By Miriam Lichtenberg
Three years ago, at the insistence of a good friend, I went to a book store on Emek Refaim to pick up Etgar Keret’s first published collection of short stories “The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God.” The title story jumps into the life of a Bus Driver who holds so strongly to his ideology of not opening his doors for anyone who is late, until a man named Eddie ends up teaching him a lesson of mercy.
I was hooked.
Since then, I have read his stories, and even got to see a theatrical adaptation of “Suddenly, a Knock at the Door,” which tells the story of a writer held hostage by people who demand that he tell a story. I immersed myself in the fictional world of his imagination, finding comfort in the dark humor, the informal language, and the stories of characters who felt I knew so well at the end of a four-page story.
So, it was with great excitement and some nerves that I got to introduce one of my favorite authors to the Nachshon Cohort on the last night of our week long Opening Conference in Caesarea. I sat next to him and detailed his awards, achievements, and my favorite of his stories, eager to join my fellow cohort members in hearing from someone so versed in the world of storytelling and the elements that compose a good story.
On Nachshon, we’ve been discussing how to best tell our stories -- our Jewish stories, our community stories, our family stories. Hearing from a professional storyteller was a true privilege. For every question that we had for Keret, he answered in story form. He seemed to have a story to match every thought that arose.
Fiction, Keret explained, has no bounds; it’s entirely the author’s invention. In fictional stories, Keret can imagine a man who cheats on his wife or hurts a bully, or a writer held at gunpoint, or an aspiring benevolent bus driver, and these worlds can have real significance without real consequences.
He was once asked to give a reading in Tel Aviv. It was the dead of the winter, and he explained that the venue where he gave the talk was used as a solace from the cold for many homeless people. In the middle of his reading, a man stood up and wondered why Keret thought he owned the stage – other people want to tell their story too! To this, Keret could not protest. He then gave the stage to this man’s twelve-minute lecture on the faults of the municipality of Tel Aviv and their disregard for their homeless population of Tel Aviv. To Keret, everyone has an important story to tell, and their stories deserved to be heard.
Keret’s stories are captivating, both in his writings and his speech – a quality that, with luck, we will echo in the stories we choose to tell.
