Tragedy and hope rule Etgar Keret's warped world

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      Malign and nightmarish transformations are a constant in Etgar Keret’s creepily seductive micro-fictions. Over the course of the 76 very short stories collected in The Nimrod Flipout and The Girl on the Fridge, a man’s beautiful girlfriend morphs into a short, fat, male soccer fan; a teenage boy’s parents develop a rare disease that shrinks them to shirt-pocket size; a race of moon-dwellers imagines itself to death; and a magician’s hat turns a rabbit into a baby—a dead baby. And those are only the more obvious change-ups; in many of these tales the very fabric of life is warped and strange.

      Keret’s debt to earlier Jewish fabulists—including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem, and Franz Kafka—is obvious, and that makes him an apt choice to open the six-day Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival on Saturday (November 26). But when the Georgia Straight reaches the Israeli author and filmmaker at home in Tel Aviv, he stresses that his sense of the world as an unsteady place owes just as much to everyday conditions in his native land.

      “I’d say that there have been many more changes in Israel in the past 60 years than in Italy, or maybe even in Canada,” Keret says, speaking in precise but heavily accented English. “You live in a place where your future isn’t really certain. It can develop in so many different ways, and so many of them are potentially disastrous.…One day you can be scared of the ultra-Orthodox and be afraid that you live in a theocracy, and then you actually discover that you’re afraid of the Hezbollah gaining power in Lebanon. And then you say, ‘Actually, what I’m afraid of is the election in Egypt and the peace treaty breaking to pieces.’ Every time, it keeps changing.”

      Adding to this generalized if understandable paranoia is that Keret’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and thus witnessed firsthand one of the most demonic transformations of the past century: the collapse of Germany’s civil society and the rise of Adolph Hitler’s genocidal dictatorship. Keret is fully aware of how his parents’ experience has shaped his world-view, and also slightly dismissive of its impact.

      “You know, you go through your life thinking that you carry specific scars that other people don’t have, and then you date somebody whose father was a drunk who beat her up, and you know that everybody has some sort of difficult dialogue with their parents’ history and behaviour,” he says. “I remember that I once came home from school, when I was in elementary school, and I quoted my teacher, who said that anybody who didn’t experience the Holocaust wouldn’t be able to understand it. My father was very annoyed by this notion, and he said, ‘Why did she say that? Do you think that people in the Holocaust had a different set of emotions and feelings than you do?’ And he said, ‘If you know what it means to be afraid, or if you know what it feels like to be hungry, then you can know how it felt. You just have to multiply it a hundred times, and you’ll know exactly how it felt.’ ”

      Keret’s intuitive understanding that everyone has to face some form of tragedy or dislocation helps explain why his stories manage to transcend their setting. As for their otherworldly quality, he contends that this may have something to do with his language of choice: Hebrew.

      “Hebrew colloquial speech is a very, very strange animal, because Hebrew existed as a written language for two thousand years, but nobody spoke it,” he explains. “And then basically at one point in history it was kind of defrosted, and people started speaking it again—and when they spoke it again, basically they spoke a Biblical language that had stayed intact, but that needed a thousand new words for all the things that had happened during those two thousand years. So it keeps switching registers: it’s 60 percent Biblical, 20 percent Arabic, 10 percent Russian, and 10 percent Yiddish.

      “Many times my translators say, ‘You cannot write this sentence in English: it would be 60 percent King James Bible and 40 percent Tupac Shakur,’ ” he adds. “So they have to compromise. They can’t quite give you the roller-coaster effect that Hebrew colloquial speech gives.”

      Enough of that effect remains, however, that Keret’s off-kilter phraseology amplifies the sense of psychological vertigo many readers experience on entering his world. But his is not a nihilistic viewpoint, unlike that of, say, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier and American novelist Chuck Palahniuk.

      “If you gave their work to an alien on a spaceship just visiting Earth, they’d say, ‘Okay, let’s destroy this race,’ ” Keret contends. “I don’t think this could be said about my work. The world that appears in my stories is really full of hope and some sort of search for the transcendental. But, of course, those hopes, most of the time, are not answered.”

      Etgar Keret joins CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel at the Norman Rothstein Theatre on Saturday (November 26), for the opening event of this year’s Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival. His film Jellyfish will be screened at the same venue at 10 a.m. Sunday (November 27).

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