In Drohobych

It is strange how interiors reflect their dark turbulent past, how in their stillness bygone history tries to be reenacted, how the same situations repeat themselves with infinite variations, turned upside down and inside out by fruitless dialectic of wallpapers and hangings.
— Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

Although Lviv stands less than 60 miles from the Polish border and is safer than Ukrainian cities farther east, 23 civilians have been killed there since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. Over a hundred have been injured by Russian attacks. A nearby aircraft repair facility was destroyed early in the war and when I visited in December 2022, all of Lviv was living on generators, as the electrical grid was taking a pounding from Russia’s drones and missiles.

In July 2023, three rockets tore into the city and killed 10 civilians and while I was visiting in September 2023, a kamikaze drone destroyed a warehouse near the train station, killing one and injuring several. A swarm of drones attacked Lviv in early 2024 but I was told all of them were shot down, although a rocket attack in February damaged 19 buildings.

On the one hand, people were fed up, nervous and frazzled, as the Ukrainian army’s counteroffensive in the east and south had not gone according to plan. The Russians had dug in and had created a massive set of trenches that the Ukrainians couldn’t punch through. By January 2024, President Zelensky had fired his top general, Valery Zaluzhny, and with American support arriving painfully late, the optimism of the first year of the war was gone.

During all my trips to Ukraine (nine thus far), I could see young soldiers returning home—many for rehabilitation, but more than a few in coffins, although the government was keeping the number of dead a closely guarded secret. Just about every town square had sprouted makeshift memorials of photos and names of those who had fallen. On the edge of every city, more and more graves were being dug.

In June 2024 I was walking through the military cemetery in Lviv, and gasped when I found the grave of Viktor Petrov, who had attended one of my institute’s seminars a few years earlier. Walking back into the city, I found it was plunged into blackout once again, and every single shop, bar, café, and restaurant had generators standing in front, roaring out their defiance to Putin’s war on everyday life. It was clear Ukrainians badly wanted to get on with their lives as best they could.

In the context, Lviv was about as normal a city as you would find anywhere—if lovelier than most. I was staying in an Ibis budget hotel in the center of town; an elementary school was down the street this way; a technical university that way. Every morning and afternoon, the sidewalks were jammed with kids on scooters and skateboards. Bars, cafés, and restaurants were all doing a brisk business, including the Epic Burger Café, the We Are Too Good To Do Bad Pizza Restaurant, and The First Lviv Grill Restaurant of Meat and Justice. No points for guessing what was across the street.

Everywhere, the city was filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic, which is why, when getting around or out of Lviv, you needed someone like Danylo Ilnytskyi behind the wheel. Danylo, thin, bearded and ponytailed, was born in Lviv, studied there and received his Ph.D. in philology. As a literary scholar he was teaching four courses in Lviv’s prestigious Catholic University, all on 20th-century Ukrainian and Polish literature.

Danylo picked me up in his aging VW Golf with 300,000 kilometers on it. Joining us was Volodymyr Olszanski, who had been born in the village of Chodoriv. Volodya had studied journalism and while in university he discovered his great-grandfather was Jewish and had been hidden during the war by the woman who would become his wife. Since his discovery, Volodya has been working on a myriad of Jewish cultural programs and was now running an audio studio where he and friends were recording audio books and podcasts, all while he is raising two children with his wife, an actress.

Danylo and Volodya were taking me to the provincial city of Drohobych. We zigzagged down one side street after another, and in a few minutes, we were barreling over hilly country lanes in a region that had spent centuries as part of the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth until the 1770s, when the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians tore Poland apart. Austria then took control here and slapped on a name from the distant past: Galicia. They made Lviv, or Lemberg as they called it, their capital.

As was their wont, the Austrians tore down the ancient city walls and replaced them with leafy parks and grand boulevards, erected a cream puff neobaroque opera house along with grand administration buildings, the muddy alleyways were broadened and covered in cobblestones that have only been repaired over the years, not replaced. The Austrians also laid tracks for trams that rumble along streets lined with ornate, wrought iron street lamps. Much of this costuming is still intact, making parts of Lviv look like a turn-of-the-last-century movie set.

Then came the First World War. When it ended here in 1918, there was an attempt to set up a western Ukrainian republic in which Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians fought each other and thousands of Jews were murdered. When the smoke cleared in 1920, Poland took control.

Things would go horribly wrong later. But during the 1920s and ’30s. a newly reconstituted Poland threw itself into a flowering of art, literature, music, film, and culture, not dissimilar to what was happening in Weimar Berlin and interwar Vienna. Jewish men and women were painting and sculpting, others were publishing poetry and fiction in Yiddish and in Polish. Among them were Debora Vogel and Bruno Schulz, who met in the mountain resort of Zakopane in 1930. According to one of Vogel’s translators and editors, Anastasiya Lyubas, Vogel encouraged and championed Schulz’s work. Schulz sent a stream of letters to Vogel that became the basis for one of his collections of short stories.

Schulz, a penniless art teacher, proposed marriage. Vogel turned him down, married an architect by the name of Szulim Barenblüt two years later, and settled down to raise a family while churning out poetry in Polish and Yiddish, critical art studies, and a guide to Jewish Lviv. With a Ph.D. in Hegelian aesthetics from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, she traveled to Stockholm, Paris, and Berlin, taught psychology in Lwow (Polish for Lviv), and wrote for avant-garde literary publications. Only recently has the full extent of Vogel’s work come to light.

Debora Vogel, her husband, son, and other relatives would be swept up in a murderous pogrom in Lwow in August 1942. Her former paramour Schulz, imprisoned in the ghetto in Drohobych, had another three months to live before he was gunned down on the street.

Danylo managed to get us to Drohobych in just over an hour. Even closer to the Polish border than Lviv, the Russians sent missiles into the city’s electrical grid early in 2023. The week before I arrived, Russian missiles blew apart two warehouses on the outskirts of town. All would be quiet during our visit; we heard no air sirens and the late September heat wave kept the temperature hovering near 90 degrees.

“We call this weather babyne lito,” said Danylo, wiping his brow, “grandmother’s summer,” and I countered with the term Americans use, Indian summer. Danylo’s brow furrowed. “I suppose that’s not politically correct anymore,” I said, “and in Vienna they call it altweibersommer—old widow’s summer.” He smiled at that one.

One of the first things you notice about Drohobych is that while this may be a small city of 75,000 (before the full-scale invasion of 2022), it had surely prospered during the last decades of Austrian rule when oil had been found nearby. Handsome administration buildings and mansions line its main streets, and an elegant interwar city hall, built under Polish rule, dominates the central square.

Danylo pulled into the courtyard of the enormous, handsomely restored Choral Temple Synagogue that towers over everything in the neighborhood. There, he introduced me to Leonid Goldberg, one of the few Jews in the city. Twelve-thousand had once lived in Drohobych when the city sported 20 synagogues. Now there were less than 50 Jews and this was the only synagogue left.

Bearded and raspy voiced, Leonid told us his father had served in the Soviet army near Stalingrad and his mother’s family survived by fleeing eastward. After the war, both parents worked as academics in Drohobych. Leonid, now retired himself, was publishing an online culture journal while acting as spokesman for the community.

The neoclassical synagogue, built in the 1860s, is by far the largest in the region and a donor whose family had come from Drohobych paid to have it restored. When I asked who that was, Leonid shook his head. “He’s not going to say,” Volodya said.

“We get school groups all the time,” Leonid said to change the subject, and he proceeded to show off the cavernous interior, which now had a collection of reproductions of Schulz’s drawings along with a temporary exhibition on the history of Drohobych’s Jews.

Leonid walked us along the town’s streets lined with Austrian-era townhouses and soon we were standing in front of a Habsburg-yellow house at Florianska Street number 12, where Oleksander and Marianne Maksymov met us at the gate. This energetic couple is running an art organization called Dro-Art, which organizes cultural and artistic events, literary meetings and even a jazz festival.

They told me that half of the sprawling Schulz home had been put up for sale and a wealthy Jewish man from Kyiv purchased it so a Schulz museum and/or study center can soon be built inside. An elderly woman still lived in a smaller part of the house and as she walked off to do her morning shopping, she stopped to chat with Oleks and Marianna.

When I asked if I could speak with the man who bought the building, Oleks said, “Well, that would be difficult right now.” He paused and said, “He’s operating drones near the front lines.”

With that, we entered the house where Bruno Schulz spent around 18 years of his life and where he did most of his writing. Of all the writers I had been chasing down and looking up in my journeys through Ukraine, none is as enigmatic as Schulz. He published only two slim volumes of short stories of less than 300 pages, and rarely ventured long from Drohobych. Yet his writing, which probably holds more metaphors and magical descriptions per page than just about anyone, manages to draw you into the imaginary world of a family much like his own while casting its peculiar spell.

Perhaps the best way I can describe that writing is that Schulz saw himself as an artist first, and did his best to use words to bring his visual ideas to the printed page. Here, for instance, is a passage from The Street of Crocodiles.

On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half-closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey, upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat—as if the sun had forced his worshippers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other’s pagan faces—the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.

As Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk told The Guardian in 2018 about Schulz, “I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language.”

Tokarczuk is hardly alone in her praise.

The Serbian novelist Danilo Kis was fascinated by Schulz; Israeli novelist David Grossman featured him in his novel See: Under Love; Cynthia Ozick wrote an entire novel imagining what happened to Schulz’s lost manuscript for his novel The Messiah; both Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Patti Smith claim to have been influenced by him. In 1976, Philip Roth went to visit Isaac Bashevis Singer for The New York Review of Books so they could discuss Schulz and in that year, Roth inserted Schulz’s murder into his novella The Prague Orgy.

That’s not even half of it. The Polish National Library in Warsaw published a 400-page dictionary on the work of Schulz—far longer than his own collected works, and there’s an online Bruno Schulz Forum filled with essays, art, and timelines, as well as a Facebook group dedicated to his work.

Every two years, academics, artists, and fans have been gathering in Drohobych to celebrate his work. There’s a Polish rock band with the name Bruno Schulz and their own Spotify playlist for him. In Vienna where I live, the contemporary composer Johannes Maria Staud recently produced a chamber work based on Schulz.

That’s a lot of cultural muscle crowding around the frame of a hypersensitive man plagued with doubt, hypochondria, severe depression, and, if his drawings are anything to go by, a serious streak of masochism.

Here is what we know about Schulz. He was the youngest child born into a rather assimilated Jewish family in 1892 and he would study, write, and teach in Polish, not Yiddish. His father had been a struggling textile merchant who had a shop on the town’s main square. When he died in 1915, Schulz moved into this house on Florianska with his married sister, Hanna Hoffman, but went off to briefly study in Vienna and Lviv. He would remain in this house, unmarried, until he and the other Jews of Drohobych were herded into the ghetto in November 1941.

After his rejection by Vogel, Schulz began a relationship in 1933 with Józefina Szelinska and they engaged in a flurry of correspondence and worked on cultural projects together. Szelinska moved to Warsaw to find work and begged Schulz to join her. He refused to leave Drohobych. They broke off their relationship in 1937 and Szelinska tried to commit suicide, failed, and moved to Gdansk, where she lived into old age. She never married and killed herself in 1991 at the age of 86.

During the German occupation, Schulz caught the eye of the Vienna-born Felix Landau, a sadistic, murderous SS officer who bizarrely saw himself as a feinschmecker. Indeed, it was Landau who had entered the apartment of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer on Elisabethstrasse in Vienna and confiscated the legendary Gustav Klimt painting of Bloch-Bauer’s late wife, Adele.

The SS sent Landau to Drohobych, an important city for the Germans because of those oil wells (even though the reserves were already in decline by then).

Not long after the Germans occupied the city in June 1941, some 300 Jews were shot. Beginning in the winter of 1942, thousands were sent to the death camp of Belzec, a hundred miles away. There would be less than 400 Jews still alive in Drohobych when the Soviet army liberated the town in the summer of 1944.

Oleks and Marianna escorted us through the high-ceilinged, empty rooms of Schulz’s house and as we walked on creaking floorboards, Danylo recounted the story of Jerzy Ficowski, a young Polish poet who had fallen in love with Schulz’s work in the 1940s and even wrote Schulz a letter praising his stories, although it would have arrived too late to reach him.

Ficowski, born in 1924, devoted much of his life to tracing down letters and manuscripts of Schulz. He would publish his biography of Schulz in Polish in 1967 and thanks to Theodosia Robertson, a Slavic specialist at the University of Michigan, English readers have been able to read Regions of the Great Heresy since 2003.

Ficowski, a major poet in his own right, continued to look for Schulz’s work until his death in 2006, and over the years, a few essays and letters did emerge. Oleks told me that Ficowksi had come to this house and rumbled throught its attic, hoping to find the manuscript for his Schulz’s lost novel, The Messiah. Dutifully, we climbed into the attic ourselves to poke around. No manuscripts.

As is now known, Felix Landau decided to protect Bruno Schulz as his “personal Jew.” While he enjoyed beating Jews to death, overseeing mass shootings and deportations to Belzec, Landau had Schulz paint murals in several places around town, including in his son’s bedroom on what is now Zelenyi Lane. We set off to see the house, now in a dilapidated state.

According to Ficowski, Schulz decided to try and escape the ghetto, but on that day, Nov. 19, 1942, he was gunned down on the street during a pogrom that took the lives of some 230 Jews.

Ficowski tells us that an SS officer by the name of Karl Günther shot Schulz because Landau had shot the protected Jew of Günther. Benjamin Balint, an American Israeli living in Jerusalem, offers several other possibilities in his insightful, thoughtful book, Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History.

After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to maintain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home.
— Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

All we know was that according to Izydor Friedman, who was interviewed by Ficowski, Schulz’s body lay on the street until dark before Friedman took the body away. No grave has ever been found. The site of the shooting, however, is commemorated and we went to stand in front of it.

Felix Landau would flee as the Nazis retreated in the summer of 1944. To say that he was unrepentant understates the case. Felix Landau actually set himself up in postwar Vienna as—wait for it—an interior decorator. Although he was arrested, tried, and jailed a few times, Landau died comfortably at home in bed in Vienna 1983 at the age of 73.

The story of Schulz’s murals, however, has become the stuff of legend, and here is where Balint’s book rolls up its sleeves.

Balint tells us that for decades no one could find the murals Schulz had painted on the walls of Landau’s villa. But in 2001, two Schulz-obsessed German documentary filmmakers, Christian and Benjamin Geissler, enlisted the advice of Lviv-based translator and psychoanalyst Jurko Prochasko, and their film crew set off for Drohobych to knock on the door of an elderly couple named Nadezhda and Nikolai Kaluzhni. The Kaluzhni’s said there were no murals to be found, but agreed to allow the filmmakers to look around. They made their way into the pantry, moved away some shelving, and over the course of a couple of days, brushed away the whitewashing to find the murals.

Long story short: A few weeks later most of the murals were spirited away by representatives (if that is the right word) of Yad Vashem and taken to Israel.

The heavens opened. Polish art historians demanded the murals be returned—not to Drohobych, which is, after all, Ukraine, but to Warsaw, where Schulz is genuinely an icon. Ukrainians demanded their return to Drohobych. Prochasko, who has translated the likes of Debora Vogel, Katja Petrowskaya, Sigmund Freud, and Joseph Roth, led the charge of cultural theft.

Yad Vashem made its own claim: Schulz was a Jew forced by a Nazi sadist to create those murals and he was murdered in the Drohobych ghetto as a Jew. Of course his murals belonged to Israel’s repository of the Holocaust and its horrors.

Balint’s book gives a fair airing to each argument, and aside from the book’s narrative, he provides 60 pages of further notes, allowing readers to consider all the evidence and make up their own minds.

We had now spent the day in Drohobych. The fierce September sun had done its work, and Danylo, Volodya, and I made our way back to Danylo’s car. We set off for Lviv but took a half hour break to let the old car cool down while we leaned against the hood, looked out over a cornfield, threw back M&M’s and shared family stories.

By the time we reached Lviv, dusk had set in, and Danylo dropped Volodya and me off near their university. We walked through one well-tended park after another, then took an electric bus toward the center of Lwow, Lviv, Lemberg. By the time I reached the city center, it was dark.

So we walked under the rockets of its stars, with tightly shut eyes anticipating in our souls its ever higher and higher Illuminations. Ah, that cynicism of triumphant night! Having taken possession of the whole sky, it was now playing dominoes on its expanse, carelessly and without keeping score, gathering up indifferently its millions of winnings. Then, bored, it drew transparent scribbles on the battlefield of overturned tablets, smiling faces, always one and the same smile in thousands of repetitions, a smile that a moment later was crossing over—already eternal—to the stars and crumbling into starry indifference.
— Bruno Schulz, excerpt from “Spring,” translated by Madeline G. Levine