Book Launch: Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity
In-person talk and book launch by Karen Underhill, University of Illinois Chicago, in conversation with Irena Grudzińska-Gross, scholar and writer
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 a number 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.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 6:00PM to 8:00PM (EDT)
Wolff Conference Room D1103
6 East 16th Street
New York, NY 10003
Speakers:
Karen Underhill, Associate Professor of Polish and Jewish Studies in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago
Irena Grudzinska Gross, scholar and writer.
This event is free and open to the public. Must register here.
Presented by Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) at The New School for Social Research (NSSR), and The Polish Cultural Institute New York.
