Etgar Keret - Author - Cannes Film Festival Award-winning Director - Transdisciplinary Artist

Interviewed by Mia Funk

Author, Screenwriter, and Director Etgar Keret is a recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Jellyfish, which he directed with his wife Shira Geffen. Most recently, they created the TV mini series The Middleman (L’Agent Immobilier) starring Mathieu Amalric. His books include the short story collections Fly Already, Suddenly a Knock on the Door, and his memoir The Seven Good Years. Etgar’s work has been translated into forty-five languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and This American Life.
A frequent collaborator with visual and performing artists, an exhibition inspired by his mother called Inside Out is currently showing at the Jewish Museum in Berlin until February 5th, 2023.
Find Etgar on Substack

ETGAR KERET

For me, there is something about art, it's not a monologue, it's a dialogue. Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language. And I think the same way that people are excited about learning and speaking different languages - because I think each language has different merits and different aspects.

So I basically speak Hebrew and English. Many things in the world are easier for me to understand through English and not through Hebrew, so this idea, this kind of learning this new language allows me some kind of versatility and understanding the world better. So I think that having a dialogue with specific and different kinds of audiences does the same. When I started publishing and my books, started becoming successful, the first thing I did was I wrote a children's book because I thought, In life, I like speaking to adults, but I also like speaking to children.

Because my mom grew up in a period where they were excited about Nazi ideology and my mom knew this wasn't a good thing. So this idea of making up your own story instead of taking other people's stories was something that was very important. When I was a child, my mother didn't allow children's books in our home because she insisted on making up the stories for us. For her, basically, it was like the idea of reading us classics from a book was like ordering a pizza instead of cooking dinner. It meant that she didn't care about us. And she felt that because her parents told her bedtime stories in the ghetto where they had no access to books. And she saw how those people who were broken and angry and hurting could still find in their imaginations a brand new story that they made for somebody that they loved. So for her, it was this kind of generosity and something that could not be compared to, for example, buying Alice in Wonderland and reading it to somebody. You had to give more than that.

You don't hire somebody who will make love to your lover for you, and then you say, “I love you so much, I hired this really good guy or good girl that will make love to you instead of me.” So this idea of being there and being authentic and giving yourself was really, really important to her.

And I think that from a young age I've kind of learned that there are good stories, great stories, but none of them is your story. And that you have to kind of make up your own story, not feel just good enough kind of picking up one. And it doesn't matter if it's about Flat Earths or some conspiracy or wanting to clear the world of plastic or going vegan - which I am, vegan. So just this idea of joining some kind of boy scouts or wearing some kind of uniform or supporting some sports club and saying, Okay, now I don't have to think, I'm the New York Knicks fan! So if they win, I'm happy. If they lose, then I'm sad. I think that there is something, both with my mother and my father, being Holocaust survivors, being orphaned, basically, they had to seek the narrative. They didn't inherit one.

It's not like my parents always said, You do like this, you know, and then you can either do what your parents said or rebel against them. It's this idea of What the hell do I do? And I'm looking outside and inside to find my narrative, to find my ethics, to find my values.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think in your work, as you said, obviously that's a collaboration when you have a translation, so the translator is putting it in the idiom and the tone. Also, in your other work in film, dance, or your television show The Middlemann (L’Agent Immobilier), this had a very French sensibility. You seem to orientate your work around the local culture. You adapt, and it just felt completely of a piece, with of course wonderful acting by Mathieu Amalric, Eddy Mitchell, and others. So it was very beautifully done, and it got right into, I feel, our sensibility.

KERET

When I do a video dance for a Japanese audience or a sci-fi comedy for a French audience then I do try to think about if I want to shock the audience at a certain moment. I think that the same things that would shock a French person would not necessarily shock an Israeli or a Japanese person, you know? I think that what's funny is that for a lot of people, the fact that The Middleman (L'Agent Immobilier) is very extreme, but in Israel when they watched it, they never thought it was extreme. They said it was very funny, but because the Israeli reality is much more extreme, so the idea of people shouting at each other or breaking a wall or punching each other or doing weird stuff, the French said, “Oh, it's over the top.” In Israel, they felt that it was just like the way things are. So it's very, very interesting.

Some people, it doesn't matter who they speak to, they will speak in the same way they would speak to a five-year-old or to an intellectual or to somebody who doesn't speak the language very well. They would speak the same way and they don't care because this is what they have to say, but I think that the natural thing in the dialogue is really to look into the eyes of the person you speak to and see when he understands or when she doesn't understand or when she's moved or when he's angry. And basically out of that, kind of create your own language. And I think the same way that people are excited about learning and speaking different languages - because I think each language has different merits and different aspects.

If I try to think about my mother's story it's really this idea that you don't have a complete picture, but it's broken to pieces. And you can look at each of them and try to imagine the pieces or collect them, but there is something that is fragmented by nature.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

In fact, insisting on a whole picture is probably the larger illusion or a larger lie because, in reality, there is no complete picture. I think to have that you would have to be God, right?

KERET

I think that there are many complete pictures, but in a sense, they are all kind of redacted. And the truth is that it's strange, but I feel that, let's say, if there's a collective narrative that you totally identify with, then one should go with it. It doesn't matter if it's the Catholic Church or Antifa or the Klu Klux Klan. If people say something, they say, Oh my God, yes! They got it! They cracked it. Yay! Give me a torch. Now I got it. It's good enough.

But I think that, at least the experience that I've had, many times it's that I'm too passive. And there are all kinds of narratives passing by, and I hitchhike, kind of sitting on a narrative without really judging and thinking, to say, Oh, it's nice. Oh, people say it's good. You know? And from my mother, I learned to be very, very critical of all those narratives. Because the fact that many people say something and are excited about it, doesn't mean anything.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think this nurturing, comforting thing that you provide in your art…you’ve mentioned opening doorways to other lands, from your very first story “Pipes” or later stories like “Lieland” or “Unzipping”. You create these other worlds where your fictions, your lies in “Lieland” come to life, and they're magical. That’s something that recurs in your fiction?

KERET

I really feel that if there is something about art that I seek - I think people use art for many things - it's really some kind of a belief that we can transcend. I mean, if I try to kind of see it as some kind of a substitute for a religion. You know, religion tells us that there's something out there. There's somebody watching us, somebody doing something. And I think that for me, many times good art says there is something beyond our understanding that exists, and there is a way to get a step closer to it. Maybe not to unveil it, but we can get there.

And I'm saying that in The Middleman (L'Agent Immobilier), it has this aspect that the guy in it is not nice in any way. There is nothing nice about him, but you see in the series that whatever the starting point, he can get better. So if he's obnoxious, he can become less obnoxious. If he's unloyal, he can become a little bit more loyal. This idea that we can move, it's really, really important.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Tell me, what was the last conversation you had with your mother?

KERET

Well, the last time we talked, she was already in dementia. So I think that the last time we talked, I held her hand. She said I love you. And I said, “You know who I am?” And she said, “Yes, of course, don't be silly. You're my father.” I think this was the last conversation we had, or something like that.

There is something about both my parents, but I think especially my mother, it's as if the horrible circumstances that they lived through being Jews in the Holocaust, my mother losing her entire family - it was horrible and traumatic, but it was almost like a very extreme human experiment. And it created something. It's like many times when you put somebody in extreme situations, and most of the time he will crush or she will crush, but sometimes, a superhero will be born. And there is something about my parents, when I came to work on the exhibition about my mother Inside Out, I realized there is something about her that was so unique that it could not have been achieved in normal times. Because the thing that happened with my mother was that, when the war started, she was five years old. When the war ended, she was 11 years old. By the time she was about 10, all the people that she had known before the war had died. Her parents, her brother, her grandfather, her friends.

So I think that there was something about my mother that she was a true rebel and an anarchist, not by choice, but by education. Because the fact that she grew up in a place in which you could not trust anyone or you could not trust the narratives in which basically the grownups that she met were not like my parents - who would help me navigate life - but they were like a kind of evil orphanage managers who would steal her food or who would try to molest her or do all those horrible things. So in that sense, she kind of relied on herself for a narrative...So it doesn't really matter so much what's out there, but what matters is how you experience it.

I asked my father as a child, “What was the point in imagining this world? And he said, “Everything that you can imagine can potentially exist. So whenever I was hiding in a hole in the ground, and whenever I could imagine something new, I would make the space in which I live bigger and bigger and wider, and make it to this kind of infinite plane by kind of unfolding my imagination.” And I think that it's always kind of good to remind ourselves that we have an option. We're active. We can act.

I think that there is something about this age that we live in, that it's an age, I think, that everybody feels trapped. Everybody feels wronged. Everybody feels that there is no responsible adult up there. But the idea is what do you do with it? And I feel that it's all about maybe creating some kind of individual sphere, and from this individual sphere trying to connect with others instead of kind of ganging into these posts, which you like or dislike, saying that you hate this guy or like this guy. Kind of avoiding this kind of binaric reduction of yourself, just so you feel you belong to a big group, you know? And I think just like the moment I talked about my mother seeing her history as a pearl necklace, I think that the moment that we see humanity as a pearl necklace and not some kind of equation in which everybody has to give you the same results, then there will be some kind of a breathing option to any person who tries to feel better.

And again, I'm not saying that all my life I felt this way. When I was younger, I think I wanted to change the world. Now I admit, I mostly want to survive it. And I think that there is something looming from above. Let's say when I started writing in the late eighties, early nineties when I was a teenager. You know, everything, the world kind of gave you this promise that things are going to get better, that things are going to get solved. Fukuyama wrote this book about The End of History. No more wars! We're going to solve all our problems! And I think that in these kinds of times, this idea of saying I want to put my things center stage because everybody would listen to it - kind of feels like not only a young man's inspiration but also something that had to do with the zeitgeist.

But right now, I really, really feel it's time for each of us to our boroughs, and not necessarily seek the default town square, CNN, Fox News, you are feeding Facebook - all those kind of things that make you feel less alone but for the price of kind of reducing yourself to something that is very, very binaric in nature.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You were saying that answering questions is a kind of therapy. Is therapy actually good for your writing process?

KERET

Actually, I have friends who have psychologists, so it's not as if I'm against this vocation. It's just maybe because of my biography, I had to go for Plan B. And I wrote my first story Pipes about two or three weeks after my friend died. So, I guess that this idea that I passed the trauma, and I can't go to a psychologist or psychotherapist kind of made me look for Plan B, and it kind of made me a writer.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Yes, that goes into that idea of happiness or wanting the absence of pain. But I think that if we didn't have any, then you wonder if you were really alive. That's how we get to know ourselves and each other.

KERET

I think that one of the most powerful sentences I've read was in Faulker's The Wild Palms where the protagonist says that “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” And again, there is some kind of hubris about it because nobody said that life is a buffet and you can choose what you want, you know? But I think there is something in this statement that between void and suffering, I'd rather be suffering. So I feel human. I feel my emotion, and I feel my life than not feel anything. This is something that I can totally identify with.

Main photo credit: Lielle Sand

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Jamie Lammers. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

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Interview with KATHLEEN ROGERS
President of EarthDay·org

Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans will become city dwellers. Our waste will drive a mounting worldwide crisis.

POORVA JOSHIPURA

PETA U.K. · Senior Vice President
Author of Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence

I wrote Survival at Stake because I've been working in animal rights for nearly the past 25 years. Throughout that time, one common question has been asked: Well, shouldn't we deal with human issues first. But animal rights are human rights. Animal rights is environmentalism. These things are not distinct. And that's the point I was really trying to make in my book. I was inspired to write it because of the COVID-19 crisis. It just brings us back to the point of why it is so important to teach people, young people, and young men the importance of being kind to everyone, animals included. If you teach them that, I think the other lessons start to much more automatically transfer over.

LEWIS DARTNELL

Astrobiologist · Science Communicator
Author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us · Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History

The challenges facing our society at the moment effectively are the unintended consequence of a solution we found in the late 1700s when society was running out of energy, we had no more timber, and we realized we could dig underground for ancient fossilized woodland, which is basically what coal is from about 300 million years ago. The consequence of burning all that coal and then oil was a release of carbon dioxide, changing our atmosphere and warming the planet. So, it's a problem born out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness, but I'm confident that we will find the solution out of our ingenuity and resourcefulness.

SASHA LUCCIONI

Founding Member of Climate Change AI
AI Researcher & Climate Lead · Hugging Face

My work is really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society. The way I got into this field was working on the environmentally beneficial applications of AI, and I do believe that that's an impactful way of using AI techniques because there's so much data about the climate, satellite data, and sensor data, and the way to go about this is to work with domain experts. AI is never going to solve the problem on its own, but it can be a tool. So I think that there's a lot of promise there.

DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR

Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition · Sciences Po
Development Clinician focused on Cities & Nation States

How do you have economic growth that is socially equitable and environmentally sustainable? It's not just that you have ecological sustainability; hence, that is sustainable development. Because lots of examples of economic, ecological, and ecologically sensitive growth need not be socially equitable. That's why this whole emphasis on just transition is not just about climate, but it's also about justice. It's about social equity in economic growth. Unlike in Europe, where there is now the call for degrowth or a circular economy, most parts of the world would look at you blankly if you talked about degrowth because they are hungry for growth. And so sustainable development is about managing these trade-offs.

From Ancient Wisdom to the Language of the Earth

Scientists, Artists, Psychologists & Spiritual Leaders Share their Stories and insights on the importance of connecting with nature, preserving the environment, embracing diversity, and finding harmony in the world.

JAY JORDAN & ISABELLE FRÉMEAUX

Artists, Activists & Anarchists Seize Wetlands from the French Republic
Authors of We are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones
the story of a 40-year struggle to preserve 4,000 acres of wetlands from being destroyed to make way for an airport

DOUG LARSON

Award-winning Scientist · Ecologist · Professor Emeritus · University of Guelph
Author of Cliff Ecology · The Urban Cliff Revolution · The Dogma At My Homework

I think one thing I learned from looking at the ancient trees is that there is no great benefit to anything of growing quickly and accumulating vast resources. Growing slowly and patiently and with fewer demands on the environment in which you live is just as healthy and perhaps more healthy than the endless hunger for more and more and more, which we see as a characteristic of our species.

THOMAS CROWTHER

Ecologist · Founder of Restor
Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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