Short stories
The Street of Crocodiles
Sklepy cynamonowe
Bruno Schulz · 1934
Opening lines
W lipcu ojciec mój wyjeżdżał do wód i zostawiał mnie z matką i starszym bratem na pastwę białych od żaru i oszołamiających dni letnich.
In July my father would go away to take the waters and leave me, with my mother and elder brother, at the mercy of the dizzying summer days, white with heat.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Fifteen stories in which the narrator, Józef, looks back on his childhood in a small Galician town: his father's draper's shop, the maid Adela, the summer nights and Crocodile Street, the town's new and shady quarter. At the centre stands the father, Jakub, who shuts himself away in his obsessions, raises exotic birds in the attic until Adela drives them out with a broom, and delivers to the seamstresses a treatise on mannequins and matter.
Context
The stories grew out of letters the author wrote to his friends Władysław Riff and Debora Vogel; Zofia Nałkowska, to whom the manuscript was taken, helped to get it published. After Les Oiseaux appeared in Wiadomości Literackie in 1933, the collection came out from Rój in the last months of 1933, with the date 1934 on the title page. Part of the critics welcomed it with enthusiasm, the nationalist right with hostility. Celina Wieniewska translated it into English in 1963 under the title of one of the stories, The Street of Crocodiles.
Who it is for
Fifteen short stories, in a very vivid prose, that can be read separately; the plot matters less than the language.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the most original works of twentieth-century Polish prose, translated into dozens of languages.
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