Bill Asks... Did we discuss what it meant that Bruno had died in 1941? I know that we raised the issue but did anyone have any sense of what that told us about Leo and the life that he had led since he arrived in America?
Donovan says...
Maybe the fact that his best (and only) friend is someone who died 60 years ago is meant to underscore the extreme magnitude of his loneliness. Leo is almost as invisible and insubstantial as his non-existent friend.
Peter says...
My response to you is similar to Donovan's. After Leo's broken connection with Alma, he becomes disconnected with life. In a sense, he floats free and above the meaning of life. (Thus his worry of dying with no one to witness his passing). Bruno is the image/memory that he uses to ground himself, to allow him a life line to the world he once knew.
Wayne says...
Hmmm. I don't know if I can bring any more insight than Donovan and Peter have offered, but I do have a few thoughts (or perhaps just flights of fancy) floating around in my mind. We know from the whole story and specifically from Leo's unofficial obituary that "He fell in love. It was his life." The book tells us that the Nazis invaded Leo's Polish village in 1941 and that essentially his love/life "ended" here. We also know that Bruno was the "greatest character Leo ever wrote". If Leo's own life ended here, perhaps Bruno, as a character and spokesman, died then too. Also, interestingly, one of Alma's (the teenager) favourite books is "The Street of Crocodiles"
- which at one point in the story it says she had read three times and was haunted by its beauty. "The History of Love" is a story where characters and real life people change places or merge together. The author of "The Street of Crocodiles" is interestingly, and perhaps only coincidentally, named Bruno Schulz (is the character Bruno in "The History of Love" ever given a last name?). One of the chapters in this book, again perhaps only coincidentally, is named "Birds" (the stories in this book sound surprisingly like the original "History of Love" story). Readers of "The Street of Crocodiles" apparently have difficulty (I haven't read the book
myself) telling where reality ends and fantasy begins. Surprisingly, the author, Bruno (a Jew living in a Polish village) is captured in
1941 by the Nazis. Bruno is kept alive by one of the Nazi officers for a year as a Jewish artist slave and then is shot. This may all be pure fancy on my part... but I think that it might even been an insider's writer's wink... at least it is something to ponder.
...OMG I am more right than I could have imagined (please see my last email message). Look at what I just found in a summary/review of a book called "The Messiah of Stockholm" by Cynthia Ozick:
Lars Andeming, perhaps overly intellectual and certainly eccentric, is the Monday book reviewer for a Stockholm daily. He is also the self-proclaimed son of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who was executed by the Nazis before his last novel, The Messiah, could be published.
When a manuscript of The Messiah mysteriously appears in Stockholm, in the possession of Schulz's "daughter," Lars's circumscribed world of paper, apartment, and favorite bookstore turns upside down, catapulting him into a whirlwind of dream, magic, and illusion.
Ozick's linguistic agility and inventive imagination, while uniquely her own, remind one of Isaac B. Singer at his inventive best.
Enthusiastically recommended for general fiction collections. Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
This is amazing!!! This is far more than a coincidence!!!!! Also note the reference to "Singer".
I also learned these other pieces of information about Bruno Schulz:
A devoted friend buried him at night in a Jewish cemetery which has since disappeared, along with Schulz' grave.
Schulz entrusted most of his writings to friends for safekeeping during the war. Most were also snuffed out, and his works lost.
He was also supposedly one of the best and least known of Polish writers. Interestingly he spoke Yiddish and German, but wrote in Polish.
The plot thickens.
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