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I SHALL NEVER FORGET THE TEARING EYES OF MY FIRST READER 1 By Yehudit Katzir Translated by Nili Gold University of Pennsylvania Autumn 1987. Each and every morning, I leave my rented apartment on Yohanan Ha-Sandlar Street and climb up Scheinkin Street to the only café in the neighborhood, the Tamar Café. The morning regulars have already sat there along with a few journalists from the Labor party newspaper Davar. The mythological Sarah observes us all from behind the counter; her well-wishing blue eyes under her purple-gray hair do not miss a thing. I sit at the corner table near the window, order a latte and a grilled cheese sandwich and open the thick, blue covered notebook. I write for four straight hours, my heart racing, my face burning; Haifa. Torrential rain. A mother who resembles my mother and a girl, the spitting image of me, run hand in hand to buy a dress to welcome the lover. Never have I run like that, in the rain, hand in hand with my mother. Never have we gone to the beach at the beginning of summer with the charming mustached Michael, who looks like Rhett Butler, nor have we ever drawn the wondrous amusement park “Disneyel” in the sand. Never has there been a festive New Year’s Eve dinner with champagne and dancing that ended with a fight between my father and my mother’s lover, and with the shattering of the Rosenthal china set, a wedding gift to my parents. I invent memories for myself, and pour into them subconscious sensations. Only years later would I discover how accurate they were. At noon, I burst onto the sun-smoldered street and glide down as light as a helium balloon. Later, in my room that is flush with my apartment-mate’s room, I copy what I had written on a greenish Hermes typewriter, confining the eruption to gray, distancing, printed letters. And had my mother not been diagnosed with cancer that summer; and had I not felt that the door was closing on my childhood and that I must push a foot and a shoulder in that door in order to take a few last pictures before it would be completely shut, would I also have written it, the story “Disneyel”? Had I not been breathlessly reading Ya’akov Shabtai’s Past 1 Xrah Literary Supplement 6 (October 17, 2005). Hebrew Studies 47 (2006) 296 Gold: I Shall Never Forget Continuous right then—as if someone had opened the palm of my hand and laid a key in it—would I also have written the story? And would I have written it that way, with long sentences, wrapping past and present together, because the tense of the consciousness is an eternal present tense? And had I not been fired from my job as an archive researcher for the only TV channel with the days spread in front of me empty and open? And had my lover in those years—married, much older than me—not gone abroad for a long vacation with his family, and had I not promised him that I would try to write, would I still have written it? But writing had always been there, from age six or seven. When I was sixteen years old I typed a few of my poems—unripe poems, overflowing with prostitutes, liquor and ancient temples, carnivorous flowers and exploding fruits, sea and sky, pathos and hormones—and sent them to my beloved poet Dahlia Ravikovitch. Every day, for an entire year, I would return from school and check the mailbox with butterflies in my stomach, hoping that the response letter would arrive. After a few months I gave up and handed the bundle of poems to my literature teacher at the Hugim High School, Yosef Ma’oz, who since then had become my good friend and a wise hearted reader until his death five years ago. He read the poems very attentively, commented on each of them and finally said, you know what, I think that you ought to try to write prose. You are too infatuated with the glitter of language—he smiled through the...

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