This is a book presentation and discussion.
In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like many of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation’s relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz’s diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.
Karen Underhill is Associate Professor of Polish and Jewish Studies in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Hosted by University of Chicago Professor, Bożena Shallcross, and the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History, Kenneth Moss.
There will be a light reception at the conclusion of the event.