Tikkun - interview with Etgar Keret
Z Etgarem Keretem rozmawiał Ben Naparstek, 26 sierpnia 2005, źródło: Tikkun
Some writers dedicate their books to their partners. Etgar Keret took it one step further. After his girlfriend, Israeli actress Shira Geffen, complained that he?d never written a story about her?even though many of their friends and relatives had made appearances in his work?Keret wrote a story called ?Fatso? for her as a sort of love letter. A strange sort of love letter, as it turns out. ?Fatso? is a bizarre parody of a werewolf tale, in which the narrator?s girlfriend transforms by night into ?a heavy, hairy man, with no neck, with a gold ring on his pinky.? Still, Keret is adamant that it?s a love story. ?In the beginning I thought, ?I wish that my girlfriend would walk like a supermodel. She waddles like an old lady.? But now, every time I look at her, I can imagine how she?ll be forty years from now, because she already has the old lady walk in her. It just makes me love her more,? he says. ?That?s the story with this Fatso guy. In the end, you have somebody who?s also a mate. When you truly love somebody, all those things that at the beginning are really alienating are things you learn to love.?
In his homeland of only five million Hebrew readers, Keret?s four collections of stories have sold more than 200,000 copies in all. His sharp depictions of urban alienation bear an uncanny relation to his unique and at times presumed pseudonymous name. With etgar translating as ?city? and eeret as ?challenge,? Etgar Keret means ?urban challenge.? Apart from collaborating on slick comic-book novels, Keret writes barbed sketches for Israeli television, pieces that have led to his being denounced in the Knesset as an anti-Semite. His books are the most stolen volumes from Israeli bookstores, and he?s the most widely read writer in prisons. ?A lot is to do with their attention spans,? Keret says of his fans behind bars. ?They like my stories because they?re short.? His pithy sentences and blunt prose rarely propel his cameo tales beyond a few pages?a feature of his writing Keret traces to his asthma. ?When you are having an attack and say to somebody, ?I love you very much,? you could, instead of ?very much,? say, ?Call an ambulance.? You don?t have time to bullshit.?
A child of Holocaust survivors, Keret grew up with a crippling sense of insignificance. His experiences felt dwarfed by what his parents had endured: ?I would bump into a wall and I wouldn?t cry, because I?d say, ?You just bumped into a wall. Smile to your mum and make her happy.?? Literature helped Keret to legitimize his emotions. Through fiction, he discovered ?a place where what I truly feel really counts.? He regards his family as a microcosm of Israeli society. Keret?s brother, a militant anarchist, heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana. His sister, with her ten children, lives by ultra-Orthodox beliefs that bar her from reading his books. But unlike fragmented Israel, Keret?s family remains tightly knit in their disparate convictions. ?When my sister goes on a demonstration, my brother will give her tips about how to deal with police brutality,? says Keret. ?The ultra-Orthodox are also anarchists in their own way.? Keret began to write during what he describes as the worst years of his life, as a nineteen-year-old doing his military service. A ?terrible soldier,? Keret was regularly court-martialled before eventually being assigned to a computer unit five floors underground. Keret was in desperate need of a reprieve from the despair brought on by the suicide of his best friend in the army. He explains that he also stuttered and had ?a very big problem expressing [him]self in any way.? During forty-eight-hour shifts at the computer outfit, Keret thought to himself: ?You must find a way out or you?ll go crazy.? So, he started to write stories.
Older Israeli intellectuals don?t always respond favorably to Keret?s non-ideological vignettes. Chief among his critics is A.B. Yehoshua, an elder statesman of Israeli letters who criticizes Keret for his lack of political commitment. While Yehoshua composes epics that stridently draw attention to their political significance, Keret?s short stories flaunt their irreverence in hip rebellion against the ideological zeal of the generation that came of age with the state. Keret says he identifies more with the Jewish tradition of self-flagellating comedy than the epic nationalist fiction that dominates his country?s literature. ?The moment Israel was formed, people gave up their Jewishness for being Israeli,? he says. ?The writers became national figures. They lost the self-criticism that you find in Isaac Bashevis Singer or Woody Allen. I?m a lot closer to Hasidic tales than Yehoshua is.? Humor, for Keret, is a form of protest?a weapon for the subjugated and dispossessed. ?The things you can change in life, you usually won?t bother to make a joke about.? Keret considers Yehoshua?s short story ?Facing the Forests,? which depicts the relationship between an Israeli and a mute Arab, emblematic of left-wing Israeli fiction. ?Many times you meet those mute Arabs [through whom] the Israeli narrators and writers tell the reader exactly what they want,? says Keret. ?I think much left-wing writing has a very patronizing subtext, saying, ?We are for peace and we know what the Palestinians want.? I?ve never tried to write a realistic text in which I?ve claimed to know what?s going on inside a Palestinian?s mind.?
Yehoshua and Keret?s divergent politics came to a head when they shared the podium during a panel discussion at a writers? festival in Greece. They argued about the older writer?s disparaging attitude towards the Jews of the Diaspora. Keret stressed the affinities that bind the Jewish people, whereas Yehoshua maintained his controversial belief that exile is the ?disease? of Judaism for which Zionism is the cure. Keret sees Yehoshua?s view of the diaspora Jew as an instance of blaming the victim for the crime. ?It?s not much different than the ?she shouldn?t have worn that dress? reaction to rape victims,? he says. ?Claiming that the Israeli is the complete Jew seems very strange and wrong to me. The archetypal Israeli is more an anti-diaspora Jew than a complete one. If the diaspora leaders were intellectuals, the typical Israeli political leader is a general or a farmer, preferably both. Jewish cosmopolitan and self-reflexive critical thought is also hard to find in the archetypal Israeli, who is more simple, pragmatic, and straight to the point?which doesn?t at all seem to me a continuation or improvement of Jewish thought.?
Keret says that, in a society where ?you go on a blind date and the second question you?re asked is what party you vote for,? he?s been attacked by the older generation for refusing to align himself with political parties. But Keret stresses the importance, ?as an intellectual, of not patronizing people, of not instructing people on what to do.? Often alarmed at the regime under which he lives, Keret at times experiences the alienation of ?a Jew living in the Diaspora of Israel.? He explains the political impasse with the Palestinians as being about who has the strongest claim to victimhood. ?Because we?ve been persecuted for hundreds of years, we cannot listen to other people?s pain; we never think it is as great as our own,? he says. ?I think we passed this syndrome on to the Palestinians, who have now become contenders for ultimate victim status?both sides competing for this title, comparing scars.? He says that, for a nation tired of being cast as a villain on the world stage, the U.S. invasion of Iraq provided a perverse form of relief. Initial hysteria quickly dissolved with the outbreak of the war, the mood lifting into ?a kind of high. Many people felt a strong release from the fact that there was a war and that we weren?t the victimizer or the sufferer?the fact that there were airplanes dropping bombs on cities and suicide bombings and we had nothing to do with it.?
Keret speaks candidly about the proposed academic boycott of Israeli universities. His English translator, Miriam Shlesinger, was a victim of the previous academic boycott, fired from the board of a scientific journal for carrying an Israeli passport. That Shlesinger was the former head of the Israeli branch of Amnesty International was immaterial. ?Like the IDF strategy of collective punishment?demolishing the houses of suicide bombers which sheltered relatives that didn?t have anything to do with the bombing?the boycott is an ineffective way of making its initiators feel they?re doing something right?or, more accurately, righteous,? Keret says. ?Universities are a stronghold of the Israeli Left and serve more as a thorn in the right-wing government?s side than as anything else. It feels like a mob action?a group of people wanting to vent their anger without much effort. If they were in the Deep South fifty years ago, they could look for some minority member to hang. But they?re British professors, so they look for an academic with an Israeli passport.?
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