Etgar Keret: "My mother, who survived the Holocaust, used to tell me something that stuck with me"

Barcelona"If you'll take one piece of advice, don't miss this book," he assured a few days ago Keret appears punctually on his computer screen in Tel Aviv, the city where he grew up and where he still lives and teaches creative writing. It's eleven in the morning, but he's been up for hours: he has a habit of going out at a quarter past seven to take a walk on the beach, which is ten minutes from his home. "I'm sorry I haven't been to Barcelona in so long. Maybe with the next book they'll invite me," he admits, before offering a small sample of his irony. "For now, with things the way they are in my country, it's normal for you to be afraid of someone like me coming."

His stories have been translated into more than 40 languages, but you resist working on them daily.

— I have never had a routine in relation to writing. When I was young I had a friend with whom I went out at night and I was desperate to find a partner. I told him that what he had to do was live well. If he lived a meaningful life, he would eventually find love too. I think the same about writing. Stories are not my goal. They are a way to communicate, to process my thoughts, to feel less alone and to give myself hope. Writing is a good method of self-help.

But his stories, especially those inThe Blues of the End of the World, end rather badly. His self-help method would not satisfy most readers of this kind of book.

— Last year I opened a master's degree in creative writing in the United States. The main idea is to explain how writing has evolved over time. In the 20th century, writers tried to find truths they could explain to their nation to unite it, but that has ended. Writing is a survival tool. If we live passively and accept the version of events they tell us, we are completely lost. The way to not lose our minds and hope for the future is by telling our own story. My mother, who survived the Holocaust, used to repeat something to me that stuck with me.

Which one?

— But their stories, especially those of

Before, he told me that writing stories gave him hope. How would you say we find this hope in The Blues at the End of the World? There are especially devastating stories, perhaps the hardest we have ever read from him.

— I agree with what you say. The blues of the end of the world must be the saddest or most depressing collection of stories I have ever written. If before my characters intended to change the world, now I want them to stand up straight while the world tries to crush them. In this book, hope is not found in triumph, but in the attempt to resist.

They put into practice a word of our times: resilience.

— They live in times of uncertainty and war in a country full of psychopaths. The only thing they can do is become aware that they must continue fighting so as not to lose their human condition and be degraded to the condition of users.

Gondola explains a disturbing relationship that begins through Tinder. The scientists of Solo feed their androids with artificial intelligence so they can become the soulmates of the person they accompany, even if the result is not optimal. In Strong opinions on hot topics, a dentist becomes a pundit to earn a living with his absurd but controversial comments.

— The world is advancing opportunistically in many ways. In the past, the main struggle was to fill one's belly. We knew what we wanted: enough money to eat and dress. Now we ask ourselves something else: what else can we achieve? Let me tell you an absurd story that may not matter, but it has to do with what I wanted to tell you in relation to this topic. The last time I went to New York, my wife asked me to buy her perfume. She wrote down exactly which one it was and where she could find it. When I asked for that perfume, the shopkeeper said to me:

Why does he say that?

— To answer this question, I have to tell you another story. At 14 years old, my older brother took me aside, took me to the bathroom, and told me: "Look me in the eyes, what I'm about to tell you will affect the rest of your life." Then he showed me a bottle of Aqua Velva aftershave and another of Paco Rabanne. I chose Paco Rabanne. From then on, whenever I went out at night, I smoked joints, got high, and woke up the next day not knowing who I was, the smell of Paco Rabanne aftershave allowed me to remember that I was Etgar. When I was young, therefore, my identity had consistency.

Now not anymore?

— It is more threatened, because social networks and artificial intelligence have taken it upon themselves to dismantle our self. When we enter Instagram, a video of a cat with a pirate hat navigating a lost river in a place we don't know appears, and right after that a rapper appears telling us we have to kill the police, and then a group of people drowning in China and the offer of a product you can buy at half price. You can believe that you experience very diverse sensations in a short time, but an hour after this racket you feel empty. This is a personal example, but we can also apply it on a universal scale. If in 1941 we had woken Winston Churchill at midnight and asked him what was most important in the world, he would have told us: "Defeat Hitler." In 1942 he would have answered the same. And in 1943. The answer was clear and always the same. If today you ask Donald Trump if he will bomb Iran tomorrow, he will tell you that he doesn't know yet.

Because this way you always have time to change your mind.

— Coherent narratives about the world have ceased to be important. Now we focus on collecting reactions. If you take a look at war conflicts like those in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, we know how they started, but it's impossible to predict how they will end. Imagine we are in a room: you offend me in some way and I decide to poison you and bury you in the garden. That's a narrative. If we are in the same room and I hit you, and you hit me, and then I slap you, and you spit on me, and I hit you again, and you punch me, we can spend the rest of our lives beating each other up, because there is no narrative, just one aggression after another. Trump is a great expert at constantly contradicting himself. One day he claims he will build a new Riviera in Gaza, another he promises to kill everyone in Iran, the next day he explains he has made peace with those he wanted to raze a few hours ago... It fits perfectly with the logic of social networks. Every time you see a statement from him it surprises you, it unsettles you, it outrages you, or, if you are a voter of his, it delights you.

The characters in many of the stories inThe Blues at the End of the World often find themselves lost in this hyper-fast and changing world, without continuity.

— We cannot aspire to row against the current, but rather to float in the middle of the river, and let ourselves be carried wherever. Unfortunately, today's world carries us to horrible, depressing, violent, and terrifying places.

One of the latest stories, ConvictionBecause that way it's always time to change your mind.Conviction is ultra-Orthodox and dedicates himself to praying for the return of the kidnapped. In his few moments of calm, he goes to the supermarket to buy frozen schnitzels and kosher sushi. How did this story come to him?

— I started it a month after October 7th. During that time I hadn't been able to write anything. My wife and I used to visit communities of people who had been evacuated as a consequence of the attacks. We looked after their children or told them stories, read books to the elderly, and set up yoga classes. We got involved in all sorts of strange activities that seemed useful to us. I also gave many interviews to the foreign press. There were journalists who told me that October 7th had never happened. That they hadn't destroyed anything, nor were there any fatalities... I took care of the people who had survived, but I have a documentary filmmaker friend who, if I asked him, would send me videos of all the terrible things that happened those days. If a journalist told me that a decapitation was fake, I would ask my friend if he had the video, and if he sent it to me, I would forward it directly, without looking at it. I am of the opinion that seeing atrocities does not help us in any way.

They must have been days of many contrasts.

— Exactly. Missiles were falling near us while someone we knew had been kidnapped in Gaza and would soon be murdered. An ex-girlfriend of mine had her brother and husband killed. Things like these cannot leave me indifferent. At the same time, I have an ultra-Orthodox sister who lives in the Mea Shearim neighborhood who has 11 children and more than 50 grandchildren – I am not exaggerating – who, shortly after October 7th, called me to tell me about what was happening as if it were news she had just seen on CNN. It made me very angry. She lives in Jerusalem, in an isolated community, and none of her children have had to go to war because they are ultra-Orthodox... Even so, how could she experience such events from such a distance? First, I was unpleasant to her. Then I told her she had to hang up the phone because all of that affected me greatly. Then I did what I always do when I get worked up like a motorcycle.

Write a short story?

— Write a story from the perspective of the one who made me put on a motorcycle.

Who has made you write more stories, lately?

— Probably Benjamin Netanyahu. I have 40 stories written from his perspective. They are garbage, I admit, but even though Netanyahu is my enemy, I need to put myself in his shoes and try to humanize him.

What happened in the case of Conviction? The protagonist is this ultra-Orthodox man who has been praying for 20 years and who buys schnitzels and kosher sushiin a specific supermarket because he is in love with the cashier.

— I have a nephew who lives in Beit Xémex and who always goes to the same supermarket to buy sushi. I thought I would dedicate a story to him and I got down to it. The most emotional thing that happened to me while I was working on it was realizing that when I was explaining that the character prayed and prayed, I was actually talking about myself.

Why?

— Writing and praying have a very important point in common. You pray because you need to communicate with God: to tell him how you feel, what scares you, and what you need. You write believing that what you have done, however strange it may be, will find a reader. In the story, the ultra-Orthodox protagonist is like me, because we both hope for something almost impossible to happen: that the hostages will be released. While I was working on it, I felt as if we were in 1941 and I was imagining the end of World War II.

Did he write the story because he needed fiction to be better than reality?

— I needed to invoke the prophet within me. It is not the first time I have written something that later actually happens.

Do we find any case in this book?

— Yes. There is a story called Dog for dog starring a group of Jewish children who are the sons of settlers. After a Palestinian accidentally runs over one of their dogs, they decide to kill a Palestinian's dog. It's absurd, isn't it? "An eye for an eye, a dog for a dog," they think. Then, as they prepare to put this extreme idea into practice, one of them begins to doubt. Dog for dog ended up being part of The blues of the end of the world, which was published in Hebrew in 2024. A few days ago I saw the news about a group of Jewish settlers who entered a Palestinian property, and after running over a sheep they took a dog and beat it practically to death. What happened in real life was worse than I had imagined. I felt very bad, as if I had been propagandizing for Israel in my story, because in the end one of the children manages to get the dog they wanted to kill spared.

The dog of the Jewish children is called Smadja as a tribute to a judo champion.

— I named him like that because I wanted a human name for the dog. A few days after publishing The Blues of the End of the World, Smadja's son, the former judo champion, died in Gaza in very tragic circumstances. At one of the first presentations of the book, the deceased's best friend came and asked me, with tears in his eyes, why I had named the dog in the story Smadja. "Do you think my friend died like a dog?", he reproached me. In Israel at that time, nobody remembered the old judo champion, only the soldier who had died in Gaza. Right now, if you draw someone's portrait, while you are doing it, reality changes and when you finish, it turns out that they have grown three eyes and a beard.

In another of the stories inThe Blues of the End of the World, a writer –who could be yourself– has to find the ideal words for the tombstone of a dead friend and ends up making his mother very angry.

— The Jewish children's dog is called Smadja as a tribute to a judo champion.

Would such a story have been impossible to write afterwards?

— On the contrary. After October 7, 2023, most writers in the country were recruited by the families of the 2,000 deceased to give funeral speeches. My wife had to write the speeches about Eli Sharabi's murdered daughters, who later published a memoir about her captivity [Hostage, 2025].

And you, what funeral speech did you write?

— I didn't write any. I rejected the proposals they made me.

Why?

— Because they asked me to use my talent to cure something I couldn't cure. When I said I couldn't help them with that, I offered them an alternative: give a lecture, tell a story to the children...

We have talked about very serious topics in this conversation, but I don't want to fail to remind readers that their stories have not lost their sense of humor, even when they address delicate situations. There is one in which he talks about the invention of the time machine. Since if you travel to the past you lose weight, the invention becomes a success: it is a faster way to lose weight than taking Ozempic.

— And you, what funeral speech did you write?