The street where we walk with Bruno Schulz appears peculiar: grey and shoddy, definitely dodgy yet with plenty to offer, including is a shop selling books, drawings and photographs of the most licentious nature. The “girls” that work here even enact the poses in the images for the client’s pleasure.
It’s all a sham, we soon realise. “Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.” Worse still, this “improvised masquerade is already disintegrating” – so we need to hurry up to grab a piece. Whose fault is this: the shopkeeper’s, the author’s, the reader’s? Here’s a clue: “Our language has no definitions which would weigh…the grade of reality”. If this is our only tool used to describe, or perceive, what’s around us, we shouldn’t be surprised when the whole picture dissolves right before our eyes.
Originally published in Polish as “Sklepy cynamonowe”, 1933. Collected in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008
A Personal Anthology 