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Benjamin Balint

Biography

Benjamin Balint

Benjamin Balint is the author of BRUNO SCHULZ and KAFKA'S LAST TRIAL, awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and is coauthor of JERUSALEM: City of the Book. A library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, he regularly writes on culture for The Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Review of Books and other publications.

Benjamin Balint

Books by Benjamin Balint

Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History
by Benjamin Balint - Biography, History, Nonfiction

The 20th-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet, to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of 20th-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time. He was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife.