When I spoke on Thursday to the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, who was in New York as part of a two-week speaking tour, he described himself as “somewhere between depression and a slight nervous breakdown.”
He was eager to book a ticket home, worried that flights would be grounded as Israel braced for retaliation from a Hezbollah leadership humiliated by the week’s deadly pager attacks against its operatives.
Another Israeli might have enjoyed a short break from a country that has been at war for 11 months, but Keret, a household name in Israel for his deceptively whimsical short-short stories, as well as films, children’s books and political commentary, said he misses the “small tasks” that have kept him occupied since Oct. 7. In his case, they have included reading to off-duty soldiers or victims at a kibbutz, comforting burned-out social workers, or collaborating on a story with a severely wounded soldier.
In the United States, meanwhile, the distance only made him more introspective — and more despairing of the war and of a government that he thinks is flouting the will of its people.
“So it’s really like you’re in a forest fire, and you know you can save a deer or a porcupine, or put down a little flame, and you’re constantly hyperventilating on all kinds of things,” Keret, 57, said of his days since Oct. 7. “It actually helps you keep your sanity, because you feel that you’re useful.”
His tour has taken him to Yale University, Miami and Mt. Kisco, New York. On Sunday he will read from his upcoming story collection, “Autocorrect,” at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan. Keret is appearing as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations for the Charles Bronfman Prize for Jewish humanitarians, which he won in 2016.
In our conversation, we spoke about the responsibilities of an Israeli artist in a time of war, why everything feels speeded up and the lesson in resilience he learned from his late father, a Holocaust survivor.
Our interview was edited for length and clarity.
How are you? I know that is a charged question these days, but we’re approaching the anniversary of Oct. 7 and I’d like to get a sense of what these past months have been like for you both in your public and private life.
The metaphor I use is that you’re watching a split-screen TV. On one side you see everything moving in fast-forward speed. On one side is the seventh of October massacre, the destruction of half of Gaza, the entire north of Israel evacuated, the pagers blowing up in people’s pockets. It’s like plagues from the Bible. I’ve been through many wars in my life, seen the suffering from both sides, the destruction. So you think, if something moves on the screen, there will be some kind of reaction.
But on the other side of the screen, you see a prime minister who fired his minister of defense [Yoav Gallant] 14 months ago, the same guy who has been running the war for us for a year, and Netanyahu is still threatening to fire him. He wants to fire the chief of staff, fire the secret service, replace all the Supreme Court judges. It’s kind of a hostile takeover by democratic means. And every week, you see hundreds of thousands of people in the street saying, “We want a deal to end the war. We want to see the prisoners back. We want a new election.” But nothing happens, and there’s no response to the will of the people.
It sounds like you’re saying it is the difference between warp speed and the status quo.
Yes. Another good metaphor for the disconnect between the government and the people is that Netanyahu wants to hold an anniversary ceremony while people are still being held hostage. It’s like doing Holocaust Memorial Day in 1944 when people are burning in Auschwitz. And many of the families don’t want the government to be involved, because they say, “We see you as responsible.” So the government insisted on doing this ceremony, which is boycotted by almost all the artists and almost all the families, and they decided the ceremony will be held without an audience, because they’re afraid that the audience will protest, so it will be pre-recorded.
And that’s the metaphor: We are not in the audience, and the government is totally in a universe of their own.
And personally: What kind of toll has the year taken on you, or perhaps the opposite — what have you learned or felt inspired by?
I got to the U.S. two weeks ago, and now I am somewhere between depression and a slight nervous breakdown. The reason for that is that for the past year, I found myself myself reading to soldiers in the front, or reading to victims at a kibbutz, or meeting social workers burnt out after six months of listening to all [of the trauma], or playing with children, or writing a story with an amputated soldier, or going to demonstrations. On a daily basis, I get a dozen people that I don’t know writing to me, asking me for something. It could be that the brother died, and they want me to talk to the publishing house that will maybe publish his book. Someone whose ex-wife is depressed since the war because she lost people close to her said, “Sunday is her birthday,” and would I be willing to hide in the bushes and surprise her, because I’m her favorite author.
I have all these tiny tasks — I am not saying it is foolproof, but I’m dealing with one fragment at a time.
Meanwhile, I am sitting in my hotel in Miami, waiting for my event, and for the first time I have some kind of a bird’s-eye view of how we’re stuck and not going anywhere.
But fiction, it’s really hard for me to do that because in fiction, you need to have hope. You need to have a kind of trust in human beings that I don’t have right now. So it’s very challenging for me to write fiction because fiction is about possibilities, and right now, I don’t see a lot of possibilities. I hope it will come back, because I really love to write fiction, but right now, it’s very hard for me to do that.
It sounds like you’re in a place where you need to focus on writing what you can write, and what you can write is not necessarily happy stories.
I’m not sure I can even write what I can write. I’m doing my best. I’m writing, and I’m teaching, and I’m trying to keep myself connected to reality. But sometimes, I feel the need to disconnect a little bit, because reality is so harsh, and I feel that fiction is a kind of escape. But it’s not the escape that I need right now. I need to be connected to reality. I need to be connected to the suffering of people. I need to be connected to the hope that maybe we can make a change. So I’m trying to do my best, and I hope that I will find my way back to fiction, because I really miss it. But right now, it’s very hard for me to do that.
I heard you speak in western Massachusetts this summer at an event for Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute for Religion, and you told a story about hope — or at least something like it. It was something your father, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2012, said when you asked him if the Holocaust was the worst time of his life. Can you remind me of his answer?
I asked him that when I was a kid, and he would always answer me honestly, no matter how young I was. He said, “I don’t split life by good periods and bad periods. There are easy periods and difficult periods.” And then he said: “It’s the difficult periods when you learn about yourself the most.”
This is definitely something that I take and understand. I was much more rigid when the war started.
If before [Oct. 7] someone had said to me, “Let’s write a story together. I’m sending you a paragraph,” I would have said no. But when an amputated soldier asked me, I said yes, and even if the story doesn’t look like any of my stories, I am in dialogue with the guy, and it’s making somebody, a boy really, smile.
Before the war I was in my own little cube. Now I get a call from somebody who is driving to the border with Gaza to bring boxes of books to soldiers, because the soldiers can’t use their cell phones, so they read books all the time. He asks, “Would you want to come with me? Maybe you can read to them.” Of course. If he called me two years ago, I would have said, “Call my agent, speak to my assistant.”
There is something about a disaster that breaks a lot of the thick barriers between you and the world.
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