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Etgar Keret?s popularity has taken him by surprise: ?When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them.?
Photograph by: Yanai Yechiel , Douglas & McIntyre
MONTREAL - Readers looking for a way into the world of Etgar Keret couldn?t ask for a better starting point than The Polite Little Boy, a story from the Israeli writer?s newest collection Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. All the qualities that have made Keret a star in Israel and an increasingly popular cult figure internationally are there: a short treatment of a deceptively simple scenario ? in this case, a child whose sensitivity goes unnoticed in a household riven with conflict ? that hides layers of meaning as deep as the reader cares to dig, as Keret?s own comments on the story confirm.
?I am a second-generation child of Holocaust survivors,? says the 45-year-old on the phone from Tel Aviv, where he lives with his wife and son. ?I feel that in almost all my collections there are stories that touch on that. One of the things about kids in positions like mine is that you know that your parents have suffered so much that the thing you want the most is to basically avoid making them suffer any more. You become very considerate, maybe over-considerate: If you?re offered cake by your parents, you want to share it with them ? that kind of thing. That?s something that?s very strong in my own memory of childhood, and that?s what I?ve tried to show in The Polite Little Boy. You?re filled with emotions, but you almost try to detach yourself from those emotions because they could be dangerous, make you sad or make you angry, and in this way disrupt the family atmosphere and make people feel bad.?
Keret?s worldwide profile owes something to Goran Dukic?s 2006 film Wristcutters: A Love Story, an adaptation, starring Tom Waits and with a soundtrack by Gogol Bordello, of the novella Kneller?s Happy Campers. In Israel, though, he was hugely popular from the beginning, his work striking a deep chord with a young generation of readers. The phenomenon caught Keret by surprise, he says.
?When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get them,? he says. ?But then my first collection of stories, which was written during my army service, became very much kind of a soldier?s book. My second book, Missing Kissinger, became very much a backpackers? book. And since I published Suddenly, a Knock, I find that the people who come to book signings are people who have six-year-old kids, saying: ?I read you first in the army, then I read you (while backpacking) in India.? I feel happy with the thought that I?ve changed enough to stay relevant to them.?
That transition, from a sort of Israeli Gen-X avatar to a chronicler of more adult concerns (however surreally rendered), wasn?t a smooth one. There was a considerable period of writer?s block.
?Whenever I would sit down to write, it would be something about being 25 and drunk or stoned, you know? It took me about five years to realize that I had to adjust. When I was young, I despised the kind of life that I was now living, kind of the petite bourgeoisie: filling out forms for tenure, taking a mortgage, having insurance, things that meant death to me when I was younger. It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don?t have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story; it?s about what goes on inside your mind and soul. So suddenly I found myself writing stories about this new reality, and I find they are as ambiguous and interesting as my earlier stuff.?
Keret?s international following is all the more impressive for the fact that he writes in Hebrew ? a language that, as he points out, can be a translator?s nightmare.
?I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation. Hebrew was not used as a spoken language for 2,000 years, and then kind of instantly revived at an arbitrary moment in history, so now you have a very, very ancient language on the one hand, but also the need for new words ? words that come from English or Russian or Arabic or just invented. So it?s a kind of roller-coaster of registers in each sentence in my writing, and this is something that kind of only works in Hebrew.?
The sheer shortness of Keret?s short stories ? rarely more than seven or eight pages, sometimes as little as one ? is not the result of a big editing-down process, he says.
?They?re short to begin with, and get shorter. Something about the way that I write is completely different from the mechanism with which you write a novel. Stories are like explosions, and I don?t know how to explode slowly. I tried once in my life to write a novel. I had written something like 80 pages of it when my laptop got stolen. When I told people this, they acted as if something tragic had happened, but I kind of felt relieved, grateful to the thief who saved me from another year of something that felt more like homework than fun.?
While Keret may not often be explicitly political in his fiction, that dimension is seldom too far from the surface, and some of his artistic choices have spoken for themselves, as when he collaborated on 2004?s Gaza Blues with the Palestinian writer Samir El-Youssef.
?People tend to overestimate the power of fiction or of art,? he says. ?I don?t know yet of a story or a novel that has stopped a bullet. But I knew Samir from before the second intifada, and when that started, he wanted us to do something political. The way he defined it was by saying: ?Let?s have a book that contains your work and mine so that we can show that Israelis and Palestinians can co-exist on the same page.? We thought that if you read Samir?s characters and you read mine, you can see that those people could be good friends.?
In his solo work, too, Keret has managed to bridge the Israeli-Palestinian divide ? something in which he takes evident pride.
?I have been translated into Arabic and published in the West Bank, which is something very rare for Israeli writers. I meet many Palestinians and it?s always an interesting dialogue. Some have told me that what they like about my stories is that the characters are confused and vulnerable and often scared of Palestinians. They?ve said that growing up they always had the feeling that the Israelis were the kind of people who had all the answers, so they found something very humanizing in the thought that Israelis were just as f---ed up as they thought they themselves were.?
The one-time party guy has even taken to lending his voice to forums once thought the preserve of an earlier generation of Israel?s writers, led by Amos Oz, though his approach is characteristically contrary.
?When I write op-eds, and I often do, I don?t write from a dogmatic place trying to convince people to hold one opinion or another,? he says. ?I try to do what I do in fiction ? take things that people might think of as obvious and present them as ambiguous. My prime objective is to confuse the convinced.?
Etgar Keret takes part in a 90-minute interview with Margaux Chetrit Sunday, April 21 at 3 p.m. at Chapters/Indigo, Place Montreal Trust, 1500 McGill College Ave., and speaks Sunday, April 21?at 7:30 p.m. at the Jewish Public Library, 5151 C?te Ste. Catherine Rd. Both events are co-presented by the Consulate General of Israel. For more information, visit bluemetropolis.org.
ianmcgillis2@gmail.com
Twitter: @IanAMcGillis
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