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Theatre de Complicite: The Street of Crocodiles

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Simon McBurney's London theater company produced this play in the 1990s with material from Bruno Schulz' novel of the same name, for which the Polish Jewish writer was best known. That brilliant 1990s staging, easily one of the 20th century's most remarkable, taught perhaps tens of thousands something about this otherwise obscure artist and author, whose life the Nazis prematurely snuffed out.

Schulz' 1934 novel included several of his masterful drawings and etchings, some of which also appear in other books. He painted in words and pictures.

One vision of meals at his family's home obviously influenced McBurney's script, which includes a wonderful scene at a Schulz dinner featuring the family's many colorful relations and friends. The play reflects Schulz' surreal brilliance, through amazing antics--chairs hanging from a wall, tablecloths floating in air and an uncle walking on the ceiling.

The play opens with a remarkable scene: The disconnected hands and feet of many Holocaust victims wave helplessly through a trap door while Schulz feeds books into a pot-bellied stove, downstage right. This evokes the era's wholesale terror, its destruction of untold millions of Jewish civilians--and its fierce war on ideas. Indeed, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Schulz was forced to sort and burn those titles they had banned.

Schulz was born on July 12, 1892, the third and youngest child of a Polish merchant in Drohobycz, where he lived a life tragically abbreviated by the Holocaust. He reflected this town (and his close connections to family) in all his written and artistic works. When the Soviets occupied eastern Poland (and Drohobycz) in 1939, Schulz avoided the deportation suffered by hundreds of thousands of other Jewish Poles, although the USSR prohibited him from working.

But Polish Jews experienced far worse hardships with the June 1941 Nazi occupation of eastern Poland. Schulz was then enslaved for a year by Felix Landau, the infamous Viennese Nazi and Jew murderer. He survived on one daily bowl of soup and slice of bread.

Gestapo officer Karl Guenther shot Schulz in the head on Black Thursday, Nov. 19, 1942. A devoted friend buried him at night in a Jewish cemetery, which has since disappeared, along with Schulz' grave.

Most of his artistic and written work also disappeared into the Holocaust's maw.

But thanks to McBurney's extraordinary play, part of Schulz' incalculable brilliance was vividly revived.

--Alyssa A. Lappen