Bruno Schulz and the Hijacking of History, with Benjamin Balint
Join us in-person or virtually on Sunday, July 21 @ 2 p.m. ET
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. He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached.” Schulz was also a brilliant graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. During the Second World War, 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.
Benjamin Balint will discuss how the ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings.
This event will be presented at the Yiddish Book Center and streamed live via Zoom. Space for the in-person event is limited and will be first come, first served; book signing following the event. Register below for the Zoom live stream.
About the author
Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is the author of several acclaimed works of non-fiction. His latest work is Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (2023). Balint has taught literature at the Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem, the first humanities program of its kind for Palestinian students. His reviews and cultural journalism have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Haaretz, the Claremont Review of Books, the Weekly Standard, and Die Zeit (Germany), and his translations from Hebrew have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry International, and Crazyhorse.