The Cinnamon Shops
and Other Stories
Bruno Schulz and John Curran Davis, Translator
In The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories, Bruno Schulz describes in fantastical, mythologised terms the cloth merchant's shop where he grew up and the bizarre antics of his father, such as turning the attic into an aviary and expounding strange theories on mannequins.
Two sides of the Galician town of Drohobycz are seen: the old town full of ancient mystery is contrasted with newer districts that have sprung up in response to oil mining in the area.
The language is poetic, heady and oneiric, employing a rich system of imagery incorporating books and labyrinths.
About the Authors
Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) was a Polish-Jewish writer, artist, and teacher, born in Drohobych, a provincial town in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine. He spent nearly his entire life there, working as a drawing teacher at a local secondary school while writing in the evenings.
His reputation rests on two story collections, Cinnamon Shops (1934), published in English as The Street of Crocodiles, and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). Drawing on the landscape of his childhood, Schulz transformed ordinary family life into a dreamlike world of myth, where time bends, fathers become birds, and a small town expands into something cosmic. His prose, dense with metaphor and sensory detail, has been compared to that of Kafka, whom he translated into Polish, and Proust, though his voice remains unmistakably his own. He was also a gifted graphic artist, and his drawings and etchings carry the same obsessive, uncanny imagination as his fiction.
Schulz was killed in 1942 by a Gestapo officer in the Drohobych ghetto. A manuscript he was known to be working on, a novel titled The Messiah, was lost. Today he is regarded as one of the most original prose stylists of twentieth-century European literature, and his work has influenced writers including Cynthia Ozick, David Grossman, Philip Roth, and Olga Tokarczuk.