Bruno Schulz’s Galician Diasporism: On the 1937 Essay “E. M. Lilien” and Rokhl Korn’s Review of Cinnamon Shops

At the close of his recently discovered 1937 essay on graphic artist and fellow Drohobyczan Ephraim Moses Lilien, Galician short-story writer Bruno Schulz spoke of Lilien’s early graphic works Juda and Lieder des Ghetto, and at the same time of his own writing, as a “creation born of the longing of golus.” This article considers Schulz’s artistic engagement with the concept of golus—understood as both diaspora and exile—as illustrated in his essay on Lilien and in the poet Rokhl Korn’s Yiddish-language review of Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops. Schulz’s writing, in its polyphony and translinguality; in its rhetorical strategies of universalization and encryption; in its marriage of Jewish and universalist thematics; and in the choices that the author made about where and how to publish, represents both a reflection on and a textualization of the experience of diaspora. Schulz’s work, within the context of the post–World War I Galician Jewish experience in a newly independent Poland, represents an affirmative diasporic cultural model that, though it was not easy to incorporate into the ethnonational narratives that have dominated in both Polish and Jewish literary studies since World War II, lends itself much more readily to the present scholarly context, with its renewed interest in diasporic, transnational, and cosmopolitan models of Jewish identity as well as its postsecularist attention to cultural projects that arise at the intersection of materialism and theology.