See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

(Or did I write that?)

Bruno Schulz. A Jew. Possibly the most important Polish writer between the two world wars. Son of the eccentric owner of a dry-goods store. Taught drawing and technical drafting at the Drohobycz Gymnasium. A lonely man.

And in 1941, when the Germans entered the city of Drohobycz, Bruno was forced to leave his home and move to a house on Stolareska Street. Under orders from the authorities, he painted giant murals at the riding academy and catalogued libraries commandeered by the Germans. To earn a living, he also worked as a “House Jew” (light carpentry, sign painting, family portraits, etc.) at the residence of SS Officer Felix Landau.

Felix Landau had an enemy—another SS officer by the name of Karl Gunther. On November 19, 1942, on the corner of Czeczky and Miz-kewitz Streets, Karl Gunther shot Bruno and, as the story goes, went to Landau and said, “I killed your Jew.” To which Landau replied, “In that case, I will now kill your Jew.”

You’re with me, I know it: for a minute the water turned to stone. Two gulls collided with a screech. You’re here.

I killed your Jew. In that case, I will now kill—

Just like that.

I’ve hurt you, I know. It hurts me, too.

But listen. We have other things to talk about. Shall we change the subject? I don’t want to hurt anyone. There’s something I have to tell you. Listen.

For many years after Grandfather Anshel’s disappearance I used to hum his story to the German. I tried to write it down a couple of times before I went to Poland, with no success. And I grew more and more frustrated and angry with myself, filled with self-reproach mixed with wistful visions of the old man locked inside the story for so long, a ghostly ship turned away at every port, while I, his only hope of liberation, of salvaging his story, deserted him.

So I began to hunt for Grandfather’s writings. I went through old archives and the dusty libraries of remote kibbutzim. I read crumbly magazines that reminded me of prehistoric cave drawings that disintegrate under the explorer’s torch. Among the literary remains of a Yiddish writer who died in an old-age home in Haifa, I found a real trove: four yellow issues of Little Lights, the children’s magazine (Shimon Zalmanson, editor) published in Warsaw in 1912. There were four complete chapters of an adventure where the Children of the Heart rescue a Roman gladiator (“Anton the Luder”) from the lion pit. I read eagerly: by now I had begun to detect certain limitations in the narrative skills of Anshel Wasserman, but this in no way hampered my enjoyment or my nostalgic feelings for him and his archaic prose, the awe-inspiring language of a prophet of yore, and the war it seems he waged throughout his life, the “only war there is,” to quote Otto Brig, the hero of the serial.

So I did some piecing together: a few episodes from a children’s magazine called Sapling (Krakow, 1920; I wonder if Grandfather Anshel ever received royalties for the stories that were reprinted), one in which the Children of the Heart help Louis Pasteur fight rabies, one Polishtranslation of a story about rescuing young flood and famine victims in turn-of-the-century India, and other fragments of adventures from around the world. I traveled everywhere, combing the musty attics of persons deceased in the hopes of finding something. It was so important to me, I spent all my spare time at it.

Incidentally, around this time I came across an article about early-twentieth-century children’s magazines in Poland that mentions him: “Anshel Wasserman, Yiddish storyteller.” According to this article, “opinion is divided” on the quality and importance of his writing, “the influence of contemporaneous authors is strongly in evidence—often embarrassingly so—” and, then with the peremptoriness so typical of literary criticism, the article pronounced “the literary value of his work … scant indeed, its main aim being to acquaint the youthful reader with historical events and personages,” though the author of this article acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, that “these simple adventures called ‘The Children of the Heart’ achieved a surprising popularity among young readers, and were translated into Polish, Czech, and German, and published in a number of European illustrated children’s magazines.”

The critic further remarks—not without a hint of reproach—that my grandfather was one of the few Hebrew authors “writing at a time of national and linguistic revival (the early part of the twentieth century) to deal chiefly with universal themes, scarcely touching on the issue of Jewish nationalism, indeed, ignoring it altogether. This may account for his favor with the children of the world and his attainment of a popular success beyond the reach of more masterful Hebrew writers imbued with a sense of Zionist mission.”

I was furious at this pompous ass of a “critic”: you don’t judge a man like Anshel Wasserman according to the commonplaces of literary analysis. Couldn’t he see that?

But I didn’t write the story, the unique story of Grandfather and Herr Neigel.

When I returned from Narvia, I was eager to write again. Because of Bruno. Because of what he told me. Or rather, in spite of what he told me. I had reached an impasse with the story of Grandfather and Hcrr Neigel, so I decided to go after documentary material, quotations from books about the Holocaust, excerpts of the victims’ testimony, psychological profiles of the murderers, case notes, etc. Ruth said, Butnone of this is really necessary, is it? Why do you insist on making things so difficult? You’re just swamping yourself under a lot of details. Look at it this way, you have two people, your grandfather and Neigel, two human beings, and one tells the other a story. That’s it. She was only trying to help, of course, as usual, but we had reached a point in our marriage, Ruth and I, where the most innocent remark could start a fight.

Are you with me?

You shake your head at my awkward attempts