Obraz-zagadka golusa u Brunona Schulza
The Bruno Schulz golus Image-puzzle

Summary/Abstract: In this essay, written in honor of the late Prof. Jerzy Jarzębski, a discussion of the Yiddish term “golus” – a bivalent word meaning both “exile” and “diaspora” – becomes an opportunity to reflect on several themes that define and link the work of Bruno Schulz, the life and scholarship of Jerzy Jarzębski, and also the context of shelter and solidarity created at the 2024 SchulzFest in Drohobycz. In his 1937 essay on the artist E.M. Lilien, Schulz described Lilien’s work as a “creation born of the longing of golus”. This article proposes that in his diasporic modernist poetics, Bruno Schulz succeeded in actively harnessing the “obraz-zagadka” of golus to create a literature that could encapsulate the unresolvable tension of life as a Jewish writer in the post-WWI Europe of nation states; and, that the author’s lasting gesture was to open this specific Jewish experience to the stranger, and to the other.

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