Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) has enjoyed a double afterlife, as an artist and writer who has become a major figure in the literary mythologies of such prominently Jewish authors as Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Danilo Kiš, David Grossman, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss, while spawning an extensive critical and creative literature in Polish, inspiring writers and artists of many fields as Witold Gombrowicz, Tadeusz Kantor, Wojciech Jerzy Has, Ewa Kuryluk, Olga Tokarczuk, Agata Tuszyńska, Stefan Chwin, and many more. Emerging from the rich multicultural context of Galicja, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the petroleum boomtown of Drohobych, called “a town and a half” being divided among Polish Catholics, Jews, and Ukrainians, it should be no surprise that Schulz’s multiple identities persist.
Speaker David A. Goldfarb is an independent scholar of Polish literature and literary theory, a literary translator from Polish to English, and a liaison for Polish authors to US publishers. From mid-2010 to the end of 2013, he served as Curator of Literature and Humanities at The Polish Cultural Institute in New York, a diplomatic mission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
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