The characters featured in Mati Shemoelof’s debut short story collection all reside on the outskirts of the literary world, pounding on its door in a desperate plea for acceptance, love and acknowledgment in the face of their flaws. Their voices collide, collapse and endlessly reflect each other, converging momentarily only to shatter to pieces once more.
Love and death, identity and violence, exile and return, all blend together in these stories, which are packed with bone-chilling figures, doubles, twins, gender and identity swaps and varying states of consciousnesses. Using hybrid language, a mix of unrestrained prose and polished poetry, Shemoelof traps his readers in a labyrinth that is simultaneously a post-modern gothic, a poetic nightmare and a haunted romance. He floods the reader with a merciless form of prose that is demanding, tyrannical and does not aim to please, but at the same time is also irresistible, and one finds it hard to remain indifferent to its wild charm.
Mati Shemoelof is an Arab-Jew poet, author and editor based in Berlin. His writing is diverse and includes six poetry books, plays, articles and one collection of stories. His works have won significant recognition and prizes. Lately he gave a lecture that was printed as a little booklet “Reißt die Mauer…” (Aphorisma Verlag, 2018). “Das künftige Ufer” - A Hörspiel he wrote was aired in the WDR radio station (2018). “Gedicte. Texte zwischen Bagdad, Haifa und Berlin” - German edition of his poems will be published by the Berlin publisher AphorismA publishers in 2019. His first article book “An eruption from the east: Re visiting the emergence of the Mizrahi artistic explosion and it's imprint on the Israeli cultural narrative 2006-2019“ will be published on “Iton 77” publishers in Israel (2020).
Now is working on a new literary project “Anu אנו نحن: Jews and Arabs writing in Berlin”. In Berlin he founded “Poetic Hafla” group that created literary & performances events (2016-2018). Now is working on a new literary project “Anu אנו نحن: Jews and Arabs writing in Berlin”.
How do I write about Mr. Job M. who tells me that when he was six he found out his mother was working in prostitution? Should I
write it from a Mizrahi to Mizrahi point of view? A message from one
Arab-Jew, me, to another Arab-Jew, Job? But what is the connection
between me, as a descendant from a Baghdadi Jewish family, and his Tunisian North African Jewish roots? I could start with Friday night,
the first of February in 2013. I enter the Japanese restaurant on Karl
Marx Straße 66 with the tiny corridor and pictures portraying “Fine
Wind, Clear Morning” by the famous artist Hokusai, awful green
and white fantasies of a world of order hanging on dimly lit German
cellar walls. I could continue with how I sat at his table, how Ofra
and Benny M. joined in, fueling Job—maybe because Job was himself fueling the others with his extra drinks and sharp tongue locating our faults and taking advantage of them. Then again, we also knew one of Job’s weak points—well, he hates politics of identity, so we talked about it more and more until he erupted like a volcano. Better I start with how Job ultimately blurted out the fact that left me with my jaw dropped and smashed, sitting on the toilet, waiting for a cleaning man who will never come?
Maybe I should tell the story from a subjective point of view of Job as the restaurant’s assistant manager. Job, a bald man with small gray eyes and a French beard hiding a baby face. I should use the story as a frame to express how I view Job’s mother. A Jerba City, Jewish-Tunisian immigrant to the new Israel of the fifties who tried to survive in the Northern periphery of a country with Ashkenazi hegemony, meaning Jews from European descent that left her an outcast and helpless, doing anything to feed her child.
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French
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Translation in progress.
Translated by Louise Chaumont
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