Perhaps one of the most haunting of Schulz’s stories, the narrator’s elderly father must go away to a mysterious Sanatorium where reality works differently. He is both dead and not, both sick and fervently active, both visitable and unrecoverable to the world. The story stretches one’s understanding of narrative logic, of time and mortality and creates an internal experience of agitation not unlike how I imagine degenerative brain diseases to feel, stirring up the overwhelming desire to escape without a clear course of return in mind. It is now also impossible not to read this story as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust, calling to mind Aharon Applebaum’s novel Badenheim 1939, another story of a health resort from which the denizens are forbidden to return home. Schulz himself was a Polish Jew who was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.
First published in Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, 1937. Published in translation in Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008
A Personal Anthology 