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Minor Canon

Bruno Schulz Street of Crocodiles tote

Regular price £18.00 GBP
Regular price Sale price £18.00 GBP
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Bruno Schulz (1892 – 1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century.

Schulz's best-known work, The Street of Crocodiles (Polish: Sklepy cynamonowe, "Cinnamon Shops") is a 1934 collection of short stories. It tells the story of a merchant family from a small Galician town which resembles the writer's home town, Drohobycz, in many respects, allegorizing the author's own boyhood. The story abounds in fantastical elements, introduced by means of the visionary and dreamlike literary style characteristic of Schulz's work. Most memorable is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one.

Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel, The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi, a Gestapo officer, in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.

This tote borrows the cover art from the first Polish edition of Sklepy cynamonowe, from 1934, with art by Schulz himself.

• 100% certified organic cotton 3/1 twill
• Fabric weight: 8 oz/yd² (272 g/m²)
• Dimensions: 16″ × 14 ½″ × 5″ (40.6 cm × 35.6 cm × 12.7 cm)
• Weight limit: 30 lbs (13.6 kg)
• 1″ (2.5 cm) wide dual straps, 24.5″ (62.2 cm) length
• Open main compartment
• Blank product components sourced from Vietnam