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by Benjamin Balint (Author)
The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People's Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich.
Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. 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 talented 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.
Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa--the last traces of his vanished world--into multiple dimensions of the artist's life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. 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.
By re-creating the artist's milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.
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Praise for Kafka's Last Trial by Benjamin Balint
Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
"Dramatic and illuminating.... [R]aises momentous questions about nationality, religion, literature, and even the Holocaust."
--Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic
"Fascinating and forensically scrupulous."
--John Banville, The Guardian
"Thoughtful and provocative."
--Ruth Franklin, The Wall Street Journal
"[Balint is] a gifted cultural historian with a scholarly sensibility."
--Lev Mendes, The New York Times Book Review
"Absorbing.... Balint's scrupulous and sardonic prose makes you love Kafka, and dread the law."
--The Economist
"A tale pitting two Goliaths against one octogenarian David, untangled in exacting, riveting detail.... [A] must-read."
--Rebecca Schuman, Slate
