 | Austeria
Cracow 2005
104 pages
paperback
ISBN 83-89129-24-8
Translation rights: Erwin Schenkelbach
Contact: Austeria |
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Erwin SchenkelbachFirst Night with Satan
Excerpt
Erwin Schenkelbach is an eminent art photographer from Jerusalem, but originally comes from Drohobych (now in Ukraine), where his father was a friend of Bruno Schulz. The first story in this book is a very strange, phantasmagoric vision of the Holocaust in his home town; the second is about a Jewish boy who has miraculously escaped death, travels to Warsaw and wanders about the city, passing through various people’s hands; and the third is about a man of advanced age returning after several decades to the town of his childhood, where he tries to rediscover the atmosphere and scenery of his early years. The language of these dream-like tales, especially in the first story, is influenced by Schulz’s prose, full of metaphors and symbolic images, as well as being mid-way between autobiography and literary fiction.
The central story makes the strongest impression, telling the tale of a Jewish boy who, to escape being killed, is sent on a journey to Warsaw. The image of the city from the viewpoint of a lost child, followed by the description of his expedition one evening to a shop to get vodka for his new guardian and his encounter with two Jewish undertakers who work in the ghetto is an unusual testament of war. With his photographer’s eye, Schenkelbach captures the tiniest details of how places and people look, and paints it all with the sharp focus of something being seen for the first time in life. The sense of alienation and danger, and alongside them the banality of the occupation era are ideally described through the eyes of a Jewish child constantly at risk of death, because he never tries to judge anything or compare it with his earlier experiences; he simply sees, bringing mundanity and nightmare onto a single plane.
Jerzy Jarzębski
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