Stalin Is Dead

Rachel Shihor

Illustration by Guillaume Gilbert


Dreaming

Since there is nowhere a human being that has not—at least once in their lifetime—dreamed, it is generally agreed among people that literature is needed. But this is neither a justification of literature, nor a proof of its existence. It is the same with God.




The Nursery Teacher

All eyes to me! said the nursery teacher. Up to now, you have managed all your tasks well, but should one towel drop, should one fly cross the room, you will need to start all over again. A fly and a towel, and everything will start to move exactly the same way as before. Nothing will be missed. You will have to be reborn and everything will begin all over again.




A Recollection

The first time I sloughed off my skin, there was already something strange about it. I did not know that it was a sloughing. I did not know what sloughing was. I called my parents and they came over, swathed in deep sleep.

The second time it happened, everyone was preoccupied, there were much graver issues at hand. My sloughing passed without much attention. I had a childhood recollection that did not matter much now. I cleared the leftovers, since that was the thing to do.

The third time I sloughed off my skin, I did it gently. It was quiet. The right time had arrived. The others didn't matter any more. The slough shrivelled as if it were not willing to withdraw completely. I saw that several thin red worms were pulling at it wildly. They were somehow trying to persuade it to remain. But if it were to remain, then it would not enjoy their company. This sloughing, I said to myself, will end badly.




The Train

It was my misfortune to have been born inside a mine. There I spent my youth and there I grew up. No one knew of this and no one invited me over. They did not know me, they did not ask me to come up so that I might entertain them.

Sometimes trains would pass above the mine. When the train was far away I would feel the high walls of the mine vibrating faintly; when the train came closer, these vibrations became stronger, and when the train passed, little chunks of granite from the ceiling would fall on my head. So fast was the passing train and so slow were my movements inside the mine.

Once I climbed up to see the light of day and to see the world. Alongside black rail tracks I saw crushed weeds.

translated from the Hebrew by Ornan Rotem


Used by permission of Sylph Editions. Stalin Is Dead  will be out in stores in November 2013.

Click here to read Mona Gainer-Salim on Rachel Shihor, also published in the Jul 2013 issue.

Read the original in Hebrew

Read the Chinese, Simplified translation

Read the Chinese, Traditional translation

Read the Spanish translation

Listen to "The Train" in the original Hebrew read by the author:

The selections published here by Asymptote are from Rachel Shihor's forthcoming book, Stalin Is Dead, which is a medley of aphorisms, flash fiction, and short stories that carve out a slice of the world in which Kafka certainly would have felt at home. The characters that inhabit this world—reckless she-goats, morose fish, somnambulistic theologians, poignant old ladies, dying dictators and dead poets, to name just a few—have nothing in common save for the fact that they instruct us on the human condition.

As Rachel Shihor's translator and one of her most avid readers, I would say the most characteristic feature of her writing is its naturalness: one feels that her words and ideas flow with masterly ease, allowing small gestures to become imbued with rich and subtle meaning. If she were a musician, it would be tempting to describe her as a player who has managed to completely tame her instrument. Her insights reveal her ability to grasp the intricacies of human nature and are a token of her intrepid gaze, qualities that are applied in equal measure to her two predominant forms: the fictional autobiography and the surreal novella (although sometimes these genres overlap).

Rachel Shihor's language is unique, and it is a language of opposites. On the one hand, it is rich in historical and literary allusions, while on the other it is very personal, almost idiosyncratic. Her sentences alternate between the straightforwardly simple and the excruciatingly complex: for example, a short, seemingly childlike sentence befitting the protagonist's age in a story might be followed by an intricate multilayered construction, a testimony to the author's philosophical training. Equally noteworthy is the musicality of her Hebrew. Ancient words or word formations will be inflected in the modern idiom, or 'played' in a contemporary, dissonant key, in which one can also detect a tension between what is said and what is left unsaid. It is as if she uses language to conceal as much as to reveal.

—Ornan Rotem 

Rachel Shihor has taught philosophy at Tel Aviv University and is an accomplished editor, working for several academic publishers. She has published both fiction and works of scholarship, among which are Lectures on Philosophy and Religion, and Nietzsche: Thoughts on Western Civilization (1990). Her two published novels are The Vast Kingdom (2005) and The Tel Avivians (2006), and her short stories have appeared regularly in various literary magazines, including Granta. Stalin Is Dead is her second work of fiction to be translated into English, and it will be followed by Days of Peace (Seagull Books).

Ornan Rotem is the founder of Sylph Editions, a specialist publisher and design studio. Aside from Stalin Is Dead, he has also translated other works by Rachel Shihor, as well as several books on philosophy.

Charlie Chak-Kwan Ng is Asymptote's Hong Kong editor-at-large. She obtained her B.A. in English and M.Phil in English (Literary Studies) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2007 and 2009 respectively. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD project is titled: Lived Space and Performativity of British Romantic Poetry. The thesis employs spatial theories drawn from Henri Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty for studying the re-creation of 'lived space' in the works of three Romantic poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Joanna Baillie. Her writings have appeared in《秋螢詩刊》(Qiu Ying Poetry) ,《字花》 (Fleurs des Lettres) and CU Writing in English.

Julia Sanches is an assistant editor at Asymptote. Brazilian by birth. She has lived in New York, Mexico City, Lausanne, Edinburgh, and Barcelona. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a masters in Comparative Literature and Literary Translation from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She was runner-up in MPT's poetry translation competition, winner of the SAND translation competition, and has translated work from the Spanish that has been published in Suelta. She works as a freelance translator, a private teacher of English and Portuguese, and a reader for Random House Mondadori. She is currently learning her sixth language and living in her sixth country.