Will I love The Street of Crocodiles?

Shulz’s real biography is both tragic and beautiful: a painter and writer, his life was cut short by the holocaust, but he left behind – among other things – an exquisite bedroom mural it took years to discover, and this masterpiece of a book.

A collection of short stories, it poignantly captures the feelings of his time: the sense of order turning into disorder right under a person’s feet. And yet what I think is most incredible about his writing is how Shulz can take you, in a breath, from reality to unreality – without you ever noticing where the… show more.

Simply put: the writing is magnificent. Beautiful, poetic, surprising, surreal, and yet exceptionally real. It’s a book of short stories that reads like a novel. Set in Poland during WWII. Schulz was a genius at capturing the world of his Nazi-occupied town and all who lived there. This book exists as if it were its own universe in a glass orb. It’s a “push-pull” read: you want to live Schulz’s life and you want to avoid it in equal measures.