A master storyteller talks to John Freeman about his new memoir of his family, lessons learned from Holocaust survivor parents, and climbing the narrowest house in the world.
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Overview
A brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller. With illustrations by Jason Polan.
The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life.
What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There’s Lev’s insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever. This wise, witty memoir—Etgar’s first nonfiction book published in America, and told in his inimitable style—is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.
The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life.
What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There’s Lev’s insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever. This wise, witty memoir—Etgar’s first nonfiction book published in America, and told in his inimitable style—is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780399576003 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/07/2016 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 428,878 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A winner of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the author, most recently, of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections like The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many other publications, and on This American Life, where he is a regular contributor.
Read an Excerpt
Year One
Suddenly, the Same Thing
I just hate terrorist attacks,” the thin nurse says to the older one. “Want some gum?”
The older nurse takes a piece and nods. “What can you do?” she says. “I also hate emergencies.”
“It’s not the emergencies,” the thin one insists. “I have no problem with accidents and things. It’s the terrorist attacks, I’m telling you. They put a damper on everything.”
Sitting on the bench outside the maternity ward, I think to myself, She’s got a point. I got here just an hour ago, all excited, with my wife and a neat-freak taxi driver who, when my wife’s water broke, was afraid it would ruin his upholstery. And now I’m sitting in the hallway, feeling glum, waiting for the staff to come back from the ER. Everyone but the two nurses has gone to help treat the people injured in the attack. My wife’s contractions have slowed down, too. Probably even the baby feels this whole getting-born thing isn’t that urgent anymore. As I’m on my way to the cafeteria, a few of the injured roll past on squeaking gurneys. In the taxi on the way to the hospital, my wife was screaming like a madwoman, but all these people are quiet.
“Are you Etgar Keret?” a guy wearing a checked shirt asks me. “The writer?” I nod reluctantly. “Well, what do you know?” he says, pulling a tiny tape recorder out of his bag. “Where were you when it happened?” he asks. When I hesitate for a second, he says in a show of empathy: “Take your time. Don’t feel pressured. You’ve been through a trauma.”
“I wasn’t in the attack,” I explain. “I just happen to be here today. My wife’s giving birth.”
“Oh,” he says, not trying to hide his disappointment, and presses the stop button on his tape recorder. “Mazal tov.” Now he sits down next to me and lights himself a cigarette.
“Maybe you should try talking to someone else,” I suggest as an attempt to get the Lucky Strike smoke out of my face. “A minute ago, I saw them take two people into neurology.”
“Russians,” he says with a sigh, “don’t know a word of Hebrew. Besides, they don’t let you into neurology anyway. This is my seventh attack in this hospital, and I know all their shtick by now.” We sit there a minute without talking. He’s about ten years younger than I am but starting to go bald. When he catches me looking at him, he smiles and says, “Too bad you weren’t there. A reaction from a writer would’ve been good for my article. Someone original, someone with a little vision. After every attack, I always get the same reactions: ‘Suddenly I heard a boom,’ ‘I don’t know what happened,’ ‘Everything was covered in blood.’ How much of that can you take?”
“It’s not their fault,” I say. “It’s just that the attacks are always the same. What kind of original thing can you say about an explosion and senseless death?”
“Beats me,” he says with a shrug. “You’re the writer.”
Some people in white jackets are starting to come back from the ER on their way to the maternity ward. “You’re from Tel Aviv,” the reporter says to me, “so why’d you come all the way to this dump to give birth?”
“We wanted a natural birth. Their department here—”
“Natural?” he interrupts, sniggering. “What’s natural about a midget with a cable hanging from his belly button popping out of your wife’s vagina?” I don’t even try to respond. “I told my wife,” he continues, “‘If you ever give birth, only by Caesarean section, like in America. I don’t want some baby stretching you out of shape for me.’ Nowadays, it’s only in primitive countries like this that women give birth like animals. Yallah, I’m going to work.” Starting to get up, he tries one more time. “Maybe you have something to say about the attack anyway?” he asks. “Did it change anything for you? Like what you’re going to name the baby or something, I don’t know.” I smile apologetically. “Never mind,” he says with a wink. “I hope it goes easy, man.”
Six hours later, a midget with a cable hanging from his belly button comes popping out of my wife’s vagina and immediately starts to cry. I try to calm him down, to convince him that there’s nothing to worry about. That by the time he grows up, everything here in the Middle East will be settled: peace will come, there won’t be any more terrorist attacks, and even if once in a blue moon there is one, there will always be someone original, someone with a little vision, around to describe it perfectly. He quiets down and then considers his next move. He’s supposed to be naive—seeing as how he’s a newborn—but even he doesn’t buy it, and after a second’s hesitation and a small hiccup, he goes back to crying.
Big Baby
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Europe. The high point of the trip wasn’t Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower but the flight from Israel to London—specifically, the meal. There on the tray were a tiny can of Coca-Cola and, next to it, a box of cornflakes not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.
My surprise at the miniature packages didn’t turn into genuine excitement until I opened them and discovered that the Coke tasted like the Coke in regular-size cans and the cornflakes were real, too. It’s hard to explain where that excitement actually came from. All we’re talking about is a soft drink and a breakfast cereal in much smaller packages, but when I was seven, I was sure I was witnessing a miracle.
Today, thirty years later, sitting in my living room in Tel Aviv and looking at my two-week-old son, I have exactly the same feeling: Here’s a man who weighs no more than ten pounds—but inside he’s angry, bored, frightened, and serene, just like any other man on this planet. Put a three-piece suit and a Rolex on him, stick a tiny attaché case in his hand, and send him out into the world, and he’ll negotiate, do battle, and close deals without even blinking. He doesn’t talk, that’s true. And he soils himself as if there were no tomorrow. I’m the first to admit he has a thing or two to learn before he can be shot into space or allowed to fly an F-16. But in principle, he’s a complete person wrapped in a nineteen-inch package, and not just any person, but one who’s very extreme, an eccentric, a character. The kind you respect but may not completely understand. Because, like all complex people, regardless of their height or weight, he has many sides.
My son, the enlightened one: As someone who has read a lot about Buddhism and has listened to two or three lectures given by gurus and even once had diarrhea in India, I have to say that my baby son is the first enlightened person I have ever met. He truly lives in the present: He never bears a grudge, never fears the future. He’s totally ego-free. He never tries to defend his honor or take credit. His grandparents, by the way, have already opened a savings account for him, and every time they rock him in his cradle, Grandpa tells him about the excellent interest rate he managed to get for him and how much money, at an anticipated single-digit average inflation rate, he’ll have in twenty-one years, when the account comes due. The little one makes no reply. But then Grandpa calculates the percentages against the prime interest rate, and I notice a few wrinkles appearing on my son’s forehead—the first cracks in the wall of his nirvana.
My son, the junkie: I’d like to apologize to all the addicts and reformed addicts reading this, but with all due respect to them and their suffering, nobody’s jones can touch my son’s. Like every true addict, he doesn’t have the same options others do when it comes to spending leisure time—those familiar choices of a good book, an evening stroll, or the NBA play-offs. For him, there are only two possibilities: a breast or hell. “Soon you’ll discover the world—girls, alcohol, illegal online gambling,” I say, trying to soothe him. But until that happens, we both know that only the breast will exist. Lucky for him, and for us, he has a mother equipped with two. In the worst-case scenario, if one breaks down, there’s always a spare.
My son, the psychopath: Sometimes when I wake up at night and see his little figure shaking next to me in the bed like a toy burning through its batteries, producing strange guttural noises, I can’t help comparing him in my imagination to Chucky in the horror movie Child’s Play. They’re the same height, they have the same temperament, and neither holds anything sacred. That’s the truly unnerving thing about my two-week-old son: he doesn’t have a drop of morality, not an ounce. Racism, inequality, insensitivity, globalization—he couldn’t care less. He has no interest in anything beyond his immediate drives and desires. As far as he’s concerned, other people can go to hell or join Greenpeace. All he wants now is some fresh milk or relief for his diaper rash, and if the world has to be destroyed for him to get it, just show him the button. He’ll press it without a second thought.
My son, the self-hating Jew . . .
“Don’t you think that’s enough?” my wife says, cutting in. “Instead of dreaming up hysterical accusations against your adorable son, maybe you could do something useful and change him?”
“OK,” I tell her. “OK, I was just finishing up.”
Call and Response
I really admire considerate telemarketers who listen and try to sense your mood without immediately forcing a dialogue on you when they call. That’s why, when Devora from YES, the satellite TV company, calls and asks if it’s a good time for me to talk, the first thing I do is thank her for her thoughtfulness. Then I tell her politely that no, it isn’t.
“The thing is, just a minute ago I fell into a hole and injured my forehead and foot, so this really isn’t the ideal time,” I explain.
“I understand,” Devora says. “So when do you think it’ll be a good time to talk? An hour?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “My ankle must have broken when I fell, and the hole is pretty deep. I don’t think I’ll be able to climb out without help. So it pretty much depends on how quickly the rescue team gets here and whether they have to put my foot in a cast or not.”
“So, maybe I should call tomorrow?” she suggests, unruffled.
“Yes,” I groan. “Tomorrow sounds great.”
“What’s all that business with the hole?” my wife, next to me in a taxi, rebukes after hearing my evasive tactics. This is the first time we have gone out and left our son, Lev, with my mother, so she is a little edgy. “Why can’t you just say, ‘Thanks, but I’m not interested in buying, renting, or borrowing whatever it is you’re selling, so please don’t call me again, not in this life, and if possible, not in the next one, either.’ Then pause briefly and say, ‘Have a nice day.’ And hang up, like everyone else.”
I don’t think everyone else is as firm and nasty to Devora and her ilk as my wife is, but I must admit she has a point. In the Middle East, people feel their mortality more than anywhere else on the planet, which causes most of the population to develop aggressive tendencies toward strangers who try to waste the little time they have left on earth. And though I guard my time just as jealously, I have a real problem saying no to strangers on the phone. I have no trouble shaking off vendors in the outdoor market or saying no to a friend who offers me something on the phone. But the unholy combination of a phone request plus a stranger paralyzes me, and in less than a second, I’m imagining the scarred face of the person on the other end who has led a life of suffering and humiliation. I picture him standing on the window ledge of his forty-second-floor office talking to me on a cordless phone in a calm voice, but he’s already made up his mind: “One more asshole hangs up on me and I jump!” And when it comes down to deciding between a person’s life and getting hooked up to the “Balloon Sculpture: Endless Fun for the Whole Family” channel for only 9.99 shekels a month, I choose life, or at least I did until my wife and financial adviser politely asked me to stop.
That’s when I began to develop the “poor Grandma strategy,” which invokes a woman for whom I’ve arranged dozens of virtual burials in order to get out of futile conversations. But since I’d already dug myself a hole and fallen into it for Devora of the satellite TV concern, I could actually let Grandma Shoshana rest in peace this time.
“Good morning, Mr. Keret,” Devora says the next day. “I hope this is a better time for you.”
“The truth is, there were a few complications with my foot,” I mumble. “I don’t know how, but gangrene developed. And you’ve caught me right before the amputation.”
“It’ll just take a minute,” she gamely tries.
“I’m sorry,” I insist. “They already gave me a sedative and the doctor is signaling for me to close my cell phone. He says it isn’t sterilized.”
“So I’ll try tomorrow, then,” Devora says. “Good luck with the amputation.”
Most telemarketers give up after one call. Phone pollsters and Internet-surfing-package sellers may call back for another round. But Devora from the satellite TV company is different.
“Hello, Mr. Keret,” she says when I answer the next call, unprepared. “How are you?” Before I can reply, she goes on: “Since your new medical condition will probably keep you at home, I thought I’d offer you our Extreme Sports package. Four channels that include various extreme sports from all around the world, from the dwarf-hurling world championship games to the Australian glass-eating matches.”
“Do you want Etgar?” I whisper.
“Yes,” Devora says.
“He died,” I say, and pause before continuing to whisper. “Such a tragedy. An intern finished him off on the operating table. We’re thinking about suing.”
“So who am I talking to?” Devora asks.
“Michael, his younger brother,” I improvise. “But I can’t talk now, I’m at the funeral.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Devora says in a shaky voice. “I didn’t get to speak with him a lot, but he sounded like a lovely person.”
“Thank you,” I keep whispering. “I have to hang up. I have to say Kaddish now.”
“Of course,” Devora says. “I’ll call later. I have a consolation deal that’s just perfect for you.”
The Way We War
Yesterday I called the cell phone company people to yell at them. The day before, my best friend, Uzi, told me he’d called and yelled at them a little, threatened to switch to another provider. And they immediately lowered their price by fifty shekels a month. “Can you believe it?” my friend said excitedly. “One angry five-minute call and you save six hundred shekels a year.”
The customer-service representative was named Tali. She listened silently to all my complaints and threats, and when I finished, she said in a low, deep voice: “Tell me, sir, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? We’re at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Haifa and Tiberias, and all you can think about is your fifty shekels?”
There was something to that, something that made me slightly uncomfortable. I apologized immediately, and the noble Tali quickly forgave me. After all, war is not exactly the right time to bear a grudge against one of your own.
That afternoon I decided to test the effectiveness of the Tali argument on a stubborn taxi driver who refused to take me and my baby son in his cab because I didn’t have a car seat with me.
“Tell me, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I said, trying to quote Tali as precisely as I could. “We’re at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Tiberias, and all you can think about is a damn car seat?”
The argument worked here like magic, and the embarrassed driver quickly apologized and told me to hop in. When we got on the highway, he said partly to me, partly to himself, “It’s a real war, eh?” And after taking a long breath, he added nostalgically, “Just like in the old days.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Seven Good Years"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Etgar Keret.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Year 1
Suddenly, the Same Thing 3
Big Baby 7
Call and Response 11
The Way We War 15
Year 2
Yours, Insincerely 21
Flight Meditation 24
Strange Bedfellows 28
Defender of the People 33
Requiem for a Dream 37
Long View 43
Year 3
Throwdown at the Playground 51
Swede Dreams 56
Matchstick War 60
Idol Worship 64
Year 4
Bombs Away 71
What Does the Man Say? 76
My Lamented Sister 80
Bird's Eye 86
Year 5
Imaginary Homeland 93
Fat Cats 96
Poser 101
Just Another Sinner 105
Shit Happens 108
Last Man Standing 111
Bemusement Park 115
Year 6
Ground Up 123
Sleepover 129
Boys Don't Cry 133
Accident 135
A Mustache for My Son 140
Love at First Whiskey 144
Year 7
Shiva 151
In My Father's Footsteps 155
Jam 159
Fare and Good 164
Pastrami 169
What People are Saying About This
Ira Glass
Etgar Keret's stories are funny, with tons of feeling, driving towards destinations you never see coming. They're written in the most unpretentious, chatty voice possible, but they're also weirdly poetic. They stick in your gut. You think about them for days. --Ira Glass
Aleksandar Hemon
I don't know how Etgar Keret does it, but he can turn anything into a brilliant story. The Seven Good Years is full of them, and they happen to be true, and full of love, kindness, wisdom, humor and stuff I long for as a reader but cannot quite name. Keret's writing is soul-healing. --Aleksandar Hemon
Claire Messud
At once funny and profound, The Seven Good Years is a gem. Etgar Keret approaches memoir the way he does fiction—from surprising angles, with a sly wit, and bracing frankness. Read him, and the world will never look the same again. --Claire Messud
Roddy Doyle
Being a father, having a father—Etgar Keret is the man in the middle and he captures the job just brilliantly. --Roddy Doyle
From the Publisher
Praise for Etgar Keret
“A brilliant writer . . . completely unlike any writer I know. The voice of the next generation.” —Salman Rushdie
“One of my favorite Israeli writers.” —John Green
“I am very happy that Etgar and his work are in the world, making things better.” —George Saunders
“[Keret’s writing] testifies to the power of the surreal, the concise, and the fantastic.”—The Washington Post
Ayelet Waldman
Hilarious, brilliant, poignant, magically economical in its language, marvelously generous in its approach to the world, this book is like its author: genius. --Ayelet Waldman
Shalom Auslander
When I first read Etgar's stories, I wondered what was wrong with him—had his mother smoked crack while pregnant? was he dropped on his head as an infant?—until I met him, and grew to know him, and realized his problem was much worse than I had ever imagined: he is a terribly caring human being in a terribly uncaring universe. Basically, he's fucked. --Shalom Auslander
Gary Shteyngart
Etgar Keret is #1 writer in Israel and #2 in my heart (after my dachshund Felix). --Gary Shteyngart
Interviews
Long Story Short: Etgar Keret on "The Seven Long Years"
By John Freeman
Not long ago, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret was sitting in a restaurant with his son Lev when a waiter said something that made him angry. The child of two Holocaust survivors, raised in a house where the creative insult was an art form, Keret responded with a sharp word. And then each time a new server approached their table Keret complained to them, too. Keret moved slowly up the line, getting angrier each time, all the way through the entire restaurant staff.
"I insulted each and every one of them," Keret remembers dolefully on a recent morning in Manhattan, well into his third espresso with no apparent effect on his bearing. "In the end the manager came and apologized and he brought Lev a cake. And Lev said to me, 'You know, now I understand, this is how people should live. We should shout at people and humiliate them and then they bring you stuff.'
"And this is when I realized that I should change."
Keret does not appear to be an angry man, and in fact comes off as exactly the opposite. Small and warmly handsome, perpetually disheveled, he radiates kindness. Like a tiny Jewish, stonerish George Clooney. But there are equal parts steel and down inside him, and in the past decade — raising a child for the first time, watching his father's health decline — he found his attempts to reconcile them coming to a reckoning point.
He tells the story of this balancing act in The Seven Good Years, his first memoir. Like his five collections of very short stories, the book is niftily, tidily made. No chapter is longer than a few pages, and yet each one delivers a well-aimed punch or a burst of hilarity. Often, it's both.
The book begins with the birth of Keret's son — the first personal essay Keret ever wrote — and ends with the account of a rocket assault on Tel Aviv, during which Keret and his wife, Shira, pull over on a highway and distract Lev from the danger by playing a game called pastrami, in which Keret lies beneath his son and his wife atop him, making a human deli sandwich.
In between the book builds a vivid and moving portrait of Keret's parents, their fierce and generous nature. It was from them in equal measure that Keret learned the power of narrative. "My mother was very, very good at kind of making up stories," Keret says. "My father would only tell me stuff that had really happened."
Both of their lives were the stuff of grim fairy tales. Keret's mother was born in Poland and was the only member of her family to survive the war. She used to smuggle food into her ghetto since she was so small and would not be suspected. After the war, she was sent to an orphanage in her native country, then to France, and from there to Israel.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Poland, for two years Keret's father hid in a hole in the ground so small no one could stand. A Christian man smuggled food to Mr. Keret and his family and hauled out their waste. Then a Nazi battalion built its headquarters very nearly on top of their hiding place.
"His sister got caught very close to the town they were hiding in," Keret tells me. "They tortured her to death but she didn't tell where they were hiding."
When I ask Keret what his father did to pass the time in this horrific situation, he answers with a miniature story.
"My father once said to me, he said he thinks that every person is the world champion at something, adding: 'I was lucky enough to discover what was my great talent in this world,' and it was to sleep.
"So he said, 'I basically fell asleep, I woke up, I asked my father, was the war over? He said no, I took a piss, I went to sleep. I woke up, I said, 'Now?' And he said no. I ate something and went to sleep.' That's the way he portrays it — like he was hibernating for two years."
Keret's conversational mode often involves such detours, digressions, all played out in stories about his family's or his own life.
Aside from a sleep disorder that meant Keret's father walked nearly ten miles a night in his bed, Keret says the trauma of that hibernation did not visibly mark his father, that he emerged from the war with an intense love of other people, of all kinds.
"When I grew up, in Israel in the seventies, it was a very, very strong anti-German sentiment, and I think that my father always made the point to tell me stories about good Germans that he met in the war."
Growing up in the shadow of these stories explains Keret's nature, and probably also his the sharply idiosyncratic and wryly humorous voice of his writing. "I experience life around me as kind of absurd," he says.
"It's actually another way of capturing our humanity. It's kind of like somebody who's scared of a dog saying to himself, 'It's a nice dog. He doesn't want to hurt me. I just petted him, it's gonna be okay.' "
As he talks about absurdism, we come back to the Holocaust and other stories his father told him. Keret references Wislava Szymborska's poem "Could Have," which lists a series of reasons why people survived, each of them contradictory, and then he tells another story.
"We had very few relatives that stayed alive — but one of my father's relatives, the reason that he stayed alive was really because he was asleep all the time." During an escape from a camp, the man decided he was simply too sleepy to keep running and so he was left behind. The Nazis caught all the others and killed them. Meanwhile, the sleepy relative survived.
As a child, Keret was left alone a lot of the time with these stories rattling around in his head. He would often skip school, and his parents were hands-off in their approaching to raising their three children. "I used to wonder how I would fare in the Holocaust," Keret says. He remembers once lying under his bed to see how long he'd last if he had to hide; fifteen minutes later he got up.
The Tel Aviv of Keret's youth was full of survivors — the very lucky and the very tough, many of them both. Especially Keret's mother. Keret finishes his espresso and brings out his phone to show me a photograph of a woman in her twenties, dressed to the nines. A man in the background obviously likes what he sees: "I want to go and build a time machine and slap this guy for looking at my mom's a*s," Keret says, laughing.
Her looks could be deceiving: Keret tells a story about a local hoodlum his mother once caught beating up Etgar's young cousin. "My mother ran to him in high heels and she held him with one arm and held his hair and said to him, 'Tommy, you know, you're a rabid animal. But you're not a stupid rabid animal. So I'm gonna take you now and you're gonna sniff this cousin and you're gonna sniff my son and you're gonna remember the smell. You can go around, you can kill whoever you want, you can burn whatever you want. But you will never touch them again.'
"And the guy, he turned his face to her and he spit on my mom, and he says, 'Who cares, what are you gonna do, you gonna call the police?' And my mother, she didn't even flinch, she was just holding him by his hair, and she said, 'You know what I'm gonna do?' And she turned his head so she's facing him, she said, 'I'm gonna kill you. And I'm gonna put your body in this dumpster. And not even your mother's gonna come to you because nobody's gonna miss you.' "
Keret said scenes like this and others — another one involved his mother breaking a beer bottle and looking at a very large man trying to snatch her purse and saying, "Such a shame, such a pretty face" — taught him a kind of toughness.
"My mother said to me, 'When you fight with somebody, don't ever think of how strong he is because it's not important. Just try to figure out how far will he go.' "
This lesson never merged for Keret into a political lesson about Israel, at least in its ongoing fight with Palestinians. His father's attitude about fighting leavened his mother's.
"I once asked my father what were the things that he was most proud of, and he said the thing he was most proud of was that he fought in five wars in Israel. Always in the infantry, always in the front line — and that he never hurt anybody."
When it came time for Keret to fulfill his obligatory military service, it turned out he was not going to have to choose whether or not to fire a gun. Asthmatic from a young age, Keret avoided the front lines in Lebanon. He entered the army with two close friends, both computer whizzes. "We were like the Three Musketeers," Keret remembers.
Both of them worked in an underground computer lab. They managed to convince a colonel that Keret was a genius with computers, too, so he could get the same cushy overnight solo gig, tending the machines. It worked, and "whenever there was a problem to solve I would call them," Keret says. "They would come fix it."
Life in the army was clearly much harder on one of the friends than it was on Keret. The young man became depressed and began to talk about killing himself. Keret tried to talk him out of it, and when it became clear he wasn't winning the argument, he and their other friend had the young man forcibly committed.
But life in the army still took a toll. When another of Keret's friends became suicidal, Keret and another friend had the young man hospitalized. Weeks later, the young man was released and given his rifle back. Keret was worried and approached the army psychologist with his concerns. The doctor told Keret to mind his own business. But Keret wasn't going to let the matter drop. "It was just before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement," he recalls, "and [my friend] was supposed to do his first guard duty there, and I volunteered to do it with him. So we met [in the computer room] first and he asked me to bring him something, and by the time I got back he had shot himself. . . . It took him a few days to die."
Keret went back to the psychologist in a rage for an evaluation: the army was worried Keret would have been damaged by what he had seen. Keret shouted and railed at the doctor, who sat there silently. Keret remembers saying to him: 'If you have one inch of soul in your empty brain, how can you sit here like you know anything?' "
Rather than punishing Keret for the outburst, the doctors pronounced him fit to go back to his post and assigned him a forty- eight-hour shift alone in the same computer room where his friend had just killed himself.
"When you are in those shifts there is no Internet, no TV, no nothing," Keret says now. "You're just in a room, a tiny room, you have a phone, no windows. I remember I had the sensation when I walked on the floor my feet were kind of sticky and I thought that it was sticky with his blood, and the bullet was still stuck there in the cabinet — they were unable to take it out — and I kind of said to myself, I don't know how I'm going to make it.
"How can I stay in this room for forty hours now? I didn't know what to do. I felt like — well, so I sat down and I wrote 'Pipelines,' I wrote my first story."
In "Seven Years Later," Keret describes emerging from this night watch and walking over in the morning light to his brother's apartment to show the short story to him. It's a sweet and moving vignette, but it doesn't describe or mention the death of Keret's friend. I ask Keret why he left it out here and in "The Nimrod Flipout," his later short story of three friends in the army in which one suffers a breakdown. Keret's answer says a lot about how he conceives of stories.
"I kind of felt that I — when you write something you want to write it so you can pretend that is the way that it was, and that if I would want to write it truly the way that it was, I couldn't write it because it wouldn't have worked."
This was in 1986, and Keret has been writing stories ever since. Pipelines, his debut collection, was first published in Hebrew in 1992 and more or less ignored, but with Missing Kissinger, a book of fifty short stories, he broke through. Tales of love and heartache and strange happenings, they read like stories Kurt Vonnegut might have written if he were born in Israel in the 1960s. One of the stories in the collection is now used on the Israeli matriculation exam.
Mira Rashty, a journalist and editor of the Hebrew edition of Granta magazine, says Keret's work was a breath of fresh air — stylistically and politically — in Israel in the late 1990s.
"He was the first writer who wrote about personal and everyday situations using a everyday Hebrew and incorporating slang into his writing," Rashty says. "Unlike some of his predecessors, he has been an inspiration for new writers to leave the traditional Zionist themes and practices of writing.
"It is not that he doesn't deal with the national and political issues, it is the way he does it. Using literature and mainly the art of words in order to reflect human situations whether they are personal, social or national. His stories are sharp, slim and concrete with an extreme humanity to them."
The length of Keret's stories and the simplicity of his prose also make them highly translatable. In the past two decades, as one book of stories has turned into five and Keret has also begun working in the comic book form as well, his work has been ferried into nearly forty different languages.
The novelist and short story writer Nathan Englander has been one of Keret's many translators. "Etgar has a really special gift for processing gigantical ideas," Englander says, "compressing them into relatable, processable, empathizable short-short stories."
He adds: "I personally love when an artist and his or her work syncs up so sincerely. And with Etgar, his notions of fairness and justice, his ability to see humanity in everyone, and to call things like he sees them, the kindness and weirdness and unbounded imagination of the writing, that is also how he is in real life."
The novelist Aleksandar Hemon says of Keret, "Reading or listening to him, more than once I thought: I wish it fell to me to tell those stories. He is the exactly opposite of the programmatic tedium of Knausgaard, who spends hundeds of pages and years of life looking for something story-worthy and cannot find anything if his life depended on it. Etgar is the kind of writer who can stare at the wall and imagine a map of the world on it, and people in it, and make them live funny, tragic lives. . . . He like a long-lost brother, and a much better human being than I can ever be."
Life around Keret does take on a strange whimsical quality. Two decades ago he was at a nightclub in Israel and he saw a woman he knew and said something along the lines that he was going home, had to get up early. She responded by saying, "Kiss me." Years later he learned she'd actually said, "You'll never get a taxi."
Keret and the filmmaker Shira Geffen have been married a long time now, misunderstandings aside, and occasionally work together. He directed Jellyfish, a film based on one of her short stories. The film won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2007. Dozens of adaptations have been made form Keret's own stories.
Occasionally, his role in the film industry meant he could rope his father into films. "He always kind of had a key role," Keret says, "so in Jellyfish, the final shot is with my dad. I made this kind of TV drama where he played a homeless guy — he played the guy who says 'popsicle.' "
Keret has spent a lot of time on planes attending the launch of these films and his growing number of books, and Seven Good Years highlights some of the comic and surreal moments of these travels. Shortly after September 11th, trying to get to Holland for a festival, Keret is double-booked on a flight. He refuses to leave and winds up sitting in the jump seat next to a furious flight attendant. In Germany, an audience member asks Keret if he would apologize for what the Jews have done to Europe. Like many Israeli writers, Keret is often reflexively confronted by politically engaged audience members. He's learned to fire back with a joke.
"I was once in Italy at an event," Keret says with a dark laugh, "and they said to me, 'You baby killer, how dare you come here?!' and David Grossman was there, and I said, 'No no no, he's the baby killer. I'm just the bum who writes short stories, he's the baby killer.' "p Occasionally, however, Keret's travels return a coherence to the world he has inherited from his parents. One of the countries where his work sells the best is Poland, and not long ago he traveled there with his mother, her first trip back in seventy years, to see a house an architect fan built in Keret's honor. It is in the Guinness World Book of Records as the narrowest house in the world.
Keret puts his arms out to the side and shows me how you can literally climb the Keret house, as it is called, from the inside by putting your hands onto the opposing walls. It's a miraculous thing, something you'd have a hard time believing existed if it were in, say, a short story by a surrealist writer. But it's not an exaggeration. Keret then tells me a story about a woman he met who was able to tell him exactly where the house was, even though much of the neighborhood around it has changed. And the reason was because during the Nazi occupation, she would bide her time under arrest by memorizing the facades and windows and roof treatments of all the homes on the same block.
When Keret's mother thought about giving up during the Holocaust, her father said to her, "You must survive, because what these people want is to erase our existence from the history of the earth. So you have to survive to prove them wrong." She did, and she passed this will to live on to her son, who has transformed it into his fiction, something magical and strange, and kind.
As we speak, Keret is off to prepare for a reading he will give tonight in the basement of a New York apartment building where he is renting a flat at a discounted rate, so long as he agreed to give a reading in Hebrew with the owner's tuba band. I ask him later how it went and he writes, "The building's super stood at the entrance wearing a sweatshirt with the word 'Security' printed on its back, but since the eighty people in the audience were mostly people living in the building they didn't buy it. The audience loved it and the French horn guy was super happy, but he got hospitalized the next day with some heart problem. His girlfriend has asked me to call him to improve his mood. He isn't in danger or anything." As in many Etgar Keret stories, the strangeness of this one makes its final note — of human fragility and resilience — all the more resonant.
—July 7, 2015
From the B&N Reads Blog
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