Mammoth
Published in Issue #25 Translated from Hebrew by Yaron Regev subscribe to unlock the full storyIt was in the summer of that year that the last literary critic died. People did not remember his death. Nor did they remember the deaths of those he had criticized. They had all expired that same summer one after another with astounding speed, as if unwilling to part from their rivals. It seemed that as soon as one had passed another followed, and then another. As if demanding to have the last word. To settle the score. To engage in more arguments about contemporary affairs whilst despairing of the earthly state of literature.
Yehiel Vatik’s death was a silent one. Not just because he was the last literary critic and no one could be found to eulogize him, but because those days abounded with funerals and eulogies and once they had passed, the editors of the literary sections crowded into their rooms exhausted, all the while amusing themselves with talk of “The Black Plague of Literature,” as that summer had been referred to in editorial board meetings.
I was never a big fan of Yehiel’s. I was envious of all the writers who had hated him; the spoiled brats who complained about the vicious words he had written about their books. Yet Yehiel, in criticizing their work, saw them as literature’s children and had not spared them his rod, unwittingly entering them into the closed club of literature. After publishing four books of poetry, I knew my poems were too marginal for Yehiel to ever notice or read, let alone write...
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