A Popular New Israeli Import

By ATIRA WINCHESTER

Etgar Keret believes that his popularity peaked when he was eight. He and his friends used to eat for free at his father’s waffle stall in Tel Aviv, and the girls loved him. But even compared to those glory days, the last 12 months have been very good to him. Zoetrope published the short story “The Nimrod Flip Out.” New York’s Symphony Space invited Leonard Nemoy and John Guare to read his work. And WBEZ Chicago’s This American Life read Etgar's "Fatso" and "Eight Percent of Nothing" on air.

“It’s a lot of luck,” says Keret, frankly. “It’s not that I wrote new stories, these are stories that have been out there a while, but things started rolling somehow, taking on their own dynamic.”

It’s Friday morning in Tel Aviv, corner of Dizengoff Street and Jabotinsky. Café Michal, a slightly whimsical place that Keret has chosen for us to chat, is spilling over with people reading Friday’s papers, drinking cappuccino, and eating finely chopped Israeli salad. A red motorbike zooms by on the busy road outside with two Chihuahas balancing precariously on the handlebars. No one blinks an eyelid.

It’s a snapshot of contemporary Israeli urban life, and Keret, 38, fits right into the picture. He speaks in a soft, slight mumble, the kind that would make a mother say lovingly, "Etgar, speak a little slower." He is instantly disarming.

The Nimrod Flip-Out—a zany, honest, and wildly unpredictable collection of stories featuring a talking halibut, an anthropomorphic door, a girlfriend who becomes a beer-swilling guy by night, and a boy with inexplicably glittery eyes—is Keret’s sixth book in English. In 2004, he released, together with Samir el-Youssef, Gaza Blues, and before that he published, on his own, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. He's currently working on a script for a claymation film, A Buck’s Worth, with producer-director-animator Tatia Rosenthal. Although it currently stands at six minutes, the pair hope to turn it into a full-length film feature.

But this is in the future, and what has nudged Keret into the cultural limelight is not the film, which will premiere at the Sundance festival later on this year, but The Nimrod Flip-Out which has somehow managed to break through to new audiences.

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Born and raised in Ramat Gan, Keret has lived in Tel Aviv for over a decade. Although many of his new stories sketch portray a metropolitan, urban existence, many of his older stories return to the small suburban life that was Ramat Gan.

It’s the kind of low-key existence Keret describes in "Shooting Tuvia," in which a school kid tells the annals of his dog’s life. The belligerent dog is banished, dropped in a forest, and shot in the head—only to return home, tired, paralyzed, but ever-faithful to its owner. The backdrop to the story is a nuclear family, an unremarkable house, a yard, a school, a car.

Keret’s own life, however, wasn't merely suburban. His parents were both Holocaust survivors. His mother was the only member of her family to live through the Warsaw ghetto, and his father survived the war by hiding out in Russia for two years. After they immigrated to Israel, their life was little more than a question of survival. There were no rules in the house, even a sense of anarchy and certainly no expectations of the children to become doctors, lawyers, or such. But they did teach their children to be moral and “true to themselves.” Their fervent desire was that they would go beyond simply surviving.

“They didn’t say what they wanted. Something not trivial that went beyond what they had lived. To go beyond that wall, ascend it. To jump in the air and try to get to that place. I think we have all fulfilled that in our own ways.”

His parents’ experience in the Holocaust was surely proof enough of just how outlandish life can be, but Keret claims that he had to look no further than quotidian life in the state of Israel to find inspiration for bizarre realities.

“The state came from nothing, a black hole, and no-one knows where it’s headed. And there’s all that history, culture. The experience of living here is of anarchy. You can be walking along and a hasid will approach you with a charity box. You’ll cross the street and get caught in a gay parade, go a little further and see a Russian immigrant fixing shoes. All of those incongruities are infused into the language, the cadence… there’s no language that’s as susceptible to new things.”

Keret admits that his relationship with this language that “was in deep freeze 2000 years” is central to his writing, something that poses problems when it comes to translation.

In one his stories a character says, "rahum v’hanun, Alek."

“It’s so uniquely Israeli,” he smiles. “How does one translate that? You have a biblical phrase, rahum v'hanun [merciful and compassionate] and alek [as if/ my ass], which I believe is Arabic. Go translate that. You can’t transmit a sense of the fusion of cultures and influences going on in those three words.”

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In the past, Keret has come under sharp criticism for the perceived amorality in his stories and his unorthodox angles on taboo issues. In "Rabin Died," from the Hebrew collection Anihu, a cat named Rabin meets his death by a speeding Vespa. Equally out of left field is the story "Surprise Egg."A woman is murdered in a terrorist attack. Pathologists perform an autopsy on her at the forensic institute at Abu-Kabir only to discover that she is riddled with brain tumors. The dilemma unfolds as to whether or not they should tell the husband that she would have died any way within a couple of months. The events of the story are relatively inoffensive, but Keret manages to make the story somewhat hilarious, an approach that is just short of blasphemous.

Writes Keret: “Everyone knows the cause of death in those attacks, and a body isn’t some surprise egg that you open without knowing what you’re going to find inside—a sailboat maybe, or a race car or a plastic koala. Whenever they operate they always fund the same things….”

He says: “Every year, for 13 years, I have given Yediot Aharonot [a daily Israeli tabloid] a story of mine to print before the festivals. When I submitted this, they phoned me to say, ‘Etgar you know I love your stories, but I don’t know if we can publish this.’ I asked them if they thought it was disrespectful, and they said, ‘No, but there is an accepted way to talk about grief, and this is written… differently.’”

In the end, the paper did publish the story, but it hasn’t appeared in Hebrew anywhere else.

It’s precisely this attitude that aggravates Keret; people, particularly politicians, believing that they own the only legitimate way to speak about loss, grief, and memory in Israel.

“My best friend died in the army and at the funeral the lieutenant colonel said he was a brave soldier and everybody loved him, " he says. "Now, he was a coward, and everybody hated him. [My saying that] isn’t derisive or disrespectful."

Says Keret: “No one can tell me how to miss my best-friends or my grandparents. There’s this moralistic righteousness here sometimes that has nothing to do with morality. I have a right to my experience of life. It’s mine. I live here, I feel here and I say it with respect and love.”