Etgar Keret is a best-selling Israeli writer and an award-winning filmmaker who Salman Rushdie calls “the voice of the next generation.” His nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Tablet, and his latest collection of short stories, Suddenly, a Knock On the Door, is on everyone’s must-read shortlist.
Suddenly, a Wave: Etgar Keret on Slow Explosions, Conjugal Collaborations, and Israeli Turning Points
-EH: There’s a fascination with Israel as a foreign policy issue, Israel as a peace process, and so on, but I’m really curious about how you experienced Israel as a boy and a young man… What were some of the artistic and cultural influences that were important to you as you were growing up?
-EH: Yes, Israel was one of the cool countries of the world during those years!
-Keret: It was cool, and it felt safe. In ‘77 there was the peace agreement with Egypt, and there was this feeling that everything was going in a very good and positive direction, you know? I really had a very beautiful and protected childhood. I’m the youngest of three in my family, and I’m very connected both to my parents and my siblings. Everything was really nice!
-EH: I know, again, the big picture from the outside, I know that that changed… When did that change occur for you, and how did it affect your feeling of being Israeli, and your sense of your place in the world?
-Keret: I think the point after which things started changing radically was the Lebanon War, because it was the first war that was not under a social consensus. As the war started, there were many people who were against it. My sister’s fiancé died the first week of the war. Both my brother and sister were in the Army during this war, and my brother served in Lebanon. So this was really a time where… there was something about the narrative of us being always on defense, always doing the right thing, and then there was something that suddenly became more ambiguous, and the question marks began appearing.
-EH: And I guess you didn’t have the easy consensus in Israeli society. You didn’t have the sense that ‘we’re united, the enemy is clear, what needs to be done is clear’…
-Keret: No, it was the Israeli Vietnam War. I think that it really created some sort of breach in society. During the demonstrations against the Lebanon war, it was the first time that a grenade was thrown at demonstrators, and an Israeli right-winger killed an Israeli left-winger at a demonstration. To imagine that not that many years later, the Israeli Prime Minister would be assassinated was something that, now it’s part of our history, but when I grew up, it wouldn’t even be a thing that you could imagine.
When I grew up, it was so safe that when we would have a bonfire on Lag B’Omer, I would come back home, I would walk from a park down the street all by myself as a 10-year-old kid at 2 AM, and all the kids would be like that. We were living in our country. The thought that a Jew would hurt another Jew was not even something that came to mind.
-EH: Yes, you’d had Labor and Likud governments back and forth politically, but there had never been these deep divisions and this sense of acrimony in the society itself.
-Keret: Yes, I think the Lebanon war was really the first time that there was a feeling that social solidarity could be broken inside the country.
-EH: And how did this boy who felt like he was growing up in a cool and safe and fun country, how did this change your sense of yourself?