Bruno Schulz (12 July 1892 – 19 November 1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher.

[5] Schulz developed his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: he was a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, immersed in Jewish culture, yet unfamiliar with the Yiddish language.

However, his aspirations were refreshed when several letters that he wrote to a friend, Debora Vogel, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his family and fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska.

When the Germans launched their Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets in 1941, they forced Schulz into the newly formed Drohobycz Ghetto along with thousands of other dispossessed Jews, most of whom perished at the Belzec extermination camp before the end of 1942.

[7][8] A Nazi Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, however, admired Schulz's artwork and extended him protection in exchange for painting a mural in his Drohobych residence.

Shortly after completing the work in 1942, Schulz was walking home through the "Aryan quarter" with a loaf of bread, when another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther,[9][10] shot him with a small pistol, killing him.

Schulz's body of written work is small: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and a few other compositions that the author did not add to the first edition of his short story collection.

Several of Schulz's works have been lost, including short stories from the early 1940s that the author had sent to be published in magazines, and his final, unfinished novel, The Messiah.

From May 2024, the only surviving literary manuscript by Bruno Schulz (short story Second Autumn (Polish: Druga jesień) is presented at a permanent exhibition in the Palace of the Commonwealth in Warsaw.

Philip Roth was the general editor, and the series included authors such as Danilo Kiš, Tadeusz Borowski, Jiří Weil, and Milan Kundera.

[14] In 2020, Sublunary Editions published Frank Garrett's translation of Undula, an early story by Schulz which appeared in Dawn: The Journal of Petroleum Officials in Boryslav under the pseudonym Marceli Weron.

A highly complex interweaving of image, movement, text, puppetry, object manipulation, naturalistic and stylised performance underscored by music from Alfred Schnittke, Vladimir Martynov drew on Schulz's stories, his letters and biography.

It received six Olivier Award nominations (1992) after its initial run and was revived four times in London in the years that followed influencing a whole generation of British theatre makers.

In a chapter entitled "Bruno," the narrator imagines Schulz embarking on a phantasmagoric sea voyage rather than remaining in Drohobych to be killed.

[23] In the last chapter of Roberto Bolaño's 1996 novel Distant Star, the narrator, Arturo B, reads from a book titled The Complete Works of Bruno Schulz in a bar while waiting to confirm the identity of a Nazi-like character, Carlos Wieder, for a detective.

Polish writer and critic Jerzy Ficowski spent sixty years researching and uncovering the writings and drawings of Schulz.

In 2010 Jonathan Safran Foer "wrote" his Tree of Codes by cutting into the pages of an English language edition of Schulz' The Street of Crocodiles thus creating a new text.

Polish conservation workers, who had begun the meticulous task of restoration, informed Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust remembrance authority, of the findings.