Schulz - fights over frescoes and authority and pride and ownership of artistic heritage.

The dispute is narrowly over frescoes removed to Israel from Drohobycz, Schulz' home town. The problem is that here we have a writer who is profoundly rooted in a place, whose story compels people to locate him outside that place. I can't find any images of the disputed murals. I would be curious to see them.

The scene of their discovery in the article is - as the writer notes - Schulzian:

The frescoes at the center of this controversy are slight and unassuming. Seen for the first time in Benjamin Geissler’s film, they are faintly visible on the wall, peeking out from behind old jars and cans in an apartment whose current residents, an aging couple with poor eyesight, never noticed the faint shadows of Schulz’s handiwork. Alfred Schreyer, one of Schulz’s last surviving students and a dedicated participant in efforts to preserve his memory in Drohobycz, is so overjoyed that he appears he might disintegrate in one of the paroxysms Schulz describes so fondly in his stories.

If you have never read Schulz, well you should. Start here, where someone is very kindly providing extensive translations.

From Cinnamon Shops: "Many a time one of those forgotten rooms was opened by chance and found to be empty; the tenant had long ago moved out, and in drawers untouched for months unexpected discoveries were made."

One of my favorite novels, I have mentioned before, is David Grossman's See Under: Love, in which Schulz appears as a character. You should read it. It seems there is a minor literary cottage industry of fictional Schulz insertions. Cynthia Ozick and others have made him their own, after a fashion. It is a very understandable urge, if only it didn't come to grief over a few meters of plaster.

Comments

[Ralph Luker]

John, There are photographs of two of the frescoes here and here.

[jholbo]

Thanks, Ralph.