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4/26
2002

80

Etgar Keret is considered one of Ism& leading
and hippest —fictional writers, but the violence
in Israel has put his writing on hold.

KEELY BROWN
Special to the Jewish News

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T

he coffeehouses in Tel
Aviv are emptier these
days. No longer does the
local writing community
gather in public places to hold forth
on opinions, to exchange ideas and
ideologies.
When they get together now, it is
almost by stealth — knocking on
the doors of each other's houses and
apartments, staying out of the open
air. For writer Etgar Keret, this
change of venue is yet another inter-
ruption in the life of a creative artist
in Israel.
"[Having experienced] more than
two attacks a day locally, you have to
get used to it," he says, in a tele-
phone interview from his home in
Tel Aviv. "But I've gotten to see a lot
of my friends' houses now, where I'd
never been before," he grimly jokes.
The Israeli press has hailed Etgar
Keret as Israel's leading — and
hippest — young voice in fiction.
His output over the past 10 years
includes three best-selling short story
collections, comedy scripts for Israeli
TV, a weekly newspaper column and
comic strip, as well as a screenplay,
Skin Deep, which won him the
equivalent of the Israeli Oscar.
The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be
God (Thomas Dunne Books/St.
Martin's Press; $19.95) has recently
been released in America, marking a
first publication in English of his
short stories, which have already
been translated into seven other lan-
guages.
The slim volume is a collection of
22 short stories, and a novella, all of
which look at life from Keret's
unique point of view.
In "Uterus," a mother's beautiful
uterus is put on display in a museum
to the dismay of her husband and to

Keely Brown is an Atlanta writer.

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the delight of her son. "A
Souvenir in Hell" illustrates the
banality of life in a village that
was built at the mouth of the end
of the world. "Breaking the Pig"
portrays a child's piggy bank, as if
it were a live pet. And the novella,
"Kneller's Happy Campers," is a
satirical yet wistful road trip set in
the afterlife for those who comit-
ted suicide.
What some might consider a
skewed perspective is actually a deep
awareness of the many levels of reali-
ty within the world and the incom-
prehensible complexities of the
human psyche.
Keret's protagonists are nearly all
loners or individualists set apart for
reasons that baffle them as much as
life itself. Many of the stories por-
tray vignettes of uniquely Israeli life
— a schoolboy's take on Holocaust
Memorial Day, an Israeli guard who
gets out of uniform so he can wreak
revenge on an enemy.
As a writer, Keret confronts reality
on a sub-textual level rather than
pushing an ideology. "After all, life is
about being human, not about being
left-wing or right-wing," he says.
But, Keret adds, he's not writing
much fiction right now. As wide-
scale violence erupts on a daily basis
along Israeli streets and in buildings,
the literary life of the nation has,
according to Keret, become dor-
mant. "The violence washes out
everything else."
Keret is no stranger to physical
conflict — he served for three years
in the Israeli military. But it was an
experience that was entirely contrary
to the writer's upbringing.
"I grew up in a very individualistic
family and for the army to work,
you must lose your individual point
of view," he says. "Soldiers are face-
less.
Keret was constantly in trouble,
and 20 court-martials later, found
himself at a desk job working with
highly confidential material — a