Etgar Keret: "Si la vida es una película, Israel es hoy una de zombis"

Etgar Keret had marked October 8, 2023, on his calendar as the day he would submit his ninth collection of short stories to his publisher. He chose the date almost arbitrarily—he produces a book roughly every seven years and sets a hard deadline to keep himself honest. Two days before, sitting with his wife Shira Geffen, a screenwriter and filmmaker whose film Medusas won recognition at Cannes, he voiced a worry that had been building. The manuscript felt too dark. The previous years had accumulated their weight: his mother's death, the pandemic, a herniated disc, and the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu leading the country's most right-wing government on record. Geffen suggested he sleep on it, reread it with fresh eyes the next morning, and if the darkness still clung to the pages, ask the publisher for more time.

Hours later, Hamas launched its surprise attack. Nearly 1,200 people were killed. More than 250 were taken hostage. The tone of Keret's manuscript became irrelevant. Three months passed. When someone asked him at an event whether he was working on anything new, he remembered the draft sitting in a drawer. By then, the publisher itself was struggling—so many reservists had been mobilized for the invasion of Gaza that normal operations had stalled. Keret added two new stories to the collection, and Siruela eventually published it in Spanish as El blues del fin del mundo.

"That day, I told my wife the book wasn't ready for the world because reality wasn't as bad as what I'd written," Keret explained during an interview at his home in Tel Aviv. "Now the public understands it. It's like an elevator between two floors. Reality has descended to the level of the book."

His stories operate in a space where the mundane collides with the surreal. A contestant feeds a single eye to a nest of red ants. A man heading to a casual sexual encounter finds himself instead at a minyan, the gathering of ten adult Jewish males required for certain religious rituals. In Ramat Gan, the town near Tel Aviv where Keret was born, the last two humans on Earth conduct guided tours for aliens. His prose, regarded as among the most original in contemporary Hebrew literature, often reads as if it could unfold anywhere—peppered with references to Spotify and Tinder, the global vocabulary of the present moment. Yet details surface that anchor the stories firmly in his geography: biblical allusions, Israeli slang, the particular texture of life in that place. Among the few explicitly political stories is one called Dog for Dog, a meditation on the cycle of revenge that perpetuates Middle Eastern conflict.

Keret reserves most of his direct political speech for his newsletter, his newspaper columns, and the street, where he has protested against Netanyahu's government. After the Hamas attack, he helped deliver books to Israeli soldiers at the front. Months later, he stood in silent vigils holding photographs of Palestinian children killed in airstrikes by that same army. "It was a way of not letting people deny it or forget it," he said.

The word genocide makes him angry. In an earlier interview, he had stated flatly: "When you say Israel is committing genocide, it means you don't want to have any conversation." When pressed on this, he grew irritated. He was tired, he said, of the word surfacing in every interview. "My criticism of my country or my army and the destruction in Gaza is mine. If El País comes to do a survey, I say: 'Find someone who isn't a creator, who doesn't have imagination.' There are plenty of those outside Israel." He paused, then spoke more carefully. "There are X people saying it's genocide and X saying it isn't. It's a reduction, almost like asking what football team you support." As the son of Holocaust survivors, he finds himself caught between two pressures: criticized or threatened in Israel for acknowledging that his army commits war crimes, and pressured from abroad to declare whether those crimes constitute genocide. "I don't want to play that game," he said. "The fact that Israel has done horrible things that must be judged is one thing. But trying to say that everything we've all witnessed has a single name—that's not my discourse."

He spoke partly through WhatsApp voice messages because his verbal torrent is such that the in-person interview began before the first question was asked and ended with several still pending. He strings together anecdotes, metaphors, jokes, wordplay—and carries his eccentricity into the physical world too, insisting on posing for photographs with his rabbit. His humor, he explained, is "a way of maintaining dignity in a world where it's been taken from you." It's always there because "life is a humiliating experience from beginning to end. You come out crying and someone whispers in your ear: 'Do you know how this ends? You'll die in pain, and before that everyone you love will abandon you or suffer or just go silent. It's going to be shit." Then another metaphor, this one cinematic: "If life is a movie, living in Israel today is living in a zombie film."