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
