Shop Talk by Philip Roth Page A

or twice, and asked if we might get together to talk about Schulz and about what life had been like for a Jewish writer in Poland during the decades when they were both coming of age there as artists. Our meeting took place in Singer's Manhattan apartment at the end of November 1976.

    Roth: When did you first read Schulz, here or in Poland?
    Singer: I read him in the United States for the first time. I must tell you, like many another writer I approach a book of fiction always with some kind of doubts; since the majority of writers are not really good writers, I assume when I am sent a book that it's going to be not too good a book. And I was surprised the moment I began to read Schulz. I said to myself, here is a first-class writer.
    Roth: Had you known Schulz's name before?
    Singer: No, I didn't even know Schulz's name. I left Poland in 1935. Schulz was not really known then—and if he was known, I didn't know about him. I never heard of him. My first impression was that this man writes like Kafka. There are two writers about whom they say they write like Kafka. One was Agnon. Agnon used to say that he never read Kafka, but people have some doubts about it. As a matter of fact he did read Kafka, there is no question about it. I wouldn't say he was influenced by Kafka; there is a possibility that two or three people write in the same kind of style, in the same spirit. Because not every person is completely unique. If God could create one Kafka, He could have created three Kafkas, if He was in the mood to do so. But the more I read Schulz—maybe I shouldn't say it—but when I read him, I said he's better than Kafka. There is greater strength in some of his stories. Also he's very strong in the absurd, though not in a silly way but in a clever way. I would say that between Schulz and Kafka there is something that Goethe calls
Wahlverwandtschaft,
an affinity of souls that you have chosen for yourself. This might have been the case completely with Schulz, and it might also be to a degree with Agnon.
    Roth: To me it seems as though Schulz could not keep his imagination away from anything, including the work of other writers, and particularly the work of someone like Kafka, with whom he does seem to have had important affinities of background and temperament. Just as in
The

Street of Crocodiles
he reimagines his hometown of Drohobycz into a more terrifying and wonderful place than it actually was—partly, as he says, to be "liberated from the tortures of boredom"—so, in a way, he reimagines bits and pieces of Kafka for his own purposes. Kafka may have put some funny ideas into his head, but that they serve different purposes is probably best exemplified by the fact that in Schulz's book the character transformed into a cockroach isn't the son but the father. Imagine Kafka imagining that. Out of the question. Certain artistic predilections may be similar, but these predilections are in league with wildly different desires. As you know, Schulz translated
The Trial
into Polish in 1936. I wonder if Kafka was ever translated into Yiddish.
    Singer: Not that I know of. As a young man I read many of the writers of the world in Yiddish; if Kafka would have been translated into Yiddish, this would have been in the thirties and I would have known about it. I'm afraid there is no Yiddish translation. Or maybe there is and I don't know about it, which is also possible.
    Roth: Do you have any idea why Schulz wrote in Polish rather than in Yiddish?
    Singer: Most probably he was brought up in a home that was already half assimilated. Probably his parents spoke Polish. Many Jews in Poland—after Poland became independent, and even before—brought up their children to speak Polish. That happened even in Russian Poland, but especially in Galicia, the part of Poland that belonged to Austria and where the Poles had a kind of autonomy and were not culturally suppressed. It was a natural thing that people who themselves