The Street of Crocodiles

by Bruno Schulz

When I had the flu a couple of months ago, I rented this collection of short films by the Brothers Quai that included "The Street of Crocodiles". Since I had the flu, I was all feverish and hallucinatory, and I kept on falling asleep and waking up again and seeing these hordes of scary china dolls and inkpots and hearing these little scratching, squeaking, ticking sounds, and to be perfectly honest I don't know that I got a whole lot out of the experience. So just imagine my delight when I found a copy of the original Street of Crocodiles at the library! And I read it, and it wasn't like the movie at all! No, it was full of cockroaches and stuffed birds and crackling, rustling and whistling sounds!

Apparently Schulz was an extremely shy person. He became tongue-tied when he tried to write for a general audience, so he wrote Street of Crocodiles in a series of letters to a friend. In what seems to me to be a stunning betrayal, she published them, and after that he hardly wrote anything at all, because he had become one of the most celebrated authors in Poland, and he was paralyzed by self-consciousness.

He was killed during World War II by a Nazi who wanted to piss off this other Nazi who had befriended him. There's a sort of slithering horror about that act that is separate from, although related to, the ordinary horror of garden-variety anti-semitism. It's the idea that this shy and brilliant person could be seen as less than an animal, as a toy, as a porcelain dog by someone who has no idea and all the power in the world. That's a story that we never seem to get sick of hearing.

In "Street of Crocodiles", Schulz transforms his father into a stuffed condor and a cockroach, among other things.

Oh, just read it. I can't explain without lots of quotations and I had to take the book back to the library.