The scene of Israeli literature resembles to me, at any given point in time, the scene of a class in a public school or high school (or in a troop of recruits and similar groups), where all participants have the same formal status, a uniform set of duties and rights. But, as each of us knows, the formal status is only the starting point of life. What really matters is the role that each person in these groups is stuck in, whether by choice and/or by necessity of the circumstances that they fall into.
There have always been and always will be “kings” and “princes” and “queens” and “princesses”. There will always be “wannabes”, claiming the crown of sorts, and we will always recognize the “loner”, the “clown”, the “fool” and everything that comes out of these.
This is exactly how the literary scene is organized in every community and at any given point in time. All of them will be called writers, and they will even be accepted into various writers’ organizations, but they too will not be able to escape the job definitions that will stick to them: “the national writer”, “Holocaust writer”, “poet for poets”, “progonim” (those, so to speak, who are ahead of their time) and “Ephigons” (imitators of styles that seem to have lost their cool), “men of the literary gangs”, “an outsider boy”, “the spy” and much more.
the magician
Etgar Kerat was seen in the community of writers and readers, from the very beginning, as the “magician”, who writes brilliant short stories, built on a series of logical and rhetorical tricks, which even if they repeat themselves – they repeat and inspire astonishment.
First, he puts his heroes in one short segment into a situation that seems strange and hopeless, as in “A World Without Selfie Poles”, the story that opens the new collection before us: “In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at not Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything Nothing. But what’s a man to do when a week after he tearfully said goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was going to study for a doctorate in Australia, he runs into her, like nothing, at a branch of Starbucks in the East Village?”
It’s a bone-chilling challenge. The first word, “in hindsight,” throws us to the future end of the story and back. The rest of the sentence introduces a character whose name is obviously absurd: “La-Debi”. Then the narrator in the first person turns to us, the readers, and presents us with a problem that looks like something out of a cheap Hollywood melodrama: his beloved partner, from whom he broke up in tears about a week ago, the one who was supposed to be on the other side of the world, for a long time, suddenly appears in front of him in the most trivial place around his residence, A branch of the American coffee chain Starbucks.
Now, after sharing with us, in a brilliant way, the details of the “situation”, the confused young man turns to us, as if we were watching his stand-up show, and wonders with us: “What is a man supposed to do?”. We, educated readers like ourselves, come to his aid. The author signals to us, behind the hero’s back, that the problem here is not emotional, but existential. The hero is required to choose between two different women. One “herself” and one “non-Debi”, and precisely this one, as it turns out (to our hero’s great misfortune), is the Debi; The ideal teddy bear. so what are we doing?
True, we can not respond to the plight of the young man and refuse the challenge; That is to put the book aside. But if we obey him, we find ourselves led in a dizzying loop in a labyrinth, built – as in Lewis Carroll, Kafka and Borges, to boast the names of genius writers who challenge our logic – on an almost mechanical repetition of a plot structure based on “autocorrects”; That is, on corrections that are created as if by software of artificial insight.
The narrator, Kerath’s character, decides at a certain moment, which seems incredibly arbitrary, to rescue us from the dizziness into which he threw us at the beginning of the story. How does he do it? Like any magician, with incredible sleight of hand, which is based on rhetorical logic exercises, which can be called “literary algebra”. Immediately afterwards, he places the hero and us in front of a trial, which seems to have ultimate validity, and the story (only) confirms it.
Thus, in “A World Without Selfie Poles”, we discover that “non-Debi” comes from a parallel location; A universe where there is God. On the other hand, we (meaning the hero himself, “Debi herself”, their children who will be born later and the readers), as derived from the “literary algebra” that Kirat deceives us with – live “in a world without God”.
Eternal slalom
“A world without selfie sticks” is just an appetizer. It is a bait story, written in the style of Kerat’s classic stories; The ones that have a comic-humorous flavor and their narrator is a mischievous, Peter Pan type of trickster who has no real bad intentions. This is a wise eternal boy, who opens our eyes for a brief moment, but never closes them.
On the other hand, the following stories in the file, written in the wake of the Corona virus and the events of October 7th, which are briefly mentioned here, are read as the classic stories of Keret Shleko, who succumbed to a severe autoimmune disease.
It seems that Kerat decided, in a very brave artistic move – which could cost him the sympathy of some of his devoted readers on five continents – to break the tools, literally.
In these stories, as always, he puts us in mazes full of twists and turns. But unlike ever, and also from what happened in the story that opens this file – he doesn’t rescue us from there, but rather abandons us in the spinning wheel forever. An example of this move is the eternal slalom that Kirat takes us to in “Modern Dance”.
Even in “Modern Dance” the narrator speaks directly to the audience. It presents a story that sounds like a transcript of a documentary film and accompanies it with commentary. First he recounts the stories of the one who turns out to be Hillel Ben-Shahar: a handsome and successful man, who looks as if he is sitting on top of the world, and it humbly responds to him – in several takes, each of which begins with the phrase “look at him”. For example: “Look at him sipping happily from the espresso cup he’s holding in one hand and texting a thumbs-up emoji with the other hand, while also asking the curly-haired waitress for the bill with a wink”; And “see him gliding with his silver Tesla, sailing confidently between the lanes like an Olympic ice skater.”
At this stage, when we are in the slalom of this story, we are waiting for the magician’s hand to be sent to us, lead us out of the maze, and present us with a stinging but comforting conclusion. But alas, Keret breaks the dishes, and twice more. First, he concludes the man’s story with one last take: “Look at him fluttering. We’ll fight between life and death on the blue marble floor of an organic chef’s restaurant. Look how he snorts and spits on himself at the same time.”
Like this, in a dry report, without any punch that rescues us from depression. And then, as if to confirm a kill, he adds another take, which reveals what he thinks, at this time, about magicians who have comic-humanist weaknesses: “We’ll move on to watch the movement of someone else: a young, demented elderly woman named Alma Bichler in the internal ward of a geriatric hospital in the north of the country . […] The meeting with her is going to be both vibrating and static at the same time, and without going into spoilers, it will surprise at the end just as bad and overwhelming.”
About this “delightful” meeting, for which Kirat prepares us in “Modern Dance”, one can say, in the spirit of the titles of some of the stories in the collection (“Point of No Return”; “Mesopotamian Hell”; “Olives or the End of the World Blues”; “The Future He is not what he used to be”; “Haim: Full disclosure”) that he exposes us, in the spirit of the events of the time and place, to the dark side of Keret’s world. In other words: welcome to hell.
I once saw a documentary about men who are attracted to very large women. One of the highlights of the movie was the moment when after one of these men built a huge palace out of Lego – he invited his mighty lady, who trampled and trampled and crushed the entire palace, all over it. It was spectacular and nauseating and terrifying. Kerat’s new book made a similar impression on me. Here he is no longer so nice, and is not content with lewd winks. He really is. Maybe because of everything we’ve been through in recent years. He destroys his palace in a fit of rage, which is also ours, and this – an act that requires the awarding of a medal for artistic heroism.
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