What one knows of Schulz the man, one can discover in the preface of his novel Street of Crocodiles: small, sickly and murdered by the Nazis in 1942. He was exceptional on a number of levels, not the least of which were his unique abilities to both draw and write. One sees in his prose an infinite reliance on the visual in terms of color, composition and imagery—often dark imagery, but imagery nonetheless.

There are certain themes that repeat themselves in Schulz's work and it is those themes that this essay shall discuss. Schulz lived in a Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian shtetl: a small Jewish town or village formerly found in Eastern Europe. Shtetl life was commonly composed of mad religious dreamers, marriage brokers, shopkeepers and zealots of various descriptions, and it was out of that mélange of characters, that tradition of shtetl inhabitants, from which Schulz emerged. When one juxtaposes that life with the fact the Nazis occupied the shtetls and exterminated Jews between the years 1938 and 1942, then one recognizes the foundations for an atmosphere replete with a horror one might only survive with the help of fantasy. In his Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult, Joachim Neugroschel writes that fantasy is often “an attempt at understanding what rational and daily experience fails to grasp: forces, notions, possibilities frequent in everyday life, often at remote points in our coordinates of infinity and eternity.” In addition to suffering as the “other” in terms of his Jewishness, Schulz suffered from a panoply of behavioral issues, all of which he dealt with in his prose.

Though Jews did not regard the Bible as fantasy, they did resort to other texts for mystical inspiration. Many of these came from what has been called Hasidism, an Eastern European outgrowth of Kabbalistc mysticism. Contrary to popular belief, Kabbalah did not begin with Madonna and her circle of Beverly Hills housewives. Kabbalah literally means a “receiving,” in the sense of a received tradition. The word is an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, which attempts to reveal hidden mystical insights in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and offers mystical insight into divine nature.