Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 1934

Schulz was said to be the most promising Polish Jewish writer between the two World Wars until he was shot dead for no apparent reason in 1942 by a German soldier on the streets of his home town Drogobych, and this collection contains all that survives of his work. These are very private stories that superficially radiate Kafka, and Schulz goes far into the private world of his family and the central figure of his lonely, mad father whose erratic and strange behaviour is an inevitable preoccupation. This is also what drive Schulz’s stories into more imaginative territory as he watches him repeatedly break the bonds of normality and escape into other, freer states of mental being (though rarely successfully), and the failures of his father in turn seems to drive Schulz back towards the kind of idyllic summer innocence found in the first story, ‘August’. It's sometimes as if the world is all too much for him, a sentiment that drives Schulz’s artistic purpose of ‘maturing into childhood’. Fantastic elements are also here aplenty in the stories ‘Cockroaches’, ‘The Comet’ and ‘Cinnamon Shops’, a few lines of which were a pivotal source of inspiration for China Miéville’s The City & The City. Encountering Schulz’s private world can be more difficult than you might expect, but it does provide some highly entertaining and angst-ridden food for thought if you let it get under your skin.  PY

MORE ON BRUNO SCHULZ : THE ART OF BRUNO SCHULZ  |  SCHULZIAN  |  WIKIPEDIA

Stefan Grabinski, The Dark Domain, 1993

Grabinski was an early 20th Century Polish writer who achieved brief notoriety with a few self-published collections of his own stories, before disappearing almost without trace, as he himself fully expected he would. All written between 1918 and 1922, these eleven stories are urban supernatural horrors in a fashion perhaps more populist than Lovecraft and more akin to Edgar Allan Poe, fairly straightforward in plotting and yet at the same time somehow more maverick. Best is the slightly science fictional ‘Saturnin Sektor’, in which a madman tries to kill off our concept of time and replace it with his own, but it’s the solitude and imagined-horror-made-real impact of ‘The Area’ which perhaps best expresses Grabinski’s own sense of artistic alienation. The re-emergence of Grabinski has been slow, starting in 1949 with his inclusion in an anthology of influential Polish fantasy tales, yet he’s now often mentioned in the same breath as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and it’s not difficult to see why.  PY

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Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl, 1989

The two linked stories included in The Shawl were not combined into a unitary edition until 1989, having both first appeared in The New Yorker earlier in the 1980s. The first story is ‘The Shawl’ which, in a mere two thousand highly succinct words, is calculated to deliver a short, sharp shock of the first order, describing the plight of Rosa Lublin, a Polish teenage mother and concentration camp inmate who witnesses the murder of her daughter Magda by a Nazi camp guard.

It might have been a self-contained if very bleak tale, had not Cynthia Ozick, a recognised American ‘lady of letters’, capped it with a more sympathetic but no less saddening portrait in the second story, ‘Rosa’. Now living in Miami, Florida, it is immediately clear Rosa lost more than her child that day fifty years before, there are aspects of herself that she has sadly also not been able to recover. With an internal life that is far richer than the actual life she lives out, Rosa writes letters to her late daughter, convincing herself that Magda has grown into a wise and worldly woman, while herself hiding this secret life from others by simply stating, more realistically, that thieves took her life. Like the shawl that once held Magda, memories of Magda herself seem to have become the shawl that Rosa uses to protect her permanently damaged psyche from the reality of a daughter and life stolen from her. There are tormented psychological depths here sketched out but to my mind not fully explored, instead going for a more distilled portrait of personal pain and inner despair, making it a book probably best approached with some trepidation.  PY

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Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1959

Had Borowski not commited suicide at the age of twenty-nine it is thought he would have gone on to become one of Poland’s truly great writers. The defining two years of his life were spent in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1943 and 1945, a period which undoubtedly coloured his perception of humanity for his remaining six years and which found an outlet in the short amount of Holocaust fiction which he produced, gathered here in this short, valuable collection. These are tales based on true happenings in Auschwitz but told with a storytelling licence that makes no bid for literary greatness or emotive overkill, yet it is just this act of ‘telling it like it is’ that gives This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen its impact.

The distinguishing thing about concentration camp life, as Borowski tells it, is that there is no clearly defined line between victims and perpetrators. Camp inmates act with frequent self-interested cruelty to each other, something that Borowski resigned himself to accepting is a trait of anyone whose back is against the wall and whose life is under threat; the Nazis, however, do reserve both the more gratuitous and ‘professional’ acts of inhumanity for themselves and appear to relish in them, there being little that is identifiably human about them, as we encounter them here. This short book seems to offer a microcosm of one extreme of human experience that does benefit from some occasional optimistic colouring and black humour, though amongst the almost everyday telling there are some particularly memorable and shocking sequences, delivered deadpan and with surprisingly little anger or cynicism. This collection deserves its ‘classic’ status.   PY