The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world. He doesn't invent a single feeling or thought – all of them existed long before him. He's not the least bit better than his readers – sometimes he's a lot worse – and so it should be. If the writer were an angel, the abyss that separates him from us would be so great that his writing couldn't get close enough to touch us. But because he's here, at our side, buried up to his neck in mud and filth, he's the one who, more than anyone else, can share with us everything that's going on in his mind, in the lit-up areas and especially in the dark recesses.I seem to have come late to the Etgar Keret party: the "most shoplifted" Israeli author is apparently world famous for his stripped-down and fantastical short stories which perfectly capture his own paradoxical situation; that of a left-wing peacenik who travels the world to attend writers festivals, where he is routinely vilified as a war-mongering Jew based on his home address. As The Seven Good Years is his first collection of nonfiction essays, it might have made more sense for me to have read the short stories first (and thereby having that aha feeling when an author finally reveals the influences behind his work), but I do know this for sure: I may be approaching this back-assward, but I'll definitely be picking up Keret's fiction after this experience.
The title of The Seven Good Years refers to the story of Pharoah of the Old Testament who dreamt of seven fat cows and seven lean, presaging seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine. More literally, these essays cover the seven years between the birth of Keret's son and the death of his Holocaust-surviving father; the seven years in which Keret felt himself to be the physical embodiment of a continuity that had been anything but guaranteed. Missiles and sirens figure matter-of-factly in these essays – from the doctors all being tied up in the ER (due to Hamas bombs) during the birth of his son, to he and his wife playing “pastrami sandwich” with their now seven-year-old at the side of the road during a later attack – but this is just the background noise to a family that has all the same concerns as any other (okay, most of us won't argue over whether our three-year-old should eventually be discouraged from serving his mandatory army term or blackly joke about taking out loans we can't possibly repay because Iran is likely to wipe us off the map any day).
But if that makes it sound like Keret feels a victim, his thinking is much more nuanced than that. One essay ends with his reading a newspaper that has a large, outraged article about an Israeli bombing attack in Gaza that left zoo animals starving because no one dared take care of them (one Israeli officer was quoted as wanting to go on a raid to liberate the lions), and on the same page, a small routine article on the deaths of three hundred Palestinian children. In another essay, Keret writes about the general, if unacknowledged, feeling of relief when Hezbollah started raining down bombs upon the Israelis during the Lebanese War:
Suddenly, the first salvo of missiles returned us to that familiar feeling of a war fought against a ruthless enemy who attacks our borders, a truly vicious enemy, not one fighting for its freedom and self-determination, not the kind that makes us stammer and throws us into confusion. Once again we're confident about the rightness of our cause, and we return with lightning speed to the bosom of the patriotism we had almost abandoned. Once again, we're a small country surrounded by enemies, fighting for our lives, not a strong, occupying country forced to fight daily against a civilian population.Keret has apparently spent most of his career explaining to the rest of the world that being “Israeli” doesn't imply a homogeneity of ideology any more than being “Nigerian” or “Chinese” or (cough) “American” does. Even within his own family, as we learn here, he and his siblings had very different responses to their mandatory military service: his older brother (brilliant and creative; could have been anything) dropped out and moved to Thailand where he is now an activist; his older sister became Orthodox (Keret repeatedly states that his sister died the day she married) and is now a mother of eleven and forbidden by her Rabbi to read her brother's books or even hug him goodbye; and as for Keret himself, it was during his service that he wrote his first short story as an attempt to transform his experience.
And just when you might be thinking that the Israelis should be willing to sacrifice more to achieve peace with their neighbours, there's a late essay in which a famous Polish architect contacted Keret and offered to build him the world's tiniest house in a narrow alley in Warsaw. When Keret showed the proposed site to his mother, she knew the spot immediately: it was the location of a Nazi checkpoint she had to pass through whenever she'd leave or enter the notorious Ghetto; we learn that she was the only member of her family to survive WWII, a duty she was charged with by her ailing father. When the house was eventually built and Keret spent some time there, he had an emotional phone conversation with his mother in which he said he was “home”. And again, there's this feeling of the importance of continuity: that Keret's very existence occurred against all the odds, and after a lifetime in Israel and a stint in the army – two facts that could have theoretically seen him blown away at any time – surviving to father the next generation must feel like the most important thing. I can't imagine the constant conflict he must feel between the duty to protect the future and the terrible toll this sometimes takes on those neighbours outside of Israel's borders who are feeling that exact same duty.
The writing in these essays is consistently interesting, often funny, and frequently touching. I love Keret's nuanced thinking about his homeland, and I am looking forward to learning more about how he utilises this thinking in his fiction.
