In the 1930s, through the prose of Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), 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 many 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 on formerly Habsburg territory, at the historical juncture between empire and nation-state.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bruno Schulz and the Archaeology of Polish Jewish Modernism
1. Leading the Word Out of Its Golus: Jewish Writing in the Polish Vernacular
2. "A Creation Born of the Longing of Golus": Schulz's 'E.M. Lilien' and the Art of the Modern Jewish Book
3. The Sunday Seminars of Bruno Schulz and Debora Vogel
4. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass
5. Acculturation without Assimilation: Polish Contexts for a Translational Poetics
6. "What Have You Done with the Book?": The Scriptural Impulse from Idolatrous Iconography to Redemptive Midrash
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Karen Underhill is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her work has appeared in journals and edited volumes.