Why writer Etgar Keret wants to get back to Israel as soon as he can

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 October 7. “It actually helps you keep your sanity, because you feel that you’re useful.”

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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. It’s like almost seeing a picture of yourself, or seeing yourself in the mirror, instead of basically just acting your role.

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. It actually helps you keep your sanity, because you feel that you’re useful.

So instead of a burden, you see these requests as a blessing?

I saw them as a blessing, because if you see a person who is suffering and you can ease their suffering, it makes me feel good. But at the same time, I think the kind of thing that resonates in your own scope is really meaningless for a government that is kind of an Olympus that is totally disconnected from reality and doesn’t listen to what anyone wants and just keeps going the wrong way.

In this country, the criticism and ostracism of Israel has extended even to the Israeli left, and among far-left critics there is seldom a distinction made between the Netanyahu government and what we used to call “liberal Zionists” and critics of his government. Have you had dialogue with people in the States on the left with whom you really, really disagree, or perhaps by whom you feel betrayed?

Social media and media in general are widely amplifying things that exist, but at the bottom most of the people that I met, regardless of their political views, I think they want to listen. But the big challenge is the people who don’t even know where Israel is on the map. There’s something very narcissistic about activism today, and it’s really played out in the street. In general, I meet people who are left-wing, and say, “It’s very difficult to identify with the actions of Israel these days.” Now, what is Israel? Imagine that you’re American, and you meet someone in France, and they say, “You’re from the country where you don’t let the women have an abortion.”

“No,” you say, “actually, I am demonstrating for abortion. Actually, most of the people I know want women to have the right to an abortion.” Somehow, we have a minority that doesn’t have the power to differentiate between Israel and the government of Israel. So you are against Israel. Are you against hundreds of thousands of people who are going out to the street regularly because they want to end the war? Are you against them?

The problem is that everything turns into some kind of emoji. This is Israel, an emoji, and all the notions of security and ambiguity are totally deleted.

Your latest book, “Autocorrect,” has been published in Israel and is scheduled to come out in the United States next year. Do any of the stories deal with Oct. 7 and the war?

When you write a short story collection, the point where you say you have a book is very arbitrary. On the eighth of October, I was supposed to deliver the manuscript. And what happened was that I read the book on Oct. 6, and I said to my wife, “I have a problem with the book,” because I wrote it just after my mother’s death, and I wrote it through the judicial reform, and I wrote it through COVID, and I said, “There is something so dark in it that I don’t think readers really deserve it.” And she told me, “You’re a drama queen. How about you put the book aside, and see if tomorrow you still find it too dark.” So I went to sleep.

I woke up on Oct. 7 to read my book, but when I woke up — it was really crazy. People that I know, they were shooting at their houses. I teach in Beer Sheva, and in the first few days my students left to the hospital to see if they could find the body of their loved ones — actually wishing to find a body, because it would mean that they were not taken.

And then it was maybe late November or December, when I said, “Oh, my God, I have a book,” and when I sat down and read it, my wife said, “Is it too dark?” And I said, “Oh, no. It’s just right.”

Is there an example of a story in the book that, even inadvertently, speaks to the present moment?

Four years ago, for example, I wrote a story about two parents who divorced when the kid was only three months old, and then the child dies and the couple, because they can’t agree on anything, ask a writer to write the eulogy to capture the child in all their beauty. It’s a story about how I feel incompetent and how I feel people want me to do things that I’m not able to do. And now, the most famous writers in Israel are being asked to write eulogies.

Another story, set in the future, is about two people living in Israel when the entire country is destroyed, and they are giving guided tours to aliens of what used to be Israel. I wrote this story three years ago, and this is how we feel now. When we see things, we say, “We used to care. We used to come here to laugh. We used to do this.” People say I’m prophetic. No. I was depressed.

So what you need to do is write happy stories so that that’ll become the next reality. 

I wish, I wish. I also want to say that it’s been very difficult for me to write fiction. I will write a poem, I will write a song lyric for singers. I write op-eds. But the idea of writing a story when I don’t know how I feel or how I will feel when I look back at a year that feels like a decade …

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.