Karen Underhill joins IIJS to discuss her recent book, Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity, which examines Bruno Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism and his use of the Polish language to reflect on the modern Jewish experience.
Wednesday, October 21, at 12:00 PM | 617 Kent Hall
In the 1930s, through the modernist prose of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942), in two short volumes—Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—the Polish language became the linguistic raw material for a profound exploration of the modern Jewish experience. Rather than turning away from the language like a number of his Galician Jewish colleagues who would choose to write in Yiddish, Schulz used the Polish language to explore his own and his generation's relationship to East European Jewish exegetical tradition, and to deepen his reflection on golus or exile as a condition not only of the individual and of the Jewish community, but of language itself, and of matter. Drawing on new archival discoveries, this study explores Schulz's diasporic Jewish modernism as an example of the creative and also transient poetic forms that emerged in formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.
Karen Underhill
Karen Underhill is Associate Professor of Polish and Jewish Studies in the Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research focuses on multilingual Polish Jewish Culture, changing memory of Poland’s Jewish past, and hybrid and diasporic cultural forms that arose in the multilingual context of 19th and 20th century Poland and Central Europe. Her book Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity (Indiana University Press, 2024) received the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, the AATSEEL Best First Book Award, and the ASEEES Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies. Her current research focuses on uses of the figures of Adam Mickiewicz and Jacob Frank in the Polish-Jewish cultural imagination. She is co-founder of Massolit Books & Café in Krakow, Poland; a member of the editorial board of POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry; and on the Board of Directors of the Chicago YIVO Society.
*Guests must register by Monday, October 19, to be approved for campus access; unregistered guests will not be permitted on campus. Each guest must register individually using a unique email address.
Supported by the generosity of the Kaye family.