Nosh נאַש

There will never arise in Israel another writer quite like Etgar Keret.

Winner of the 2019 Sapir Prize in literature (Israel’s highest literary award), university lecturer and internationally recognized voice in radio (This American Life), TV and Film, Keret is principally known as a master of the short story. His work so far spans nine collections of short fiction including his latest book Fly Already. His stories are often so stunningly compact that the magnitude of their emotional punch, genius of form and humor seem to defy the laws of literary physics.

Confinement, daydreaming/hallucination and the realness (and dullness) of parallel worlds are themes present in much of Keret’s writing. His grounding in workaday life is obvious to anyone who reads him — he employs common, simple language, and his characters, even the angelic ones, are mostly everyday schlubs. But his stories are intensely fantastical and juvenile too — both in the best way. “If Kafka were Israeli,” commented the New York Times in a comparison that elevates Keret to the status of one of his own heroes, “and wrote about talking goldfish.”

During the pandemic, Keret has experienced a minor explosion of creative output. Though he blames this on a slowdown in externally commissioned projects, it might also be because he, like all of us, have been inhabiting confined. parallel worlds in these days of plague. The world is full of little confined Jacobs, rooted to our sleeping places with stones beneath our heads, except that our celestial dreams have continued unceasingly for eight months now and are nowhere near over. This is not a welcome situation, nor is it clear what the human impact of this confinement will be if/when it’s all said and done.

So let’s explore a bit of Etgar Keret’s output by reading, watching and listening to some of his words and images that touch on these themes.

Links and source you might explore:

Outside, a short story published as part of the NYT Magazine’s Decameron Project in July 2020. Read the story but also watch the amazing dance/film/thing made by Keret and choreographer Inbal Pinto (and if you have time, this article from Haaretz containing an interview about the piece and the pandemic):

Windows, from his collection Fly Already (link on request or just Google it if you don’t have the book)

Dreams from my Father, from his memoir the Seven Good Years in which he has coffee with his terminally ill father — a man who survived the holocaust by hiding in a barn for several years, and refuses to allow the lack of an esophagus to prevent him from enjoying an espresso.

Ladder (also from Fly Already) An unhappy angel discovers an infinitely long ladder.

Date: Dec 27, 2020

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