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Friday May 4, 2007

From its beginnings in a bunker, Etgar Keret’s career has soared

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

Being an internationally acclaimed author was not on Etgar Keret’s to-do list.

But on a dreary day in a dreary bunker in the late ‘80s, Keret, then a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, felt he desperately needed to do something, anything, to take his mind off the 48-hour shift in front of a computer.

So he wrote.

The story — his first — was published in his debut collection in 1992. “Pipes” tells the story of a quiet loner who works in a pipe-making factory. One day, he builds a curvy pipe into which marbles disappear. To figure out where the marbles go, the man fashions a giant replica and crawls inside. He emerges in heaven, which turns out to be filled with people, like him, who never fit in with the world around them. Housewives climbed through the back of kitchen cabinets; pilots through the Bermuda Triangle.

Since then, Keret has published nine books in Hebrew, mostly short story collections, two-thirds of which have been translated into English (and have been translated into 22 languages in all). He’s also collaborated with an artist for a graphic novel, written a children’s book and worked with a Palestinian author for a book called “Gaza Blues.”

Nonetheless, the Israeli author admitted during a book tour stop in San Francisco that he still doesn’t think of his writing as a “career.”

“It seems strange, at this exact moment, that I can make a living out of writing,” he said. “It’s never felt like a career, I’ve never had goals for myself, or imagined a future as writer. I write, and when I have enough, I publish a collection and hope people read it … When you write a story, every story could be the last. It’s not like carpentry or any other profession where you have control over what you’re doing. Something just happens. There are very long periods in which I don’t write.”

What has happened to Keret is that he’s become one of the most popular writers among Israeli youth today, and his books are bestsellers in Israel. He came to the Bay Area to promote his most recent collection, “The Nimrod Flip-Out.”

“I think that’s my favorite story. It’s not my best story, but it is maybe the most biographical story,” he said. “It’s the story of four friends, one of whom committed suicide in the IDF, and how the other friends deal with that, how they continue living their lives.”

Keret found himself in that exact situation as a 19-year-old in the army. His stories since that time usually deal with deep, universal themes, but are written in an irreverent tone that stretches the reader’s definition of reality and the absurd. His stories are more about the human experience than the Israel experience, though certainly he’s influenced by his homeland, he said.

Keret was born in 1967 in Tel Aviv, where he still lives with his wife and their infant son. His parents are Holocaust survivors. He has a brother and sister, who he sees as a microcosm of Israel’s diversity. His sister, who is Orthodox, lives in Jerusalem with her 11 children, who “have to rent a small bus just to get everybody somewhere,” Keret joked. His brother, who currently lives in Thailand, at one time worked for an Israel lobbyist group to legalize marijuana in the country.

Keret has also been successful as a screenwriter for television and film. He and his wife are currently working on a film called “Jellyfish,” which his wife wrote and Keret directed. It is scheduled to be released in Israel in October.

In his homeland, Keret’s books have not always been well received by more veteran writers and leaders, despite his success with younger readers. He has been criticized for his lack of political commitment to Israel, but says he is not concerned with how his writing may shape the way readers in other countries view his homeland.

“I don’t want my fiction to change the way people perceive Israel,” Keret said. “But, when they read my stories, I hope they can see that the people in Israel are not so dissimilar from them. Their emotions and dreams are very similar.”

The Nimrod Flip-Out by Etgar Keret (176 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $12)

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