The Jewish father according to Bruno Schulz

The Jewish father has become a quasi-folkloric contemporary figure, nourished by biblical memories of the irascible God-father anxious over the fate of his people, and by recent reflections and representations, among which figure Freud’s theoretical and novelistic constructions as much as Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.”

The modern Jewish father is a source of authority, an authority that comes from beneath himself, and he is simultaneously the target of humiliation: an irascible and unreachable tyrant among his own, exposed and weak in the world of the Gentiles. Witness, in Freud for example, the complementary figures of Michelangelo’s wrathful Moses and of the father compelled to step down from the sidewalk to make way for a Christian, and picking up with resignation his fur cap thrown into the mud (L’interprétation des rêves [The Interpretation of Dreams], ch. “The Material of Dreams as Derived from Childhood”). He is a father seen by his son, or his sons, at once a source of wisdom, or a model inscribed in memory (indeed a fixed point of memory itself), and a cumbersome father, authoritarian but essentially vulnerable, whose murder by the coalesced sons Freud imagined.

In the shimmering and humorous narratives¹ of Bruno Schulz, born in 1892 in Drohobycz in Galicia and murdered in 1942 by an S.S. man in that same little town, the father plays an essential role. He is a father defined less by his personal relation with his son, as in Kafka’s “The Judgment” (Schulz had prefaced the Polish translation of Der Process [The Trial]), than by his place in the “household.” The son is here the narrator, watching and describing the world of a small town that is not named, of a house stirred by an irrepressible or ceaselessly reborn eroticism, of which the father himself is one of the actors; and who knows whether the mother herself…

Concerning a work as singular, even solitary, as that of Schulz (whose dissemination after the war owes to the fidelity of certain of his Polish friends, among them Arthur Sandauer and Witold Gombrowicz), one hesitates to treat it within the frame of a panorama of the Jewish father. Jewish, however, this father indisputably is, even if Schulz wished to be a Polish writer (he chose to write in that language rather than in German or Yiddish). But this father is indeed singular, leading a somewhat marginal existence in a world that often seems (owing to maternity, to the birth of children) to have “regressed in its social evolution all the way to the stage of matriarchy,” it is said with humor. The father’s authority is no less present, but unstable, ever on the verge of departure (“In the month of July, my father went off to the spa and left us—my mother, my elder brother, and me—as prey to the summer days, white with fire and intoxicating.”), often exposed to a ridicule that does not destroy the memory of an ancient grandeur: “I have never seen the prophets of the Old Testament, but at the sight of this man, struck down by the wrath of God, crouched broadly above a great porcelain urinal, swathed in the wind of his shoulders…I understood the divine wrath of those venerable old men.” Wrath, but also the fantasy of a character absorbed in chimerical undertakings, “lost in his eccentricities” that verge on “genius,” an unfulfilled genius that loses itself in the infinite multiplicity of an essentially unstable and proliferating world. Schulz’s narratives are animated by the struggle between, on the one hand, the “hero” (whether the father, a small shopkeeper overwhelmed by his affairs, or the son, a writer impassioned by the instability and sensuality of the world—therein lies the difference with Kafka, in whom sensuality, of women, of wild animals, of substances, is often present only at the margins); on the other, the engendering of descriptive nuances, the multiplication of details, the surprising character of the enumerations, the permeability of the realms of existence, in a text where clouds, wind, colors, paperwork and fabrics, insects and the various humans pass into one another, by the play of comparisons or through strange expansions of their being.

How can one enter into relation with the father in his strangeness, this father always on the brink of absence? One must not be content to fear him or to pity his somewhat derisory status; one must love him, all the more so since, the narrator acknowledges, the mother “never loved him… Father had taken root in no woman’s heart, he had been unable to embed himself in any reality, he hovered eternally above the periphery of life…” One may wonder whether this father ever created, whether he even engendered. For the universe of Schulz’s narratives, though bathed in Judaism, though it evokes a little town through whose streets Jews in caftans and sidelocks roam on the Sabbath, competes with the biblical universe and even supplants it.

The Jewish father leans against the Book, even if he knows it poorly. This Book, in Schulz, is obviously the Hebrew Bible; or an illustrated and translated version of it; even other books, including almanacs or stamp albums that enclose the motley multiplicity of the world, in any case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which the writer was born. All these books are the reflections, the shards, or the anticipation of one single great Book, of which the narratives show only the offcuts, the loose leaves. The father himself, in the grip of one of his whims, sets forth, in order “to oppose himself openly to the existing order of things” and to seduce two little seamstresses, the “heterodox” doctrine of a “second Genesis,” according to which there was no Creator, or rather there were several: “Matter possesses an infinite fecundity.” In proclaiming this, the father ruins the possibility of fathers. He is there to announce his own disappearance and that of his fellows, a disappearance staged humorously in “Father’s Last Escape”: He is metamorphosed into “a crayfish or a great scorpion” that the mother ends up boiling and serving at the meal: “One morning, we found the dish empty. Only one leg remained on the rim, lost in a little coagulated tomato sauce and jelly trampled by his flight. Cooked and shedding his extremities, he had dragged himself out of the dish with his remaining strength to continue his solitary journey; we never saw him again.” But this seemingly abolished father never quite dies. He never finishes dying—such is the tonality of his paradoxical survival. Just as the writer and draftsman Bruno Schulz had the audacity to compose an “Idolatrous Book”², an erotic and grating rival of the “Book,” so the father of his narratives, born of his creator’s imagination and sense of observation, inherits from his ancient and eternal model the endless vigilance to which he is devoted: “In the dark apartment my father alone kept watch, drifting noiselessly through the rooms filled with our melodious sleep.”

Notes