V/v Schulz. Trong Inner Workings, Coetzee đưa ra một hình ảnh thật thần kỳ về Schulz, người nghệ sĩ "trưởng thành trong thơ ấu", 'mature into childhood'. Trên Người Nữu Ước, 8 & 15, June, 2009, có bài viết Giai thoại về Schulz, Bruno Schulz's legend, thật tuyệt, của David Grossman. Tay này là tác giả cuốn Viết trong bóng tối, Tin Văn đã từng giới thiệu. Ông cũng đã từng đăng đàn diễn thuyết chung với DTH tại Nữu Ước.
Cái chết của Schulz cũng là một giai thoại, nhưng thê lương vô cùng, qua kể lại của Grossman, trong Viết trong bóng tối. Ông đi tù Lò Thiêu, nhờ tài vẽ, được một tay sĩ quan Nazi bảo bọc, khiến một tay sĩ quan Nazi khác ghét, và sau cùng giết ông, rồi kể lại cho tay kia nghe. Tay kia xua tay, chuyện lẻ tẻ, để kiếm đứa khác, thế!
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LIFE AND LETTERS
THE AGE OF GENIUS
The legend of Bruno Schulz.
BY DAVID GROSSMAN

An afternoon in spring, Easter Sunday, 1933. Behind the reception desk of a small hotel in Warsaw stands Magdalena Gross. Gross is a sculptor, and her modest family hotel serves as a meeting place for writers and intellectuals. In the hotel lobby sits a Jewish girl of about twelve, a native of Lodz. Her parents have sent her to Warsaw for a school holiday. A small man, thin and pale, enters the hotel, carrying a suitcase. He is a bit stooped, and to the girl-her name is Jakarda Goldblum-he seems frightened. Gross asks him who he is. "Schulz," he says, adding, "I am a teacher, I wrote a book and I-"
She interrupts him. 'Where did you come from?"
"From Drohobycz."
"And how did you get here?"
"By train, by way of Gdanski Bridge." The woman teases him. "Tanz? You are a dancer?"
'What? No, not at all." He flinches, worries the hem of his jacket. She laughs merrily, spouting wisecracks, winking past him at the girl.
"And what exactly are you doing here?" she asks finally, and he whispers, "I am a high-school teacher. I wrote a book. Some stories. I have come to Warsaw for one night, to give it to Madame Nalkowska." Magdalena Gross snickers, looks him up and down. Zofia Nalkowska is a renowned Polish author and playwright. She is also affiliated with the prestigious publishing house Roj. With a little smile, Gross asks, "And how will your book get to Madame Nalkowska?"
The man stammers, averts his eyes, yet he speaks insistently: Someone has told him that Madame Gross knows Madame Nalkowska. If she would be so kind-
And when he says this Magdalena Gross stops teasing him. Perhaps-the girl guesses-this is because he looks so scared. Or perhaps it's his almost desperate stubbornness. Gross goes to the telephone. She speaks with Zofia Nalkowska and tells her about the man. "If I have to read the manuscript of every oddball who comes to Warsaw with a book," Nalkowska says, "I'll have no time for my own writing.".
It Magdalena Gross asks that she take one quick look at the book. She whispers into the phone, "Do me a favor. Just look at the first page. If you don't like it, tell it him and erase the doubt from his heart."
Zofia Nalkowska agrees reluctantly. Magdalena Gross hangs up the phone. "Take a taxi. In half an hour, Madame Nalkowska will see you, for ten minutes."
Schulz hurries out. An hour later, he returns. Without the manuscript. "What did she say?" Magdalena Gross asks.
He says, "Madame Nalkowska asked me to read the first page to her out loud. She listened. Suddenly she stopped me. She asked that I leave her alone with the pages, and that I return here, to the hotel. She said she would be in touch soon."
Magdalena Gross brings him tea, but he can't drink it. They wait in silence. The air in the room grows serious and stifling. The man paces the lobby nervously, back and forth. The girl follows him with her eyes. Years later, after she has grown up, she will leave Poland, go to live in Argentina, and take the name Alicia. She will become a painter there and marry a sculptor, Silvio Giangrande. She will tell this story to a newspaper reporter during a visit to Jerusalem, nearly sixty years after the fact.
The three wait. Every ring of the telephone startles them. Finally, as evening draws near, Zofia Nalkowska calls. She has read only thirty pages, there are things that she is certain she has not understood, but it seems to be a discovery-perhaps the most important discovery in Polish literature in recent years. She herself wishes to have the honor of taking this manuscript to the publisher. The girl looks at the man: he seems about to faint. A chair is brought to him. He sits down and holds his face in his hands.
Of the many stories, legends, and anecdotes about Bruno Schulz that I have heard over the years, this one especially moves me. Perhaps because of the humble setting of this dazzling debut, or perhaps because it was recounted from the innocent vantage of a young girl, sitting in the corner of the lobby, watching a man who seemed to her as fragile as a child.
And another story I heard: Once, when Schulz was a boy, on a melancholy evening his mother, Henrietta, walked into his room and found him feeding grains of sugar to the last houseflies to have survived the cold autumn.
"Bruno," she asked, "why are you doing that?"
"So they will have strength for the winter."

Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jewish writer, was born in 1892 in the town of Drohobycz, in Galicia, which was then within the Austro- Hungarian Empire and today is in Ukraine. His oeuvre is small: only two collections of stories survive, and a few dozen essays, articles, and reviews, along with paintings and drawings. But these pieces contain an entire world. His two books-"Cinnamon Shops" (1934; the English translation is titled "The Street of Crocodiles") and "The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass" (1937)-create a fantastic universe, a private mythology of one family, and are written in a language that brims with life, a language that is itself the main character of the stories and is the only dimension in which they could possibly exist. Schulz also worked on a novel called 'The Messiah," which was lost during the war. No one knows what was in it. I once met a man to whom Schulz had shown the opening lines. What he read was a description of morning rising over a city. Light growing stronger. Towers and steeples. More than that, he did not see.
On the publication of his first book, Schulz was immediately recognized as a rare talent by the Polish literary establishment. Over the years, he has become a figure of great interest to readers and writers worldwide. Authors such as Philip Roth, Danilo Kis, Cynthia Ozick, and Nicole Krauss have written about him, made him a character in their books, or reinvented his life story. An aura of wonder and mystery hovers ceaselessly over his works and his biography. "He was one of those men on whose head God lays His hand while they are asleep so that they get to know what they don't know, so that they are filled with intuitions and conjectures, while the reflections of distant worlds pass across their closed eyelids" so wrote Schulz about Alexander the Great, in his story "Spring" (as translated by Celina Wieniewska), But one could easily say the same of Schulz. And per' haps also of us, his readers, as his stories: work their way into our mind.
It seems that everyone who loves Bruno Schulz has his own personal tale of discovery. It happened to me just after published my first novel, "The Smile of the Lamb." A new writer is sometime like a new baby in the family. He arrives from the unknown, and his family has to find a way to connect with him, to make him a little less "dangerous" in his newness and mystery. The relatives lean over the infant's crib, peer at him closely, and say, "Look, look, he has Uncle Jacob's nose! His chin is exactly like Aunt Malka's!" Something similar happens when you first become an author. Everyone rushes to tell you who has influenced you, from whom you have learned, and, of course, from whom you have stolen.
One day, I received a telephone call from a man named Daniel Schilit, a Polish Jew who had come to live in Israel. He had read my book, and he said, "You obviously are greatly influenced by Bruno Schulz."
I was young and polite and didn't argue with him. The truth is that, up to that moment, I had not read a single story by Schulz. But, after the phone call, I thought I should try to find one of his books. And that very evening, at the home of friends, I happened to come across a Hebrew edition of his collected stories. I borrowed it and read it. I read the whole book in several hours. Even today it is hard for me to describe the jolt that ran through me.
When I got to the end of the book, I read the epilogue, by one of Schulz's Hebrew translators, Yoram Bronowski. And there, for the first time, I came upon the story of how Schulz had died:
"In the Drohobycz ghetto Schulz had a protector, an S.S. officer who had exploited Schulz to paint murals on the walls of his house. The rival of this S.S. officer shot Schulz in the street in order to provoke the officer. According to rumor, when they met thereafter, one told the other, 'I have killed your Jew,' and received the reply: 'All right, now I will go and kill your Jew.'''
I closed the book. I felt as if I had been bludgeoned. As if I were falling into an abyss where such things were possible.
Not always can a writer pinpoint the moment at which a book sprouted inside him. After all, feelings and thoughts accumulate over a period of years, until they ripen and burst out in the act of writing. And yet, although for many years I had wanted to write about the Shoah, it was those two sentences, this devastating sample of Nazi syntax and world view-"I have killed your Jew," "All right, now I will go and kill your Jew” -which were the final push, the electric shock that ignited the writing of my novel "See Under: Love."
Schulz's many admirers know the story that I just told about the circumstances of his death. The Polish author and poet Jerzy Ficowski, one of the greatest scholars of Schulz's life and work, recounts in his book "Regions of the Great Heresy" how, a short time before the Black Thursday massacre in Drohobycz, in 1942, the Gestapo officer Felix Landau shot a Jewish dentist named Low, who had been under the "protection" of another Gestapo officer, Karl Gunther. There had been a grudge between Landau and Gunther for some time, and the murder incited Gunther to take revenge. Proclaiming his intentions, he went looking for Schulz, aJewwho had been under Landau's protection. Taking advantage of the Black Thursday Aktion, he shot Schulz at the corner of Czacki and Mickiewicz Streets. "According to acccounts of several Drohobycz residents," Ficowski writes, "when meeting Landau, Gunther announced triumphantly: 'You killed my Jew-I killed yours.'''
This is the canonical version of the story. But there are some who believe that although Schulz was indeed killed in the Drohobycz ghetto, that horrible exchange was fabricated, a legend. The debate about Schulz's death has endured for decades. Apparently, there is no way to settle the issue-nor do I expect that other 'evidence, such as the testimony that I am about to report, will lay the matter to rest.
From the time I knew that I was going to be a writer, I also knew that I would write about the Shoah. And, as I grew older, I became even more convinced that I would not truly be able to understand my life in Israel, as a person, as a father, a writer, an Israeli, a Jew, until I understood the life that I hadn't lived-in the time of the Shoah, in the space of the Shoah. I wanted to find out what there was in me that I could have used to oppose the Nazis' attempt at erasure. How would I have preserved my human spark within a reality that was wholly devised to extinguish it?
Today, I can say that Schulz's writing showed me a way to write about the Shoah, and, in a sense, also a way to live after the Shoah. Sometimes there are such moments of grace: you open a book by an author you don't know, and suddenly you feel yourself passing through a magnetic field that sends you in a new direction, setting off eddies that you'd barely sensed before and could not name. I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life. On every page, life was raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of its name; it was taking place on all layers of consciousness and sub consciousness, in dreams, in illusions, and in nightmares. I felt the stories' ability to revive me, to carry me beyond the paralysis and despair that inevitably gripped me whenever I thought about the Holocaust or came into contact with the aspects of human nature which had ultimately allowed it to happen.
In his story "Tailors' Dummies," Schulz wrote about his father, a cloth merchant:
It is worth noting how, in contact with that strange man, all things reverted, as it were, to the roots of their existence, rebuilt their outward appearance anew from their metaphysical core, returned to the primary idea, in order to betray it at some point and to turn into the doubtful, risky and equivocal regions which we shall call for short the Regions of the Great Heresy.
There is no more precise description of Schulz's writing itself, of his incessant search for the "metaphysical core" of things, but also of his brave capacity to change his point of view in an instant, and to turn, at the very last second, in the most ironic and ambiguous way, to the Regions of the Great Heresy.
This is the strength of this writer, who has no illusions about the arbitrary, chaotic, and random nature of life yet is nonetheless determined to force life - existence both indefinite and indifferent - to surrender, to open itself wide and expose the kernel of meaning hidden in its depths. I would even add: the kernel of humanity.
But although Schulz is a big believer in some significance or meaning or law that generates and regulates everything in the world-people, animals, plants, even inanimate objects, to which he often also grants, with a certain smile, souls and desires-he is still able to uproot himself suddenly from this faith and deny it absolutely, with a sort of bottomless, demonic despair, which only intensifies our sense of his profound loneliness and our intuition that, for this man, there was no consolation in the world.
In an old-age home in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, in the early summer of2008, I met Ze’ev F1eischer. A short man, slight and bald, with huge eyeglasses, he was, at eighty-three, sharp minded, ironic, and disillusioned, and his humor was seasoned with bitterness. Most of all, he was self-effacing, never missing an opportunity to diminish or make fun of himself. He liked to write "satirical songs and fleeting aphorisms," and had collected his works in a book, entitled "Above My Sailboats." In his youth, for two years, from 1939 to 1941, Fleischer had been a pupil of Bruno Schulz's at the Sternbach Gymnasium, a private high school for Jews, in Drohobycz. It was situated on Szaszkiewicz Street, not far from the city center.
"Officially, Schulz was a teacher of arts and crafts," Fleischer told me. "He was very shy and bottled up. His stock was very low, in the eyes of others, of strangers. "Why? Because a man, after all, has to earn money! And someone like Schulz, who wrote 'nonsense,' counted for nothing. At most they regarded him as human sawdust. . . . His friends, mostly literary people, arranged a job for him at the Gymnasium. They, the friends, saw his talent and his genius-this was after the publication of his books. They saw that he had no chance of surviving in a climate that valued only money, and they decided to help him.
"He was supposed to teach us drawing and handicrafts, but he understood very quickly that as an art teacher he would get no respect from the students. In general, he was one of those people who kind of apologize for their very existence, so you can only imagine what went on during his lessons. In Schulz's class, there were mainly kids who were disciplinary problems, and he knew he would be fresh meat for them and their ridicule, and I think he realized very fast that he could save himself only if he did something different. So he had this brilliant idea-he would tell us stories. Extemporaneous stories, on the spot, and that's what he did, and it was like he was painting with words. He told stories, and we listened-even the wildest animals listened."
Fleischer laughed. "He did nearly nothing else. I don't think he drew one line on the blackboard the whole year .... But he told stories. He would come into the classroom, sit down, then suddenly stand up and start walking around, talking, with hand gestures, with that voice of his, and the wildest kids sat there enchanted."
I asked what kind of voice Schulz had.
"When he spoke softly, he would dominate. There were no imperatives in his voice. And there was always this feeling that he himself was hearing-how do I put it?-that this was a kind of music for him. He spoke in a monotone, but colorfully. He didn't care about commas or question marks. But he was very impressive. His quiet was very impressive. His music was in the quiet. And we, the students, adjusted ourselves to this quiet. Apparently, he didn't know how to talk loud.
"And he was afraid of us," Fleischer added. "He was always in a sort of defensive position .... Because most of the students, they saw him as a lemech, a nebbish, but, when he told stories, that shut them up. They didn't understand much, but they felt him. I don't know if he ever wrote any of those stories down. I can't recall them specifically. But I remember that they were stories not from this world they were mystical. After the war, I called up a friend who had studied with me there in the Gymnasium, and he didn't remember Schulz at all. But on me Schulz made an impression-I guess because of certain feelings of inferiority, which I still have to this day, and he, Schulz, also had, and this was a connection between us.
"I also knew Schulz because he lived across from my aunt on Bednarska Street," Fleischer went on. "He was my father's age. Older than me by thirty-three years. When he was our teacher, I couldn't control myself, and I would run after him at the end of the lesson: 'Professor!'-that's what we called all our teachers-and I would ask him what he had meant in a story he'd told us, and he would stop and talk to me, talk to me like we were equals. Even though they were already calling him one of the giants of Polish literature. His lack of self-confidence was so obvious. He would walk into class: 'Sorry I came,' 'Sorry I'm breathing,' a character like that, walking bent over, there was always that stooped element in him.
"His sense of humor was laughing at himself ... When he would start to tell a story, there would be a moment when he wasn't sure of himself, always at the beginning, but as soon as he started to spin out the story, and saw that the class was quieting down, suddenly there would be this smile on his face, half ironic. Now they're listening, they're sitting down, nobody is moving. And then this smile of his, it was ... like he was celebrating his temporary victory, but at the same time he was also kind of laughing at himself."
In my book "See Under: Love," Bruno Schulz appears both as himself and as a fictional character. In his fictional guise, I smuggled him out of wartime Drohobycz, under the noses of the literary scholars and the historians, to the pier in Danzig, where he jumped into the water and joined a school of salmon.
Why salmon?
Perhaps because salmon have always seemed to me the living incarnation of a journey. They are born in freshwater rivers or lakes. They swim there for a while, and then head for salt water. In the sea, they travel in huge schools for thousands of miles, until they sense some inner signal, and the school reverses direction and begins to return home, to the place where its members were hatched. Again the salmon swim thousands of miles. Along the way, they are preyed upon by other fish, by eagles and bears. In dwindling numbers, they scoot upriver and leap against the current, through waterfalls twenty or thirty feet long, until the few that remain reach the exact spot where they were spawned, and lay their eggs. When the babies hatch, they swim over the dead bodies of their parents. Only a few adult salmon survive to perform the journey a second time.

Troisième enfant d'un drapier Israélite, Bruno Schulz nait en1892 à Drohobycz. Sa ville natale, petite bourgade de Galicie à l'est de l’Empire austo-hongrois, est rattachée à la Pologne à la suite des bouleversemenrs de la Première Guerre mondiale. Trop jeune pour s'engager lors du conflit, it apprend néanmoins la peur er la souffrance. Après des études d'architecture et de peinture à Vienne, it revient à Drohohycz enseigner le dessin; it ne quittera plus guère sa ville qui deviendra le décor de la plupart de ses textes. II commence à écrire par hasard, en correspondant avec des amis à qui it raconte sa famille, ses concitoyens, tous les petits événements qui rythment son quoridien solitaire. Peu à peu, ces lettres deviennent des récits, et donnent naissance aux recueils Les boutiques de cannelle en 1934 et Le sanatorium au croquet-mort en 1937. Empreints de rêves, parfois de fantastique, ces textes puisent leur inspiration dans les souvenirs d'enfance et expriment une profonde angoisse tout en décrivant avec amertume le monde moderne, à la fois pathétique et grotesque. Bien que ces texts ne rencontrent pas de succès en librairie, ils lui permettent de se faire remarquer par l'intelligentsia et par les écrivains polonais qui saluent son génie, son originalité et son talent. En 1936, it traduit Le Procès de Franz Kafka et contribue ainsi à faire connaitre l’écrivain praguois dans son pays. Il illustre de ses dessins la première édition de Ferdydurke de son contemporain Witold Gombrowicz ainsi que ses propres oeuvres. Enfermé en 1941 dans le ghetto de Drohobycz lors de l’avancée allemande, il commence un roman qu'il n'achevera malheureusement pas: un SS l’abat d’une balle dans la nuque le 19 novembre 1942 et le manuscript disparait dans les ruines du ghetto.
Malgré une oeuvre littéraire restreinte, BrunoSchulz est considéré comme l’un des plus grands écrivains polonais du xze siècle et influence tous les domaines artistiques. L'écrivain Isaac B. Singer disait de lui «Parfois il écrivait comme Kafka, parfois comme Proust, et il a fini par atteindre des profondeurs auxquelles ni l'un ni l'autre n'avaient accédé.”

Đọc những còm của mấy đấng độc giả, trong có nhà thơ ‘nhớn’, về một truyện ngắn của HNT đăng trên DM, Gấu nhận ra, chẳng đấng nào là ‘tri âm’ của nhà văn đã mệnh một!
Chán thế!

Bèn post bài giới thiệu ‘thiên tài của tuổi thiên tài’, của ‘trưởng thành vào tuổi thơ’, Bruno Schulz, trong cuốn Le Printemps, và lèm bèm thêm, như thế này:

Bạn có thể coi đây là bài viết về HNT của Mít chúng ta, và, nhớ là, đừng so sánh ‘mức độ’ thiên tài, giữa hai đấng tài hoa mệnh bạc!
Cũng đừng ngậm ngùi với cái chết héo mòn của ông, như cả một thế hệ văn chương Miền Nam cùng với ông, sau 1975, với cái chết vì một viên đạn bắn vào ót của Schulz. Bởi vì:

HNT rất giống Schulz, [đọc Tuổi thiên tài], ở đời thường, khoan nói chuyện văn chương, nghệ thuật. Cả hai đều khốn khổ khốn nạn, sinh ra đời là đã chỉ muốn xin lỗi cuộc đời, xin lỗi, tớ tới nhầm chỗ, đúng ra tớ không nên bò ra cõi đời này!
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V/v Bạn của HNT: Gấu biết hai ông, rất thân với HNT, khi sinh thời. Một, là nhà phê bình văn học nổi tiếng của Miền Nam trước 1975, một bạn văn, bạn lính, mà còn là bạn mê bóng đá, bóng tròn, đá bóng… Lạ, là chẳng bao giờ hai ông này thỏ thẻ về cái chuyện được là bạn của thiên tài tuổi thơ cả!

Còn một tay nữa, cũng rất thân với HNT, nhưng cũng ngại nói tên ra ở đây….
Cái cảm giác, 'xin lỗi tớ đến lộn chỗ', của HNT, là của Gấu, lần đầu gặp HNT, hình như tại cà phê Bà Lê Chân thì phải.

"Parfois il écrivait comme Kafka, parfois comme Proust, et il a fini par atteindre des profondeurs auxquelles ni l'un ni l'autre n'avaient accédé.”
“Đôi khi ông ta viết như Kafka, đôi khi như Proust, và sau cùng ông đạt tới những chiều sâu mà cả hai ông kia, chẳng ai đạt tới”