As Bruno Schulz, the Jewish writer and artist who is the subject of Benjamin Balint’s new biographical study, once wrote: “urge to sad whimpering to understand in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities with the feeling of homelessness”.
Well, not quite. These are Schulz’s words – sort of – but translated from the Polish in which he wrote them into English, and I’ve chosen them at random from the strange and extraordinary book Tree of Codes, produced in 2010 by the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. It consists of the entire text of Schulz’s short story collection The Street of Crocodiles, but with most of the words having been cut out, leaving yawning gaps, so that rather than reading the pages we read through them, creating strange, opportunistic collages of Schulz’s words, snippets and flashes of his thought.
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