by Francesco Caporusso
Originally published in Boat Magazine, Issue 10 Tel Aviv
“I am just like Immanuel Kant,” Etgar Keret starts when I ask him to tell me about Tel Aviv, “he lived in the same place his entire life…only I don’t have the brains.” Then he laughs.
Keret is the Israeli writer best known for his absurd, funny, surreal, and oddly touching short stories. His work is unlike anything else out there, yet his stories have connected with people to such an extent that they have been translated into 37 different languages and have been featured in such august venues as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and This American Life. He has been called “the voice of the next generation” by Salman Rushdie and “one of the most important writers alive” by Clive James.
Keret has lived all of his 48 years in greater Tel Aviv, in five apartments that span a radius of no more than six kilometers. He has lived in his current apartment, which he shares with his wife the actor, writer, and director Shira Geffen, and their son, Lev, for 23 years. Their apartment is one of nine units in a building which harbors a real community atmosphere. At midnight, he tells me, anyone who is awake can head downstairs to one of the ground floor apartments, or outside if the weather is nice, drink a beer and talk a little. Even though the apartment is modest, Keret refuses to move. “I tried to explain to my son- I asked him, ‘Lev, how many of the other eight apartments have you sat down and had a meal?’ He counted and he said, ‘I’ve eaten in all of them.’ I said, ‘This is not common. Some apartment buildings you don’t even know who lives in the unit above you.’”
Keret’s latest book is the memoir Seven Good Years. The title refers to the years between the birth of his son and the death of his father. The first story was written the night he and Geffen returned home from the hospital after the birth of Lev, which took place the same day as a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, whilst another is taken from an email Keret wrote to a friend. The stories jump around in place and time, taking place in a variety of locations, such as JFK airport, a seaside resort in Sicily, a restaurant in Gothenburg, Sweden, and of course, Tel Aviv.
The idea for the book came about after Keret learned that his father was terminally ill. “For my father the most important thing to him was family and I wanted to honor him. This is a kind of literary tombstone for him.” The publishers were not very excited about the project as they felt that the memoir was too personal and narrow. Keret persisted, compelled by the sense that this was something he had to do. Happily, Seven Good Years has turned out to be Keret’s most successful book yet; resonating with a global audience through its rueful and sometimes comic reflections on life. Keret has however decided not to publish in Israel because of the book’s personal content explaining, “Some secrets are easier to say to someone who sits next to you on an airplane than to your next door neighbor.”
Keret is very aware of the political complexity of modern Israel and that it functions as strong symbol to so many. In his travels he often encounters people who tell him that they are “pro-Israel” or “anti-Israel.” He says that he finds their narrative, whether sympathetic or oppositional, to always be very reductive. However, this memoir has produced a different response. “The reaction I’ve gotten from this book is, ‘Now I have a glimpse of what it means to live there. You’re not the good guys. You’re not the bad guys. You’re people living in a reality.’ The everyday dilemmas are not fundamentally different if you live in Israel. It’s the same life but at a higher volume.”
Keret is not a religious person, yet his favorite day of the year in Tel Aviv is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It’s a day where no businesses are open, nor are there any cars on the streets. He says, “It’s as if civilization is taking a break. The force of inertia stops functioning for 24 hours and there is something very powerful in it.” He and his family are able to walk in the middle of the highway, kids are playing, it’s quiet, you can hear the birds. Keret feels that taking a day to reflect and evaluate life makes Yom Kippur the most Jewish holiday of them all. “It doesn’t matter if you’re religious or not religious, there is something so universally humane about this idea. You think about what you did this year, and you think about who you need to ask forgiveness from just to go on. I think that there is something beautiful about that.”
Although history looms large in Israel, Keret tells me, “Tel Aviv’s great power in Israel is due to the fact it lacks history.” While Jerusalem has existed for close to six thousand years, Tel Aviv was only officially established in 1909. He continues, “Jerusalem has so many tragedies and traumas and hatreds that have been going on for centuries that you can’t detach yourself from them…you don’t have any personal elbow room in all this kind of history. In Tel Aviv there is no strident government ever, in Tel Aviv there is a kind of freedom not found anywhere else in Israel.”
He sees Tel Aviv as a city of clashing narratives, an “urban argument about what it’s all about.” “It isn’t a city that tries to keep its identity,” he says, “It’s a city that tries to seek its identity.” He comments that many European cities are beautiful but they lack vibrancy because, “they basically serve the idea of the postcards they’re selling to the tourists.”
Topography is the other great distinction between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that Keret notes. Tel Aviv stretches out against the Mediterranean Sea while Jerusalem sits inland, atop mountains. He explains, “In Israel the people who are more radical are based in Jerusalem and the people who are more liberal are based in Tel Aviv. It’s much easier to be radical when you are at the top of the mountain looking down there than when you are right next to the sea. There’s something about the sea that is both very soothing but also kind of says to you that it doesn’t matter what nationality you are, we are creatures, fish with feet that can breathe air.”
The sea is the feature of Tel Aviv that Keret cherishes most and when he’s away he misses, he even dreams about it, which is not surprising when you understand that it has always been a part of his life. His father sold ice cream at the beach and Keret has been swimming since he was three. Telling me that he was clumsy as a child and would often fall and get hurt, Keret reflects that he felt more comfortable in the water. In Tel Aviv the beach is seamlessly incorporated into the city. Keret’s apartment is a ten minute walk from the beach and some mornings he takes Lev down for a morning swim before heading back to the apartment in order to get him ready for school. As he mostly walks in order to get places in Tel Aviv Keret will often take a detour in order to walk along the beach. He passes men in suits eating their lunch and reflects: “In five minutes he’ll go back to his office and argue with someone about a payment, but for now he can have a break here.”
Along with other elements of Keret’s Tel Aviv, the sea plays a pivotal part in Jellyfish, the 2007 film that Keret and Geffen made together. Written by Geffen and co-directed by both of them, Jellyfish was awarded the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Although entirely shot in Tel Aviv, the film does not present the city as you might find it on the postcards. Most of the locations they used were within walking distance of Keret and Geffen’s apartment, including the aforementioned beach and, in fact, the ice cream seller in the film is actually played by Keret’s father, Efraim. The film’s very small frame and specific portrayal of Tel Aviv was exactly what Keret wanted. One of their producers suggested a wide establishing shot of the skyline and beaches of Tel Aviv, which Keret was firmly against. He explains it this way, “If I ask a New Yorker, ‘What is New York?’ I think they would say that it’s the deli across the street, it’s this old man limping. They wouldn’t think about the Statue of Liberty, they wouldn’t think of all those monuments. Those are touristic things. In the end our experience is very, very specific and it’s kind of a closed frame.” He continues, “And I believe that in fiction and in film that when you close the frame enough, it becomes universal.”
Keret has used many different forms in order to tell his stories: short stories, film, television, graphic novels, children’s literature, and now, a memoir. Everything he does shares the same playfulness and fantastical qualities you might only expect to find in the stories small children tell before they forget how to pretend. Keret’s stories are free from polemic and agenda, leaving instead space for the reader to enter in and make it their own, illustrated aptly by the fact that a single short story of his was adapted for film by two separate people resulting in one romantic comedy and the other a horror film.
Keret reflects, “for me, I don’t see what I write as a physical object; I see it as a movement, as an emotion.” He continues, “I think that art is always a way to aspire to some sort of intimacy. The thing about the intimacy in art is that it’s a safe intimacy. You allow yourself to go where it leads, you take down your guard in a way that you wouldn’t in real life.” And it’s very easy to end up in some incredible places when Etgar Keret is leading you.