The Street of Crocodiles

The Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz is a collection of interlaced short stories set in a fictional Galician town in what is now Ukraine. The stories are based on the family of Jacob, a merchant who, suffering from psychosis, struggles to overcome his mental instability throughout the book. Jacob’s son Jozef narrates the stories. Written with a dream-logic, the stories include a number of mythic images and characters who seem otherworldly, or not quite real. Published in 1934, the collection is based loosely on Schulz's hometown of Drohobych, Ukraine.

The book’s style functions to convey the impossibility of truly depicting life through its mundane details. For this reason, many of the stories convey some mundane details, such as the comings and goings of the narrator and other recurring characters in the stories, but many of the details are enhanced or described more vividly, and with a degree of magic. Though the reader knows these details are impossible, they increase the emotional intensity of the story – in this way, the book is, in fact, a more realistic portrayal of life, because the emotions are more real.

The thirteen stories included in The Street of Crocodiles focus primarily on the strange antics of Jacob, the narrator Jozef’s father. Jacob is a merchant who runs a textile shop in the city's bustling Street of Crocodiles, a commerce center with labyrinthine streets that Jozef often describes for readers. Jacob is not your average textile merchant, however – he also battles a persistent madness that transforms him by night into a mad scientist and superhuman, who exists between the lands of reality and fantasy. Jozef watches this madness throughout the thirteen stories, charting his father's descent into fantasy.



Jacob's madness is complicated – while it brings magic in Jozef's world, it also brings fear and chaos. Jacob conducts a number of experiments and keeps a collection of exotic birds in the attic, claiming that they have the ability to turn into monsters. He also muses on the philosophy of existence, fascinating and mystifying Jozef with his thoughts on what it means to be alive. On the other hand, Jacob's madness creates a vein of fear and paranoia through the family, as Jacob struggles against forces that aren't real. Eventually, Jacob's madness leads to his death, and Jozef looks back on his father with reverence, not resentfully, but rather proud of the imaginative nature of his father's wild mind.

Other recurring characters in the story include the maid Adela, the one voice of reason in the house, who often combats Jacob's “experiments” by doing things like releasing the birds from the attic. Adela provides consistency for Jozef throughout his childhood. Other characters include Touya, a young “mad girl” who explores the city, and whose life as a homeless, mentally ill woman is richly imagined by Schulz. Emil, Jozef's cousin, emerges as a symbol of failure – he is one of few family members who manage to escape the small, magical town, but he is sickly and boring, providing little depth to the narrative. Mr. Charles is a similar character, lively and personable in his sleeping, dreaming, and morning life, who entirely loses himself the moment he leaves for work and doesn't recover until the night when he goes to bed.

Schulz creates a lively narrative that personifies a magical city and its mad inhabitants, depicting both the struggle with mental illness and the power of the imagination, particularly compared to the drudgery of capitalism and working life.



Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jewish writer, was born in 1892 and died in 1942 at the age of fifty. Considered one of the best Polish writers in the history of the country, he was awarded a Golden Laurel prize from the Polish Academy of Literature in 1938. He was best known for The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, and a few others works, though many of his novels were lost in the Holocaust. Schulz's unfinished novel, The Messiah, was one of these lost works, remaining incomplete because Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi officer while walking to his home in the Jewish Ghetto of Drohobych in German-occupied Poland in 1942.