Bruno Schulz was one of the most innovative Polish writers of the twentieth century. The two slim volumes of short stories on which his reputation is based are a significant contribution to European expressionism in their evocation of an intensely phantasmagorical world in which the simplest objects are made to reveal their hidden, magical side. Schulz was also an accomplished draftsman and printmaker who remained faithful to the figurative mode of expression at a time when abstraction, in its various styles, all but dominated the visual arts.

Schulz was born on 12 July 1892 in a town of Drohobycz, located in eastern Galicia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the third child of Henrietta Hendel (née Kuhmarker) and Jakub Schultz; the couple also had a daughter named Hania, their firstborn, and a second son, Izydor. Jakub Schulz was a textile merchant and a shop owner...