Situated at 8 Taras Shevchenko Street, it was a one story building with a small backyard, neighboring one more identical building and a quiet common garden at the back. Opposite there was Bertold Schenkelbach’s photography shop. It was a ten-minute walk to the Market Square and no more than five to Bruno Schulz’s house at Floriańska Street.
Regina Silberner, who was the Pilpels’ neighbor before the war, remembers how Schulz visited his friend almost every day. When the weather was nice, they would sit on a long veranda facing the backyard and read. More often however they would disappear inside the house for a little while.
As Silberner writes, “The interior of the Pilpels’’ apartment was always slightly dark, especially the dining room and master bedroom which you walked through to reach the living room. This apartment seemed never to be aired, which after my own house, constantly «desinfected», was fascinating. In the living room there were old, comfortable armchairs, a grand piano, innumerable books, walls covered with paintings”. Among them there stood out large-sized oil portraits of Mundek, as Pilpel was known to his family and his sister, Trudzia – both painted by Schulz.
There were also engravings, most probably from the Xięga bałwochwalcza series and Schulz’s masochistically themed sketches. “One stuck in my head. It depicted a nude woman stepping into a bath into which a Black man was pouring blood from a headless body, and at her feet invariably a head of Mundek, Staszek Weingarten and other men I knew, and Bruno Schulz’s head”. The drawing described by Regina Silberneris lost. It is worth adding that Schulz used a similar motif in the background of a juvenile self-portrait in 1919.
In Emanuel Pilpel’s house social gatherings during which people played the piano and led long discussions about art were frequently organized. Apart from Schulz, frequent guests included poet Juliusz Wit and,as might be imagined, members of an informal group of the Jewish intelligentia from Drogobych “Kalleia”: Stanisław Weingarten, Maria Budracka, Otokar Jawrower and Michał Chajes. As Jerzy Ficowski writes, it was in 1925 at the Pilpels’ house that Schulz met Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz for the first time. It was then that Witkacy painted a (now lost) “portrait of Schulz in crayons – fantastical composition with a head on a fish tail”.
After Emanuel Pilpel’s death in 1936 Schulz most probably visited his parents’ house more and more infrequently. The building still exists, today at 6 Adam Mickiewicz Street in Drogobych.
See also: 1918, 1919, 1925, 1936. (jo)
