Director’s Cut by Etgar Keret

 

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás; Source photograph by Angelo Giampiccolo

FLASH FICTION

Director’s Cut 

by Etgar Keret

9 July 2020

For Jess

Maček Smolansky was a filmmaker, entrepreneur, and philosopher. But, above all, he was a perfectionist. Which was why no one was particularly surprised when he announced that his new film, “Life,” would be shot on three cameras and would correspond, minute by minute, to a human life span. Filming began with the birth of Mateusz Krotoczowski, the film’s introverted protagonist, and lasted seventy-three years. On the set of the final scene, in which Mateusz hangs himself in his basement after being diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer, the entire crew wept. Not even the soundman’s desperate shushing could stop the tears.

Etgar Keret / A brief survey of the short story

Etgar Keret

ETGAR KERET

BIOGRAPHY

A brief survey of the short story: part seven

Etgar Keret's startlingly unorthodox - and very brief - fictions are some of the best in Israeli literature

By Chris Power
The Guardian, Tuesday 29 January 2008

As an author, film director, playwright, TV scriptwriter, graphic novelist and university lecturer, Etgar Keret has been a ubiquitous figure on Israel's cultural scene since the publication of his second collection of short stories, Ga'agui Le'Kissinger (published in English last year as Missing Kissinger), in 1994.

Etgar Keret / You should feel some desperation

ETGAR KERET

BIOGRAPHY

YOU SHOULD FEEL SOME DESPERATION

“IF YOU REALLY GRASP WHAT IS GOING ON, IN SOME SORT OF WAY, YOU SHOULD FEEL SOME DESPERATION.”

Believer, april 2006

Useful lies on the way to becoming a writer:
Telling people you’re a computer genius
Faking an asthma attack
Complimenting old, fat ladies

In Israel, Etgar Keret has published three immensely popular collections of sly absurdist fables. The mournful irony that runs throughout his work will not feel odd to American readers, but it has ruffled some feathers in his homeland, where literature still bears an epic, nation-building burden.The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, released here in English translation in 2001, includes stories about a portal to Hell outside a grocery store in Uzbekistan, a man who tries to rescue his mother’s neglected uterus from a museum display, and a lonely boy who befriends his piggy bank, as well as a novella about the special sector of the afterlife reserved for suicides. It is the only book by an Israeli author to be published in the Palestinian Authority since the beginning of the latest intifada.

Dorit Silberman / A Knock On The Door Of Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret

Suddenly, A Knock On The Door Of Etgar Keret

BIOGRAPHY

Dorit Silberman Interviews Author and Film Maker Etgar Keret. This is the first in a planned series of interviews with authors and other key figures in the Israeli and international Culture and arts.

Etgar Keret’s last book Suddenly, A Knock On The Door was recently selected for Amazon’sEditor’s Pick – Best Books of the Year list.

  By Dorit Silberman 

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer whose work is characterized by a unique humorous style. His short stories certainly win the title “The shortest stories in the world”, however though short they contain all the abundance of the ocean. As a native of Tel Aviv myself I will always remember this particular description in one of his stories: “all the traffic lights became green for her”, and every time I get a ‘green wave’ of traffic lights while driving downtown these words resonate all over again.

 There is an additional connotation here: until Keret the use of the word ‘green’ in Israel had been reserved for nature and for topics vaguely ecological.  But Keret’s witty writing manages to legitimize the urban lifestyle as also being ‘green’.  Keret’s surreal fiction is written in highly realistic manner, which though contradictory enables the reader to detect underlying realities represented by his impossible scenes, and thereby realize something important about human nature.

 Keret’s last book Suddenly, A Knock On The Door was recently selected for Amazon’s Editor’s Pick – Best Books of the Year list. His best sellers are translated into many languages, and have even become extremely successful in Poland, though he does not address the Holocaust or the Israeli-Arab dispute, as demanded by international book agents.

 - In your opinion, what are the elements that are drawing world-wide attention to your books.

 “It has been a long process. My first book that was published in the U.S in 2001 got almost zero attention. However, the book succeeded later in climbing up from the bottom. Ira Glass, the host of the popular radio show, called This American Life used to read parts of the book on the show and helped make it a cult book. In 2007, a private film based on my book Kneller’s Happy Campers got on screen. The movie was called Wrist-cutters, a Love Story and became a cult movie as well. I feel that all is growing from the bottom and not being dictated by forces above”.

 -  How did it come about that you, the son of native Poland holocaust survivor Jews, do not write about the Holocaust

“My parents spoke Polish, but for me that was always the secret language I was not supposed to comprehend. But the place where I learned the most about good humour was at home. My mother has always been supportive of my writing, but reading my stories in her native language can bring her to tears. While this may be due to my wonderful translator, my mother has always claimed that actually I’m not an Israeli writer at all, but a Polish writer in exile. This may explain my extraordinary success in Poland”.

 - A short while ago I read that someone in Poland built the smallest house in the world for you.

“That is correct. One day I received a phone call from a person who spoke English in a strong Polish accent. He told me that he was out walking with his son, who suddenly darted from the path. He rushed after him and discovered a narrow slot between two buildings. He felt as if this slot was urging him to build a house inspired by my stories. I replied “…you should follow your heart, but I’m pretty busy right now… “. The man paused and told me that he felt that I maybe didn’t quite take him seriously. He was right. Later on he came to Israel, we met and he described what he had gone and done. Then it certainly did sound serious: he had built the narrowest house in the world and even registered it in the Guinness Book  of Records and now it has become a tourist attraction. On the one hand it is a public monument, on the other hand it looks like my house, even with my family pictures in it. The insurance policy for it apparently allows only two people be inside the house at the same time, so we have started a series of encounters for two. On each such occasion I enter the house with one of my readers and read him one of my stories, upon his or her request”.

-

Etgar Keret / Photo Moshe Shai

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- So you may not write about Polish Jews, but you write like a Polish Jew…

“Look, I’m convinced that my humour is Jewish and cannot be considered American. Israeli humour imitates Jewish humour in its manner of laughing at the absurd ‘other’. The Jew is usually laughing at the people around him. However, it’s the Jewish way of showing affection- if you are not fond of someone why waste a joke on them?  My late father told me “… in half your stories I’m dead, and in the other half I’m an idiot, but I’m not insulted because you still love me in all of them”. For example the story Gratification describes a child that grows at the expense of his parents. The bigger he gets, the smaller they become, until finally he puts them in his pocket and goes with them to a date, while they are giving him date tips from inside his pocket.  I’m a “Sabra”, but I also feel like a Jew in exile, and I resent Israelis who try to erase their “Jew in exile” feelings. That is why I could not take part in the writers team of the Israeli satire show A wonderful Country, the Israeli version of Saturday Night Live. My humour laughs at someone, but does not alienate them emotionally”.

 - So let’s go back to the wonderful review of your latest book by Steve Almond in the New York Times.

“It’s the first time that it has happened to me. Amazon’s critics have decided to place Suddenly, a Knock on the Door on their Editor’s Pick – Best Books of the Year List. The book has also won the single Audio Book award in the U.S. Some of my earlier books got good reviews, but this book has got much more attention. Writing it had been the greatest challenge for me, helping me cope with changes in my life. I got married at 38 and I now have a son. The book marks the shift from being a free spirit to becoming a responsible parent, who writes from a child’s point of view and at the same time speaks to his father in a child’s voice. It is the first book I have written as a parent, and it’s also the first time I stop moaning about life and start teaching my son about the beauty of being alive”.

 - Please Explain more…

“When my son Lev (Heart in Hebrew, D.S) turned 3 years old I took a cab, taking him with me. He accidently kicked the Mercedes ashtray and the driver yelled at him: “Don’t you know what you are doing? You idiot!” I shouted back: “How are you talking to a child, aren’t you ashamed?”. The driver replied: “How come he is kicking, it’s a new car!” I replied: “Hold the wheel in both hands and watch out, or I’ll make sure you lose your license”. We yelled at each other some more and then there was silence. At this point my son asked: “What did the man say?”. I answered:  “He said that you should have been more careful, and not kick and damage the car”.  My son asked: “What did you tell him”? I told him it’s not nice to yell at a little boy. “But dad, I heard that you were yelling too”. “You are right”, I said. I turned to the driver and told him sincerely that I apologize for yelling and that I should have spoken in a calmer tone. After a while he replied: ”Now he has to apologize too”. He was a big Russian guy, and I did not want to make him angrier, so I told my son: “I wouldn’t like to disturb him while he is driving. It may not be easy to say that you are sorry, but I’m sure that he feels sorry too.” Lev thought about it and told me: “I don’t think that he’s sorry at all”. And then, in the middle lane, the driver stopped suddenly, turned back and told Lev quietly: “Believe me, I’m sorry”.

- Your son is 7 now.  Are you teaching him Jewish values?

“I have two brothers. My older brother is an anarchist who used to live with his wife in a tree house for eight years. He is also a gifted software engineer who founded the Israeli party Green leaf (advocating for legalization of marijuana in Israel. D.S). My middle sister is ‘Haredit’ (an Orthodox Jew). I have a strong emotional bond with her, and wrote about her. Once Lev was asked at school if someone in the family believes in God. He replied: “Yes, my aunt. My mother doesn’t, and me and my father have not decided yet”. On another occasion he told people that there is a god, but he can be found only in Jerusalem”.

- Let’s talk again about you. So many writers out there are dreaming of a worldwide glory. Your fiction is read in Poland, U.S.A, Mexico, Turkey, Bulgaria, Georgia and many more places. Is it also an economic breakthrough?

“ International best sellers are usually ‘flight fiction’ books. Israel may be the only place where Amos Oz beats all other authors and Bulgakov’s The Artist and Margarita hits the charts. I sell well in some countries, but Israelis read more than any other nation in the world, so my books are usually sold in greater numbers in Israel. My last book sold 80, 000 copies”.

- You also write scripts. You were in the writing team of the satirical show “The Chamber Quintet”. You co-wrote with others screenplays for the movies “Something Total” (2000) ,“Daddy” and the 2007 movie “Jellyfishes” which won the ‘Golden Camera’ award in Cannes with your wife, Shira Geffen. Do you describe yourself as an author or as a filmmaker?

” Both. As a Jew in exile, I don’t put all my eggs in one basket. If I cannot get a budget for a movie – I will write a book, and if my writing gets stuck – I will make a movie. I like to cooperate in writing. I write my movie scripts with friends and the script for “Jellyfishes” I wrote with my wife Shira. We also wrote two children’s book together. Making films is a way of breaking the writer’s loneliness. To me the cinema is a human miracle, integrating multiple elements of the human mind to a single creation. Being an author is terrifying, adopting this title as well. Telling a story is the most intuitive thing I can think of, and I never know if I can come out with another story. That is why I wrote a comic book with illustrators. In 2009 I wrote a script for an animated movie called $9.99, a joint Israeli-Australian production. This year I co-wrote with Dov Alfon the movie What’s In Our Pockets which was accepted by the Sundance Festival.

JEWISH BUSINESS NEWS

Etgar Keret / Plastic people

Etgar Keret

BIOGRAPHY

Plastic people

Todd McEwen is alarmed by Etgar Keret's world of masculine fury and fantasy in Missing Kissinger

by Todd McEwen
The Guardian, Saturday 24 March 2007

Missing Kissinger
by Etgar Keret, trans Miriam Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston
211pp, Chatto & Windus, £11.99

These are 46 horror stories from Israel, though they acrobatically shape-shift from the political to the fabulous, and are outwardly comic. They amount to a worldview more frightening than their subjects (and these are scary enough: the Holocaust, sexual dysfunction, sadistic birthday-party magicians). Etgar Keret's locale is that of male confusion, loneliness, blundering, bellowing and, above all, stasis. His narrator is trapped in an angry masculine wistfulness which is awful to behold in its masturbatory disconnection from the world's real possibilities and pleasures.

Etgar Keret / Two Stories



Two Stories By Etgar Keret BIOGRAPHY

CONJUNCTIONS:55, Fall 2010 September for Good —Translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Miriam Shlesinger When the crash came, NiceDay was the first to go. They’d always been a luxury brand, but after the Chicago riots even the wealthiest clients cut off their service. Some did it because of the unstable economic situation, but most of them just couldn’t face the neighbors. The shares lay on the world trading floors, bleeding point after point. And so NiceDay became a cautionary tale of the depression. The Wall Street Journal headline ran “September Gone Bad.” This, of course, was a play on their “September for Good” campaign, in which a swimwear-clad family stood around on a sunny fall day … decorating a Christmas tree! The ad had worked, big-time. One week postlaunch they were moving three thousand units per day. Affluent Americans bought. So did the less affluent, if they could fake it. NiceDay became a status symbol. The official stamp of a millionaire. What executive jets were to the nineties, and into 2000, NiceDay was to now. NiceDay: weather for the wealthy. Say you’re based in Greenland, say all the snow and gloom is driving you batshit, one swipe of your credit card and, with a satellite or two, they’d set you up with a perfect fall day in Cannes, delivered direct to your own balcony, every day of the year.        Yakov “Yaki” Brayk was one of NiceDay’s earliest adopters. He truly loved his money and had a hard time parting with it, but even more than he loved the millions he made selling weapons and drugs to Zimbabwe, he loathed those humid New York summers and that gross feeling you get when your sweaty undershirt sticks to your back. He bought a system, not just for himself, but for the whole block. Some people mistook this for generosity, but the truth is he did it just to keep the great weather with him all the way to the bodega on the corner. That bodega wasn’t just where he got the unfiltered Noblesses they imported from Israel especially for him. No, more than anything, it marked for Yaki the boundary of his personal space. And the minute Yaki signed the check, that block turned into a weather paradise. No more gray rain, no more dog days. Just September, twelve months a year. And not, God forbid, one of those off-and-on, partly-sunny, partly-cloudy New York Septembers, but the dependable kind, the kind he grew up with in Haifa. And then, out of the blue, came the Chicago riots and suddenly here were the neighbors telling him to cease and desist with the gorgeous fall post-haste. At first he didn’t give them the time of day, but then came those lawyers’ letters and someone left a slaughtered peacock on his windshield. That’s when his wife asked him to turn it off. It was January. Yaki turned off the fall and instantly the day turned short and sad. All because of one dead peacock and an anorexic wife with an anxiety disorder who, as always, was able to control him through her weakness.       The recession went from bad to worse. On Wall Street, NiceDay hit rock bottom. So did shares in Yaki’s company. Then after they hit rock bottom, they drilled a hole in the rock and went down a little farther. It’s funny, you’d think weapons and drugs would be strong during a worldwide recession, but that’s not how it worked out. People were too broke to buy medicine, and they very quickly rediscovered an old forgotten truth: that weapons with chips are a luxury, just like electric car windows, and that sometimes all you need is a stone you found in the yard if you want to smash in somebody’s skull. They very quickly learned to manage without Yaki’s rifles, much more quickly than Yaki could get used to the unseasonably cold and wet mid-March. And Yaki Brayk, or Lucky Brayk, as the tabloids liked to call him, lost his shirt.        He kept the apartment, the company accountant managed to retroactively put it in the anorexic wife’s name, but all the rest was gone. They even took the furniture. Four days later, a NiceDay technician came to disconnect the system. When Yaki opened the door, he was standing there drenched with rain. Yaki made a pot of coffee and they talked for a while. He told the technician how, not long after the riots, he’d turned the system off. The technician said a lot of customers had done the same. They talked about the riots, when a furious mob from the slums had stormed the Indian-summery homes of the city’s wealthier residents. “All that sun of theirs, it was driving us crazy,” one of the rioters said on a news commentary show a few days later. “Here you are freezing your ass off, just trying to make your next gas bill, while those bastards, those bastards …” At that point, he burst into tears. The camera blurred his face to hide his identity, so you couldn’t actually see the tears, but you could hear him wailing like an animal hit by a car. The technician, who was black, said he was born in that same neighborhood in Chicago, but today he was ashamed to admit it. “That money,” he said, “all that fucking money fucked up the whole fucking world.”        After they’d finished their coffee, when the technician was about to disconnect the system, Yaki asked if he could turn it on just one last time. The technician shrugged and Yaki took that as a yes. He pushed a couple of buttons on the remote and out came the sun from behind a cloud.       “That’s not real sun, you know,” the technician said proudly. “What they do is image it, with lasers.”        Yaki winked and said, “Don’t spoil it. For me, it’s the sun.”        The technician nodded. “A great sun. Too bad you can’t keep it out till I get back to the car. I’m sick of this rain.”       Yaki didn’t answer. He just closed his eyes and let the sun wash over his face.  My Brother’s Depressed —Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger It isn’t like just anyone walked up to you in the street and told you he’s depressed. It’s my brother, and he wants to kill himself. And of all the people in the world, he had to tell it to me. Because I’m the person he loves the most, and I love him too, I really do, but that’s a biggie. I mean like wow.        Me and my little brother are standing there together in the Shenkin Playground, and my dog, Hendrix, is tugging away at the leash, trying to bite this little kid in overalls in the face. And me, I’m fighting with Hendrix with one hand, and searching my pockets for a lighter with the other. “Don’t do it,” I tell my brother. The lighter isn’t there, in either pocket. “Why not?” my little brother asks. “My girlfriend’s left me for a fireman. I hate university. Here’s a light. And my parents are the most pitiful people in the world.” He throws me his Cricket. I catch it. Hendrix runs away. He pounces on the kid in the overalls, pushes him flat on the lawn, and his scary rottweiler jaw clamps down on the kid’s face. Me and my brother try to pry Hendrix off the kid, but he won’t budge. The overalls’ mother screams. The kid himself is suspiciously subdued. I kick Hendrix as hard as I can, but he couldn’t care less. My brother finds a metal bar on the lawn, and whams it down on the dog’s head. There’s a sickening sound of something cracking, and Hendrix collapses. The mother is screaming. Hendrix has bitten off her kid’s nose, but completely. And now Hendrix is dead. My brother killed him. And besides, he wants to kill himself too. Because to him having his girlfriend double-cross him with a fireman seems like the most humiliating thing in the world. I think a fireman is pretty impressive actually, rescuing people and all that. But as far as he’s concerned she could just as well fuck a garbage truck. Now the kid’s mother is attacking me. She’s trying to gouge out my eyes with her long fingernails, which are painted with repulsive white polish. My brother picks up the metal bar and bangs her one on the head too. He’s allowed to, he’s depressed.  http://www.conjunctions.com/preview.htm