Remnants of the Cursed Book and Other Stories

Short Stories

Mati Shemoelof
Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, Tel Aviv, 2014
Edited by Professor Yigal Schwartz and Tamar Bialik
Language: Hebrew

Remnants of the Cursed Book and Other Stories is Mati Shemoelof’s first collection of short stories.

The book brings together characters who live on the margins of the literary world and who struggle with love, recognition, identity and violence. Writers, artists and outsiders move through stories filled with doubles, twins, shifting identities, altered genders and unstable states of consciousness.

Love and death, exile and homecoming, literature and failure constantly collide. The prose moves between fiction and poetry and creates a world that has been described as a mixture of postmodern gothic, nightmare and dark romance.

Professor Yigal Schwartz, the collection’s editor, identified in the book a new and distinctly Mizrahi literary voice emerging within Israeli literature.

Reception

Remnants of the Cursed Book and Other Stories marked a significant transition in Mati Shemoelof’s literary work: his move from poetry into experimental prose and horror fiction. The collection attracted considerable attention in the Israeli literary scene, with critics highlighting its unusual mixture of horror, surrealism, science fiction, suspense and meta-fiction, as well as its shifting identities, voices and states of consciousness.

Professor Yigal Schwartz, who edited the collection, recognized in Shemoelof a new literary voice and placed his work within a broader transformation in Israeli literature: a new generation of writers with Mizrahi roots, more cosmopolitan than their predecessors and working across different artistic forms and media.

Dr. Ketzia Alon emphasized the book’s position of alienation and its exploration of an identity that is “neither here nor there,” connecting the book’s dedication to the author’s mother with questions of mother tongue, identity and poetic language.

Professor Haviva Pedaya described the collection as deliberately refusing conventional literary eloquence, moving freely between literature, science fiction, Facebook posts, email and other forms of writing. She praised Shemoelof’s ability to move from poetry into another form of writing and described him as one of the important voices helping to “reestablish Israeli Literature by turning it inside out.”

The collection was also selected as one of the most interesting books of the summer by Time Out Tel Aviv, while scholar and cultural theorist Nissim Katz selected it as his Book of the Year for 2014 on the Yakum Culture website.

Yotam Schwimmer, reviewing the book for Ynet, praised Shemoelof’s ability to work across a wide range of styles and described the collection as an impressive, unsettling body of 31 stories. He emphasized its recurring mythology, its horror and mystery, and the way its characters reflect conflicts between authors and their creations, reality and the desire to escape it.

The collection also received strong recommendations from writers and poets. Ronny Someck described it as an exciting book in which every story reveals a twist, a crack or something incomplete and carries it into unexpected territory. Shai Golden praised the book’s demand for the reader’s devotion, describing it as an experience that can bring both happiness and sadness.
The book’s literary significance was also discussed in relation to Berlin. Several critics noted that the stories move between Israel and Berlin and explore immigration, displacement and the experience of living between places.
At the same time, the reception was not uniformly positive. Yaron Avitov, writing in Haaretz, focused on the radical departure from Shemoelof’s earlier political poetry and questioned whether the shift toward horror and escapism served the writer. He nevertheless described the prose as rich and powerful and noted its distinctive mixture of horror, European and German literary influences, immigration and Berlin.

This range of responses reflects the central quality of Remnants of the Cursed Book and Other Stories: it was a deliberate departure from the political directness of Shemoelof’s poetry and an experiment with the darker, stranger and more unstable possibilities of fiction.

Book details

Title: Remnants of the Cursed Book and Other Stories
Original title: מקלחת של חושך וסיפורים נוספים
Author: Mati Shemoelof
Publisher: Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir
Year: 2014
Editors: Yigal Schwartz and Tamar Bialik
Language: Hebrew
Genre: Short Stories