Mordechai’s Moustache and His Wife’s Cats: And Other Stories

Mahmoud Shukair’s first major publication in English translation enthralls, surprises and shocks as one of the world’s most original of storytellers excels in exposing the surreal moments in the ordinary and the mundane, the limits of human frustration and patience, and the intricacies of tiny daily obsessive practices.

Brimming with humour that ranges from the funny and the farcical, to satire and black comedy, with a painter’s eye for colour and detail, Shukair’s stories present a unique commentary on the power of the human spirit to see beyond the particular.

The collection includes the author’s two fascinating autobiographical commentaries ＂Hemingway in Jerusalem＂ and ＂My Journey in Writing＂.

Here is the brilliantly observed clutter and comedy of everyday lives, the lives of ordinary people pushed up against an iron occupation and fighting for survival with all the comic and moving strategems of the human imagination. Shukair’s gift for absurdist satire is never more telling than in the hilarious title story which turns and pulls the leg (or the moustache) of the occupation, in the classic tradition of Palestinian satire. - Judith Kazantzis

Translated from the Arabic by Issa J. Boullata, Elizabeth Whitehouse, Liz Winslow and Mahmoud Shukair.

Mahmoud Shukair was born in 1941 in Jerusalem, and grew up there. With a Masters degree in Philosophy and Sociology he worked for many years as a teacher, journalist and editor-in-chief of cultural magazines.

He was jailed twice by the Israeli authorities, lasting nearly two years, and in 1975 was deported to Lebanon. He returned to Jerusalem in 1993 after living in Beirut, Amman and Prague. He is the author of 25 books, nine short story collections, 13 works for children, a biography and a travelogue. He has written six drama series for TV, three plays and countless newspaper and magazine articles.
Some of his short stories have been published in French, Spanish, Korean and Chinese, as well as English.

Christina Phillips is a senior lecturer in Arabic Literature and Media at the University of Exeter, teaching Arabic literature, translation and literary theory. She has a PhD in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS, University of London. Her translations include Naguib Mahfouz’s Hadith al-Sabah wa’l-Masa (Morning and Evening Talk, AUC Press, 2008), excerpted in Banipal 30. Mahmoud Shukair has been a prodigious creator of short stories since 1962. He was born in 1941 in Jerusalem and grew up there. He studied at Damascus University and has an MA in Philosophy and Sociology (1965). He has published 67 volumes of works, including 14 short story collections, three novels, more than 40 books for children, a volume of folk tales, a biography of a city, and a travelogue. In addition to these, he has written six series for TV, four plays, and countless newspaper and magazine articles, including for online publications. Issa J Boullata (1929-2019), was an eminent Palestinian scholar, writer and critic, an educator and translator, born in Jerusalem in 1929. He started his academic career with a PhD in Arabic literature from London University in 1969. He is formerly Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. During his career he has translated many works from Arabic to English, and authored several others, including Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (1990) and in 2014, a memoir of his early life entitled The Bells of Memory: A Palestinian Boyhood in Jerusalem. Elizabeth Winslow is a graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, USA. Her translations include Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005), which won the American PEN prize for translation and was short-listed for the Griffin International Poetry Prize 2006. Some of her translations have appaered in Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry International, Words Without Borders, Banipal, Circumference and World Literature Today.