Word: keret
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Holy Land What will Israel look like 60 years from now? Hear the answers of Elie Wiesel, Dennis Ross, Etgar Keret and others and see more of Tivadar Domaniczky's images at time.com/israel
...always know it, but lines that you don't pass, you pass them all the time in Israel," Keret explains. "When you're 18, you're taken into the army, you kick doors down, you beat people, shoot people. Then you go home and people say now you are going to lead a normal life. But the moment your girlfriend doesn't want to open the door, well, it's not like you've never been in that situation before...
Above all, perhaps, Keret wants to show how complex life gets. He should know: he was born in 1967, the year of the Six Day War, to two Holocaust survivors. His sister is an ultra-orthodox former settler, whose beliefs forbid her to read his work. His brother is the founder of Israel's movement for the legalization of marijuana and a member of the super-left-wing Anarchists Against the World...
Then there are the surreal kinks in Keret's career. Izzat al-Ghazzawi, a Palestinian writer who died in 2003, refused to sit on the same panel as him at an event in Norway, drawing in the process an attack from French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Later, however, Izzat translated Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God, another collection of short stories, into Arabic for the first time...
...well that version did is hard to pin down. Strong sales were reported, but Keret's publishers suspect that Hamas bought the books and burned them, lest ordinary Palestinians read them. That scenario sounds like the perfect beginning to a Keret short story. But given the insight into young Israel's collective psyche that Keret offers up, if the tale is true, it would be a tragedy in itself...