S0206 Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

Bruno SchulzBruno Schulz was a Polish writer. He was born in 1892 in Austrian Galicia. In those days that part of historical Poland was under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now it is part of Ukraine. His family were well-off traders who owned a dry goods shop. I'm not wholly sure what that is, though I think I knew when I was younger. After the First World War, Austrian Galicia became part of Poland. Schulz was 26 when that happened. His home town was a drab industrial place, predominantly Jewish, at least until the Holocaust. Schulz lived there most of his life.  Schulz was interested in the arts from his youth and studied design in Lviv. He then went to Vienna to study architecture for two years but returned to his home town to the school he had himself attended and became a teacher of arts and crafts. He is said not to have liked teaching much, but he entertained the pupils by telling them stories. He was Jewish, and before the Nazi partition of Poland, there was a thriving Jewish community in his hometown. He wrote in Polish but was fluent in German too.  Like many writers, he was inspired to continue writing even though he received little encouragement at first.  He gained success after he went to see a famous Polish novelist, who was reputedly not too keen on seeing him at first, thinking him just another wannabe writer. However, after hearing him read out the first page of his work, she asked him from the manuscript and declared she had discovered a new genius of Polish literature. His first collection of stories was published in 1934 called The Cinnamon Shops in English though it is often known as The Street of Crocodiles. Three years later he published Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass. He illustrated his own books. In 1936, he translated Franz Kafka (1883-1924)'s The Trial into Polish. Kafka who wrote in German was also Jewish and also from territory that had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was awarded the Polish Academy o