Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

In-person talk and book launch by Karen Underhill, University of Illinois Chicago, in conjunction with the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies. The exact location of the event will be given after you register.

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Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

28 Jan 2025, 18:00 – 19:30

At UCL
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

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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

Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies

University of Illinois Chicago

Karen Underhill is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Ilinois Chicago, and co-founder of the Polish Jewish Studies Initiative. Her research at the intersection of Polish and Jewish cultures and literatures focuses on Polish and Yiddish modernisms; Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish culture in the interwar period; and changing narratives of Poland as a multilingual and pluralist space of encounter. She received her PhD in Polish and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, was 2012-13 Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellow at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and is co-founder of Massolit Books & Cafe in Krakow. Her articles have appeared in POLIN, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic & East European Journal, Ruch Literacki, Teksty Drugie, and Czas Kultury. She is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled “Writing in the Third Language: Bruno Schulz and Jewish Modernity.”