“For me writing is a place of ultimate freedom,” Keret said. “When I write I don’t have any idea what I’m writing. It’s like trust falls—couples go to counseling and do those trust falls. I close my eyes and fall back and I hope the story will catch me, and when it works, what comes out is me.”

For those of us with aspirations of becoming famous enough that our work might one day be translated, this method is a bit overwhelming. It hinges on one’s natural abilities and doesn’t bode well for what can be learned in class rooms. But that’s his point. We all need to let loose a little and just write. Englander was as much in awe as Keret’s fans despite his own success as a short story writer, novelist, and playwright.

“The stories I love most are the ones I can’t understand why they’re working for me, but when I finish I’m filled with such a deep and beautiful sadness, or belief, or love,” Englander said of Keret’s work. “The rules in his works are impeccable; the emotions are real. It’s almost like hyperrealism to me. You can see yourself in the character, just maybe in another dimension.”

“In Case You Missed It: For Etgar Keret Writing is like Trust Falls,” Gapers Block Book Club, April 27, 2012.  

Keret, born in 1967, has often been distinguished from Israeli writers of the previous generation by virtue of his whimsy. But his concerns are different, as well. While Amos Oz and David Grossman wrestle with the moral quandaries of the emergent Jewish state, and Aharon Appelfeld plumbs the calamitous dislocations of Jewish history, Keret tracks the chaotic inner life of his countrymen. To him, the perils of modern Israel — the free-floating rage, the anguish of occupation, the sudden and senseless violence — are not national dramas so much as existential dilemmas.

Lovely review of Etgar Keret’s ‘Suddenly, a Knock on the Door’ in today’s New York Times Book Review. (I had the pleasure of translating some of the stories in the book.)

In ‘The Reader’ a successful novelist emerges after several years of writing to find, on his book tour, that his following has shrunk to one. Is there a comment here about our ever shortening attention spans and our appetite for instant culture, without the wait for a long and complicated novel to be produced?

For me the story is talismanic in a way. And I do believe in the idea behind it. That it would be enough of a gift ‘to find one true reader’ in this world. You better not want for more. If you’ve managed to communicate with one other human being, it really is a gift. As a child I learnt everything I know from reaching for the wrong volume of the encyclopedia.Yes, I was also thinking about the printed word in the digital age. If an art form dies out, then so be it. But I don’t think we can measure success purely on numbers, in terms of how many people chose to do something or interact with it. I recently discovered that the Encyclopedia Britannica is no longer going to be in print. As a child I learnt everything I know from reaching for the wrong volume of the encyclopedia. It worries me that they think a nine-year-old is going to care about real-time online updates. There’s something special about the book, any book, the way a person can pull it off the shelf and discover a photo of an old girlfriend tucked into the pages, a receipt, a ticket stub, a note scribbled in the margin. I’m on Twitter and Facebook and all that, and was really excited to work with Electric Literature on the e-version of the story, but, outside of all the wonderful things that come with connectivity, I’d be saddened for us to lose that relationship with books and the solitude of reading. ■

- Interview today in Granta.

For the New Yorker podcast series, you chose to read Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “Disguise,” about a cross-dressing yeshiva boy in old Europe, and it reminded me of some of your own stories in this way that you’re comfortable enough to say, “This is a world. It has enough inside of it.”

My aesthetic is very simple: If a piece of art isn’t universal, it’s not functioning. It’s very strange that people want to ask Jews, “I’m not Jewish. My friends aren’t Jewish. Can I read this story?” It’s like Crime and Punishment. You don’t give that to someone and say, “Oh, you’re not Russian, you’ve never killed an old woman, so I don’t think this book’s for you.” Nobody’s worried about whether you can watch Star Warswithout having been a Jedi. It’s a really strange notion that gets put very specifically on literature with lots of Jews in it, or with lots of black people, or with lots of gay people. That’s how I feel about [John] Cheever. Nobody in my family ever mixed a martini. That world is as foreign to me as a dybbuk is to someone else. And you know what, there’s no distance, I get everything. Nothing is lost on me. So yes, why would a Jewish world be less of a world, or too “other,” unless the writer has failed?

- from an interview in Heeb, April 4, 2012. 

 Only one form of religious storytelling is ever permitted to bleed into the secular space — the Haggadah, the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt, and the book of prayer to accompany the Passover Seder.

This story gains new complexity and unanticipated fluidity in The New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and translated byNathan Englander. Foer and Englander’s edition is less a makeover than a workout — by opening up the Passover story, giving stiff words new flexibility, and prodding the text’s eternal questions, they have given readers, both devout and secular, a newly rich and provocative text, one that can be enjoyed long after the afikomen is found. The book is classically laid out, with Hebrew text on the right-hand page (gorgeously illustrated in texturally rich watercolor by the Israeli typographer Oded Ezer) and Englander’s translation on the left. At the top runs a timeline from Mia Sara Bruch, a scholar of Jewish history at Stanford University, charting the history of the Jews from 1200 BCE to present day, from the moment of the actual diaspora’s commencement to the reading of the Haggadah today, creating a throughline of historical relevance for the reader. Some readers may feel the text is wanting for a transliteration, but its book is an engaging read despite its absence. I found myself turning the pages in all directions, searching my years of Hebrew school for a language I’ve forgotten, and lost myself in the experience of the text.

…

Within each newly framed line, however, is a question — not one of the four questions, not even the major one, “Why is this night different than all other nights?” The question is the ambivalence of our worship: how, in a universe where chosen people were forgotten and made to toil under the yoke of slavery, and where their exodus came only at the price of further slaughter and plagues of suffering, do we believe and enact justice as spiritual citizens? The question of how to be good in a world that has not been good to us, colors Ezer’s powerfully violent illustrations for the 10 plagues. And yet these unanswerable questions do not defeat us as readers, but emboldens us. Ambivalence is empowering, for it demands that we debate and engage with our faith. In Englander’s translation on the Shema, the holiest of prayers; he says, “Blessed is the One that is Space and the Source of Space, the One that is the World but whom the World cannot contain…” In the complexity of our devotion are the unanswerable details of how we maintain faith. The most provocative sequence, in which a single illustrated word vibrates in pale green and which Englander translates to “With how many layers of goodness has God blessed us?,” made me run to several different books in attempting to find the exact Hebrew transliteration, all to no avail. Yet in the searching for the transliteration, I felt more connected to the Passover story than ever before.

A kindly read of the New American Haggadah in The Millions. 

For instance,this article in London’s Telegraph reports that some novelists who hope to sell a lot of Kindle books are constructing their plots so that a major cliffhanger occurs about 10% of the way into the book. Why? Because that’s about how much of a book Amazon allows readers to download as samples. These writers (there will be more and more of them) try to calculate precisely when to insert that Oh-my-goodness-what-happens-next moment, so that it occurs at just the instant when …

End of this sample Kindle book 

Enjoyed the sample? 

Buy Now

An irresistible invitation.

“Will Kindle’s Free Samples Change the Structures of Plots?” Alan Jacobs, The Atlantic, March 21, 2012. 

Two Novelists Take on the Haggadah

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Nathan Englander, left, translated the liturgical text for the “New American Haggadah,” which Jonathan Safran Foer edited. Four writers contributed commentary.

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Published: March 9, 2012

AFTER a lengthy interview with President Obama in the Oval Office two weeks ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, had one more question, and it had nothing to do with Iran.

“I know this is cheesy …” Mr. Goldberg started, but before he could finish, the president interrupted him. “What, you have a book?” Mr. Obama asked. Turns out, Mr. Goldberg did, but “it’s not just any book,” he replied.

Mr. Goldberg reached into his briefcase and handed the president an advance copy of the “New American Haggadah,” a new translation of the Passover liturgy that was edited by Jonathan Safran Foer and contains commentary by Mr. Goldberg and other contemporary writers.

After thumbing through the sleek hardcover book, Mr. Obama looked up and asked wryly, “Does this mean that we can’t use the Maxwell House Haggadah anymore?”

Mr. Goldberg was impressed. “Way to deploy the inside-Jewish joke,” he later said.

Now that our Haggadah made it to Obama, I’m feeling my Presidential Pardon can’t be far behind. Fingers crossed for clemency. 

(Source: The New York Times)