Etgar Keret, writer: ‘Living in Israel today is like living in a zombie movie’

Writer Etgar Keret (Ramat Gan, Israel, 58) had planned to deliver his ninth book of short stories to his publisher on October 8, 2023. He had picked the date at random: he produces one every seven years or so and sets himself a firm deadline. Two days earlier, he told his wife, Shira Geffen — the screenwriter and filmmaker who wrote the film Jellyfish (2007), directed by Keret and awarded at Cannes — that he felt the book had become too dark because of the personal and political events that had marked him in preceding years: his mother’s death, the coronavirus pandemic, a herniated disc, the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu with the most right-wing government in the country’s history… His wife advised him to reread it calmly the next day and, if he still felt that way, to ask the publisher for an extension.

Hours later, Hamas launched its surprise large-scale attack, leaving almost 1,200 people dead and more than 250 hostages, and the tone of the book ceased to be Keret’s main concern. Three months later, at a public event, he was asked whether he was working on a new book and he remembered the draft. With so many reservists mobilized in the country for the invasion of Gaza, the publisher also could not release it. In the end, Keret added two stories and a new work, Autocorrect, was born.

“That day, I told my wife that the book wasn’t meant for the general public because the world isn’t as bad as the one I was describing. Today, the public understands that. It’s like an elevator between two floors. Reality has come down to the level of the book,” he says in an interview with this newspaper at his home in Tel Aviv.

As often in Keret’s universe, the stories in Autocorrect mix everyday situations with surrealism. A contestant feeds a nest of red ants with an eye. A man heads to a casual sexual encounter and ends up in a minyán (the 10 adult Jewish men required to perform certain rituals). In Ramat Gan, the town near Tel Aviv where the writer was born, the last two humans provide guided tourist visits to aliens.

In his prose, regarded as some of the most original in contemporary Hebrew, many stories could take place anywhere in the world, with global references such as the apps Spotify or Tinder. At times, however, details — or biblical nods or references to Israeli slang — anchor them in his geographical reality. Among the few explicit political references in Autocorrect is the story A Dog for a Dog, a metaphor about the cycle of revenge that fuels the Middle East conflict.

Keret leaves politics to his substack, his columns (reprinted in this newspaper), or the streets, where he has protested against Netanyahu’s government. After the Hamas attack, he helped bring books to Israeli soldiers at the front. Months later, he took part in silent vigils holding photos of Palestinian children that the same army had killed in bombardments. “It was a way to prevent people from denying it or forgetting it,” he explains.

The taboo word in Israel (genocide), however, angers him. In a previous interview Keret said: “When you say Israel is committing genocide, it means you do not want to have any conversation.” Asked about that assertion, he becomes irritated: he is fed up, he says, with the word always ending up being brought up in interviews. “My criticism of my country or the army and the destruction in Gaza is my own. If EL PAÍS comes to conduct a survey, I say, ‘Pick someone who isn’t a creator, who has no imagination.’ There are plenty of those outside [Israel].”

Then he reflects on it more calmly: “There are X people who say, ‘It’s genocide,’ and X who say, ‘It isn’t.’ It’s a simplification, almost like which soccer team you support.” Keret, the son of Holocaust survivors, complains that he is criticized or threatened in Israel for admitting that his army commits war crimes and, at the same time, is pressured abroad to take a position on whether it has committed genocide. “I don’t want to get into that game […] The fact that Israel has done horrible things that must be judged is one thing, but the attempt to say that what we have all seen has a single name… that is not my discourse,” he says.

He expresses himself via WhatsApp voice messages because his verbal torrent is such that the in-person interview begins before the first question and ends with several still pending. He links anecdotes, similes, jokes and wordplay; and projects his eccentric character onto events (he insists on posing for the photographer with his rabbit) and onto his words: “You ask me a question, and I can answer it, say something else, get up and punch you, or give you a French kiss and tell you, ‘You’re not really straight.’”

The humor that permeates his work and his speech is, he says, a “way of keeping dignity in a world where it has been taken from you.” “It is always there because life is a humiliating experience from beginning to end. You leave [the womb] crying and someone whispers in your ear: ‘Do you know how it’s going to end? You will die in pain and before that everyone you love will abandon you or suffer or simply keep quiet. It’s going to be awful.’”

Another analogy, this one cinematic. “If life is a movie, living in Israel today is like living in a zombie movie.”

— Why?

— Because when you come across a zombie on the street, someone or something has turned them into a zombie […] People, driven by pain, by worlds that have come crashing down, say things that aren’t their own so they don’t shatter into pieces on the ground. The people I meet on the street praise thoughts that didn’t come from their very core. They have settled into the void left there after the shock, the trauma, the fear. It is a spectrum of emotions that does no good to human beings. It is the laboratory of a shitty creature,” he laments. “In a fascist country, there is order, method, and something that leads somewhere. What we have here is a kind of animal chaos, real, tinged with megalomania and messianic thoughts.”

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