Bruno Schulz and the Hijacking of History

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Bruno Schulz and the Hijacking of History

A Conversation With Benjamin Balint and Joshua Cohen

 

Benjamin Balint, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen discuss the Polish-Jewish writer and artist, his tangled afterlife, and the secret operation to rescue his last artworks.

 

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived". Schulz was also a brilliant illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, his last murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  

 

Balint and Cohen will discuss how the ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

 

Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is the author of Kafka's Last Trial (Norton), awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and co-author of Jerusalem: City of the Book (Yale). His latest book is Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton).

 

Joshua Cohen is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Netanyahus (2021).

 

Sunday, June 4, 8 pm Israel /7 pm CET /6 pm UK /1 pm EST