call and response

My attempts at writing are really agonizing...

I am in the lowest possible spirits. I have been telling myself I am neither a painter nor a writer, I am not even a decent teacher. It seems to me I have been swindling the world by some sort of flash or glitter when there is nothing inside me. I tried to renounce creativity and live like an average person, but this feels very sad.

B Schulz (15 November 1936, Letters, 140) 

Today, I can say that Schulz's writing showed me a way to write about the Shoah, and, in a sense, also a way to live after the Shoah. Sometimes there are such moments of grace: you open a book by an author you don't know, and suddenly you feel yourself passing through a magnetic field that sends you in a new direction, setting off eddies that you'd barely sensed before and could not name. I read Schulz's stories and felt the gush of life. On every page, life was raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of consciousness and subconsciousness, in dreams, in illusions, and in nightmares. I felt the stories' ability to revive me, to carry me beyond the paralysis and despair that inevitably gripped me whenever I thought about the Holocaust or came into contact with the aspects of human nature which had ultimately allowed it to happen.

David Grossman, The Age of Genius