Etgar Keret sometimes worries about what’s happening to Palestinians

Etgar Keret is a contemporary Israeli writer. His new book, The Seven Good Years, is a memoir that describes a period of seven years in his life, beginning with the birth of his son, Lev, and ending with the death of his father (who died of cancer in his 80’s.) On the back cover of my edition, there are several glowing blurbs. “Etgar Keret is a genius” says The New York Times. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, he is a “major new voice.” There is a friendly readability to the writing style, and I tried to approach the book with an open mind, but I disliked the politics, and, to a lesser extent, the personality of the narrator. The book is a bit of a work of Zionist propaganda. In addition, it is clear to me that Etgar Keret looks inward, but doesn’t look outward enough.

With a light treatment, Keret writes about daily life in Israel. Flashbacks are also dispersed throughout the narrative. We learn that his father barely survived the Holocaust. Then, after the war, when he was 19 years old, his father went to Italy to obtain weapons for Jewish militants in Palestine:

His fellow members of the Irgun wanted him to try to buy weapons for them, and after asking around and pulling a few strings, my father found himself at the southernmost tip of Italy, from which you can see the Sicilian coast — Reggio Calabria. There he rubbed shoulders with the local Mafia and, in the end, persuaded them to sell him rifles for the Irgun to use to fight the British. Since he had no money to rent an apartment, the local Mafia offered him free lodgings in a whorehouse they owned there, and that, it seems, was the best time of his life.

Keret certainly creates an upbeat memory here. He describes how his father used to tell stories from this time, stories which were filled with “magic and compassion.” But the father was buying weapons for Jewish terrorists. Keret does not explore this critical point. There is no discussion of the Irgun’s terrorist activity, which killed a lot of innocent people. Instead, the chapter fizzles out, as Keret muses about the human desire to “find good in the least likely places.”

The following chapter opens up cheerfully. Keret is a stay-at-home dad who likes to take his son to the park. One of the moms at the playground, probably a pacifist, asks Keret what he thinks about army service for his son. Keret is shocked to learn that some families have already decided they won’t let their sons serve in the Israeli army. He can’t wrap his head around the idea. He writes, “there was something accusing in her [the mother’s] tone, as if the fact that my wife and I haven’t discussed our baby’s military future is on the same scale as skipping his measles vaccination.” Keret acts as if he doesn’t know what he thinks. On the surface, he is laid back, and tuned-out. But I feel this is really a social strategy that he uses, to disguise his weird, conservative politics.

Later on, he and his wife have an argument. Apparently, his wife is highly critical of the Israeli government, and, just like the mother at the playground, she never wants her son to serve in the army. Keret argues with his wife. He calls his wife “controlling” because he wants Lev to “decide…by himself” at age 18. But what is so sacred about the decision-making process of a teenage male, as it pertains to army service? Keret has reverence for Lev’s choice, because he kind of likes the idea of his son having an army career. He justifies it, “we live in a part of the world where our lives depend on it.” He characterizes himself as:

…a stressed-out Jew who considers his momentary survival to be exceptional and not the least bit trivial, and whose daily Google Alerts are confined to the narrow territory between “iranian nuclear development” and “jews+genocide”…

and,

Am I supposed to admire the violent culture he describes, no matter what? It’s infuriating. Israel is costing America billions of dollars. Our support for the Israeli ethnocracy contaminates our own experience, as Americans— how we think, and how we treat each other. No religion or ethnicity should be privileged above others. Keret’s politics are a clear reflection of that privilege.

The author tries to distract the reader with humor. This is supposed to be a fun book, filled with Woody-Allen-ish vignettes. In one passage, Keret describes some of the inconveniences of air travel, such as “the sour-faced airline employees at the check-in counter who explain that the last empty seat left on the plane is between two flatulent Japanese sumo wrestlers.” In my opinion, this writing is cartoonish, and Keret is not observant enough to be truly funny.  He should be looking outward, and thinking more about what is really going on in the minds of the airline employees and the people sitting on the plane.  Great slapstick humor is more complex. This narrator is narcissistic, and careless in his descriptions.

Keret paints himself as a loyal husband and father. (He brags about himself.) I would argue that behaving appropriately in one’s personal life isn’t “enough.” Citizenship places additional demands on the individual.

Etgar Keret is just going with the flow— as most people do, when a political situation becomes outrageous and highly dangerous. But Keret is a writer, which means that he is an educated person who should be able to speak clearly during a crisis. There is something in Keret’s personality that is lazy and entitled— entitled in a literal sense, as if he is an aristocrat from pre-revolutionary France. In that era, aristocrats were not subject to normal laws. It was written into the legal code. A nobleman could gallop through a peasant’s freshly planted, delicate field, and ruin it, if the nobleman was engaged in a fox hunt and the fox ran through the field. This was the law.

As we all know, those French aristocrats became exceedingly childlike and spoiled, preoccupied with their emotions and trivial needs. In paintings, they were often depicted as having children’s faces:

Have modern-day Israelis become aristocrats, as a result of their over-the-top, privileged legal status? Are they simply in love with themselves, because they have more rights than other people in their vicinity?  Keret describes how, by his late thirties, he was almost handicapped due to overeating and inactivity. His poor health seems to be the result of sloppiness, and a peculiar lack of shame about his body. He acts like his physical condition is funny and cute— wonderful, even. That attitude is definitely not charming.