Etgar Keret

Guest of the ilb 2003

Etgar Keret is an author and filmmaker who was born in Tel Aviv in 1967.  He grew up in an unconventional family: his parents were Holocaust survivors, his sister extremely orthodox, and his brother chair of the Israeli movement to legalize marijuana.  Keret began writing stories while serving in the army. He has since published several books of stories and one novel, which have been translated into German. Although the books are controversial in Israel, they are international bestsellers. His short films have received awards at international film festivals; he writes a column and a comic for newspapers in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Keret has received the Prime Minister's award for literature, as well as the Ministry of Culture's Cinema Prize.

Keret belongs to a young generation of writers, who – unlike the major Israeli authors, where it was about the existence and destiny of Israel – in a society that is increasingly falling apart see the end of all ideologies: "I often think that this country is like a bagel: many people are pushing their way around a center, but there, where the ideology used to be, now there's only a hole.  And we all stare into it spellbound." The Palestinian conflict and the violence in the occupied territories, the religious conflict, the militarism, and the generation problem only interest him to the extent that they play a role in everyday life.  "If I want to move a person, I have to write about life. And it is not the case that in daily life the first thought we have in the morning is that we should leave the occupied territories. It is rather, that somebody stole your car or that your girlfriend left you." The stories are told in a quick and forward manner; their tone is concise and laconic; they are not interested in being politically correct and combine poetry and brutality, comic elements and despair, everyday occurrences and the absurd.  'Missing Kissinger' (1994) is about the mercilessness of the Ten Commandments, about the sobering insight that angels are just liars with wings; it is also about the use of foreign languages in the Third Reich and while making love. In episodes that are loosely linked together, the novel 'Hakajtana schel Kneller' (1998; Engl: Pizzeria Kamikaze) describes a world which is already familiar to us from Keret's stories with their daily routines of regular work schedules and relationship problems – but with the difference that the figures in the novel are people who have committed suicide, who find one another in an unusually familiar place beyond.

In 2003 a book of short stories was published in German translation under the title 'Mond im Sonderangebot'.  In 2006, "The Nimrod Flipout" appeared in Britain. The writer lives in Tel Aviv.

© international literature festival berlin

Etgar Keret online: www.etgarkeret.com