Often compared to Franz Kafka, the Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz shared much in common with his older contemporary: both were natives of the Habsburg empire; both were somewhat ambivalent Jews writing in non-Jewish languages; both enjoyed drawing as well as writing; both had work that was the subject of posthumous controversy; and both wrote stories where the main character is transformed into a cockroach. Boris Dralyuk reviews two new books that bring Schulz’s life and work to an English-speaking audience:

Schulz was in life and remains in death the archetype of the peripheral artist. Born into a Jewish family on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1892, he matured on the outskirts of interwar Poland—all without abandoning Drohobych, which is situated in the far west of today’s Ukraine. A man of geographical margins, he was also a somewhat marginal character on the Polish literary scene. He published two collections of short stories . . . which garnered much interest and earned him, in 1938, the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature—but kept his day job as a teacher of arts and crafts at the local secondary school. He claimed to have detested the work, but quitting was out of the question, for reasons both economic and, one gathers, psychological.

During the Nazi occupation he was granted the status of “necessary Jew” for his artistic skills and lived under the tenuous protection of Drohobych’s sadistic SS overseer, Felix Landau. Landau ordered Schulz to paint fairy-tale scenes—perhaps inspired . . . by the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)—on the walls of his young son’s nursery in his “villa.” Covered up for decades, the murals were rediscovered by a German filmmaker in 2001, in what was by then a private flat. Only months later a team of Israeli agents removed large portions and spirited them away to Jerusalem, where they are now on display at Yad Vashem.

Produced under duress, these images of “kings, knights, squires,” one of Schulz’s students, Emil Górski, recalled in 1980, “had the completely ‘un-Aryan’ features” of the faces of people among whom Schulz lived at the time. “It was on the walls of a Nazi’s nursery,” Górski continues, that “these tormented people . . . found for themselves in paintings brilliant richness and pride.”

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.