The Street of Crocodiles

Front Cover
Penguin, 1977 - Fiction - 160 pages
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.
 

Selected pages

Contents

August
25
Visitation
36
Birds
45
Tailors Dummies
51
Treatise on Tailors Dummies or The Second Book of Genesis
59
Continuation
63
Conclusion
66
Nimrod
72
Mr Charles
81
Cinnamon Shops
85
The Street of Crocodiles
99
Cockroaches
111
The Gale
117
The Night of the Great Season
125
The Comet
139
Copyright

Pan
77

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Popular passages

Page 18 - in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.
Page 18 - The Messiah, in which the myth of the coming of the Messiah would symbolize a return to the happy perfection that existed at the beginningin Schulzian terms, the return to childhood.
Page 18 - Schulzian time-his mythic time—obedient and submissive to man, offers artistic recompense for the profaned time of everyday life, which relentlessly subordinates all things to itself and carries events and people off in a current of evanescence. Schulz introduces a subjective, psychological time and then gives it substance, objectivity, by subjecting the course of occurrences to its laws.

About the author (1977)

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.

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