The Street of Crocodiles

Storm Goretti was battering the South-West last evening, so I wasn’t venturing out anywhere. That gave me a chance to finish reading the book that arrived here last week. It is called The Street of Crocodiles, a collection of short stories by Bruno Schulz. It was Patti Smith who led me to discovering Bruno Schulz when she mentioned him on page 338 of her Book of Days. Patti said that Bruno Schulz was shot dead in the street by a Gestapo officer on November 19^th, 1942. This made me curious to find out more about him. I discovered that Bruno Schulz (12 July 1892 – 19 November 1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born in Drohobych, Poland (Now in Ukraine) where he lived all his life. He was the son of cloth merchant Jakub Schulz on whom the main protagonist of the book is based. At a very early age he developed an interest in the arts, writing and drawing. Bruno became recognised as a writer when several of his letters were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska who encouraged Bruno to have them published as short fiction. They were published as The Cinnamon Shops in 1934, and when published in English in 1963 as The Street of Crocodiles. 

My Copy

Several of Bruno's manuscripts were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. When WW2 began in 1939 Drohobych was occupied by the Soviet Union, but when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets in 1941 Bruno along with thousands of other Jews was forced into the Jewish Ghetto. Most of the Jewish population were sent to the death camps, but Bruno was kept alive by a Nazi Gestapo officer called Felix Landau who liked Bruno’s artwork and wanted him to paint a mural in his house. Bruno even had a pass to enter the Aryan Quarter. In 1942 he was walking home carrying a loaf of bread when another Gestapo officer called Karl Günther casually shot and killed him. This murder was in revenge for Landau having murdered Günther's own "personal Jew," a dentist named Löw.

The thirteen stories which make up the book are all fictionalised boyhood memories set in his hometown and concern his immediate family, other relatives, and the employees of the shop downstairs. His father Jacob features in most of these fantastical tales. This is one of the strangest books I have ever read because of Bruno’s incredible imagination which begins in some sort of reality but then takes flight in all directions. For instance, in one of the most amazing stories simply called Birds Jacob in order to relieve the monotony of their drab existence takes up ornithology and begins importing exotic bird’s eggs from all over the globe. The eggs hatch and before long, their apartment is full of parrots, pelicans, vultures, and even a condor which bears an uncanny resemblance to Jacob. Finally, the housekeeper Adela tires of the noise and the droppings all over the floor, opens the windows and doors and shoos them out. They do return in a later story to visit their ‘master’. 

There is great humour in this book. At times Jacob with his bizarre experiments reminds me of De Selby in Flann O’Brien’s masterpiece The Third Policeman where bicycles also feature prominently. In Jacob’s universe there is even a new constellation called ‘The Cyclist’. Time and space are twisted like a bicycle wheel; In The Night of The Great Season the year grows another 13^th month at the end of August which is stunted like a hunchback. Jacob is tired of the tyranny of the Demiurge who created the physical world and wishes to create his own universe of pseudoflora and pseudofauna. 

In this strange world, houses, Apartments, Streets, and roads become labyrinths full of long forgotten rooms where even the wallpaper comes alive. The seamstresses Pauline and Polda are forced to listen to lectures by Jacob such as his treatise on tailors’ dummies. Every paragraph has vivid descriptions, a flock of crows resemble flakes of soot, Jacob’s face looks like an old plank full of knots and veins. Uncle Charles leaves his room in the morning while simultaneously walking in the opposite direction into the depths of a wardrobe mirror to a world that doesn’t exist. Nimrod is the pet dog who meets a cockroach, Pan is a tale of meeting an old tramp in the weeds of an overgrown garden. The Gale describes an account of a storm which is so strong his brother has to fill his pockets with irons and other metal objects as ballast in order to leave the house. 

The Street of Crocodiles itself is a sleazy area of the city where you can venture into the shallow mud of companionship and dirty intermingling. Tailor’s shops sell dirty books and there is a black market in railway tickets. One story called Cockroaches is very Kafkaesque where Jacob’s obsessive fear of cockroaches leads to him metamorphosing into one. I won’t tell you any more in case you read it yourself. 

I’d just like to add one thought about the cruel death of Bruno Schulz where the world was robbed of the work of his brilliant mind. Casually shot dead on the street by a fascist. You would think that we have progressed and such depravity has no place in a modern ‘civilised’ society. Then you look at the BBC News and see that Renee Nicole Good, an acclaimed poet, guitar player, mother of three, and peace activist is shot dead in Minnesota by a government official who enjoys full immunity. The lesson of Bruno Schulz is that we cannot afford to take our hard-won freedom for granted because it could easily be taken away again.

Bruno Schulz