Keynote speech at the PEN Berlin Congress on 2 November 2024 in Hamburg
»What to do now?«
By Etgar Keret
[Listen as audio or read the German translation]
I’ve been doing events – I’m 57 years old – I’ve been doing events I don’t know for more than 30 years. But this kind of feels like my first event. So I’m a bit excited, okay. Because there is something about the 7th of October that it’s kind of almost rebooted everything that existed before that. And it seems like that when I try to think about my last European keynote, it feels like it was 200 years ago.
I didn’t write anything, I just speak. I hope it will make sense. Sorry if it won’t so. The first 3 or 4 months after the 7th of October, everyone that I knew, drafted themselves to do something useful.
A lot of people cooked, other people drove people who needed to be driven. I can’t cook and I can’t drive, so I said to my wife, we have to find something useful, something that we can do. And we found ourselves going to all kinds of communities of survivors and speaking with them. Basically, I have medical marijuana, I would give joints to people who wanted a joint. I would do yoga with the kids. It was just basically more kind of going around and trying to feel useful. And a lot of times when you came, you came kind of unannounced, so the audience would be three people. One of them would fall asleep.
Or I don’t know, you would read to a girl and next to her, her father would sit with a rifle, even though we were not in the border all the time. And when in the sad part in the story, you could see the father crying, the girl was happy, but it was really, very very weird.
And in one of these events, which was in the north, I found myself again with a random audience, but the audience was as big as the audience in this room, and somehow it was all elderly people. Elderly survivors. In those kibbutzes, you have many people who are not young. And they were a very good audience, I was happy to speak to an audience, and they listened and I read them stories and told them jokes and everything worked fine. And in the end, they clapped and they started leaving. And I don’t know how many of you ever spoke to elderly audiences, but the thing about the elderly audience is that they leave very slowly. Because they have those little canes and the crutches. No, really. So, it’s kind of a process.
So, when the event ends, it’s not like, puf, they disappear, wow, they’re drunk in a bar in Hamburg, you know, no, they just make their way out. And I finish this and I see that everybody’s leaving and I’m kind of taking my books in order and putting everything in my bag. And I see this one old lady sitting in the middle staring at me with this stare like that, of a teacher who’s caught the student didn’t do his homework. Really, really angry. Really angry, while everybody is already leaving. And I look at her and I say to her: »Miss, is everything okay?« And she said: »You read us your stories and you told us your jokes and that’s all wonderful and funny, but you forgot to do the most important thing.« And I said to her: »What’s that?« And she said: »You didn’t tell us what to do now!«
Reality doesn’t have the arc of a story
And a trick that I learned from my dad was that when they ask you or tell you something and you don’t know what to do, it’s always good to repeat it because you win time. So, I say: »Ah, what to do now.« And then this man at the door shouts: »Varda, Varda, come back now, quickly, he’s gonna tell us what to do now!« And then you see all those elderly people they’re doing a U-turn with the canes, and they’re coming with their crutches and it’s really like a crusade or, I don’t know, like going to Mecca, or it’s really like, all those crippled people they’re coming for me to tell them what to do now.
And they all sit down in order and again when I’m stressed, they don’t think so. So, I tell them a story about something that happened to me and my mother and I kind of come up with some kind of a fake, I don’t know, a kind of a pragmatic ending to the story. And they all clap and they leave and this time they leave for good.
But this question of »What do we do now?« I think that this is the question that hits, for sure, the Israeli society, I would say the entire region, maybe the world. This idea that you live in a reality, that this reality doesn’t have the arc of a story. When you when you see a movie, you say, »Oh I hope that you get the job. I hope that the girl would leave him. I hope that he stops drinking.« You have those kinds of expectations, you go along with them and you say, this is good, this is bad. But the reality in Israel since the 7th of October is pretty much like your Instagram feed. It’s like, »Oh here’s a cute kitty, I want to pet him. Oh, here are pagers exploding, how did they do that? Oh, they’ve killed and kidnapped people, it’s horrible.« But all those serious or very emotional clips, they don’t come up to a story. And what’s even more horrible, you don’t feel that you are part of them.
It’s really like, let’s say when I see Instagram and then I see a monkey petting a cat, I say, »ooh, it’s cute«? And then I see somebody drowning in China, it’s horrible. And then I see a rapper says, »Kill the police!« And I say: »Ah, society is conflicted,« And I’m not in any of those movies. But they make my reality when I watch Instagram. And that’s the feeling. The feeling is that you are not a player. You’re not even a fan. You don’t have any expectations. Whenever something happens in your reality, you don’t even try to process it if it’s in your favor or not in your favor. It’s really like, everything that happens is because Israel is engaging in two wars. One of them a public war, against Iran, against Hezbollah, and the other, the more important and crucial war, the war of keeping the Israeli society a democratic and liberal place.
And the idea is that many things that happen in this war, in Gaza, they’re basically affected by the fact that Netanyahu wants to keep his regime. And many things that happen inside Israel have a lot to do with the fact that we are in an exterior conflict. And I feel that the attempt of Netanyahu is to tie those two things together. To make it impossible to untie them. Very much like the Hamas use of civilians, then this is really the attempt, like if you put your forces under a hospital, then, you know, then they’ll be safe. And I think that the same way that the Hamas use this kind of human shield protection, Netanyahu’s doing the same with the kidnaped people, with this idea that behind those people who sacrifice themselves, I can keep on doing what I’m doing.
No bad periods and good periods
And I must say that, after the Iranian attack, I had a call from a journalist from Corriere della Sera, and he asked me a question and he knows me, I gave him interviews in the past and in the end of the interview he said: »Etgar, I just want to say to you, that all the things that you say sound crazy and don’t make a lot of sense.« And basically, I said: »Why?« He said: »Because there were 2000 missiles shot at you when you were caught in a house with no bomb shelter, and you say to me, I’m not afraid of Iran. I’m okay. We’ll deal with Iran. Just get Netanyahu out of the way.« I know the Jewish history, the two temples that got burned, the two exiles were not because of an exterior force, there were because fundamentalist Jews got into a fight, into something that turned into close to a civil war and basically ended this twice.
And in both cases, it took less than 100 years. Since I was a child, since the 70s wars, I remember wars all the time, they’re horrible, people that die, but you endure. But how can you endure the situation in which your society starts to become less and less recognizable, in which democratic values, in which human values are being challenged constantly.
So I go back to the story that I told the people of »What to do now« because I think that since the war started, I find myself more and more thinking about what my parents had taught me. Because I remember on the 7th of October by the way, the first thing that I thought was that when I was a child, I asked my father, in the naivety of a child, I was really six years old, I asked my father if the Holocaust was the worst period in his life. It’s not a very tactful question.
And my father, who always took any questions that I would ask him very seriously, he thought for a moment and he said: »Look, the way that I see it, you don’t have bad periods and good periods. You only have difficult periods and the easy periods.« And then he got quiet for a moment and he said, »I must say that all my life I tried to avoid the difficult periods, but that in hindsight, these were the times where I learned the most about myself.« And since the 7th of October, I keep repeating, all those kinds of thoughts that seem to be fitting for the situation and they also demand something from you, call for action.
»I don’t work in the Holocaust«
And the stories that I told the elderly people in the kibbutz was that when I was, I think eight years old, my mother took me to a pediatrician, right? A child’s doctor is a pediatrician? My English is … Okay. So, it’s a pediatrician. I remember her name. It was Dr. Bokokowski, which is a name I would never forget. And in the waiting room, there were only two chairs, and in the chairs were sitting a woman about the age of my mother, I think my mother was in her 40s, and a child that was maybe two years older than me. And they were sitting and I come from a small town, not a small town, but a town called Ramat Gan. And it’s a town where most of the people are from Iraqi descent. So, if you were a Holocaust survivor, you were a bit of a celebrity, because there were not many European Jews, and there were not many Holocaust survivors. And the woman that we didn’t know recognized my mother as a Holocaust survivor, so she elbowed her son and said: »Get up, get up! Give her a seat, she’s a Holocaust survivor!«
And of course, we both my mother and me, we heard it. And the kid said: »Please, ma’am, you can have my seat.« And my mother said to him: »Wow, you’re such a polite, nice child. Could you please explain to me why are you giving me your seat?« Because she wasn’t an elderly person or an old person. And he said: »I’m giving it to you because you’re a Holocaust survivor.« And then my mother said: »And what do you think it means the fact that I’m a Holocaust survivor?« So, the kid said, »It means that you suffered and were tortured and you lost people that were close to you and were humiliated constantly, and the least that I can do is to give you my seat.« So, my mom said: »You’re such a smart and polite child. But may I offer you another explanation to what it means that I am a Holocaust survivor?« And the child said: »Sure.« And my mother said: »I think that what it means is that if me, you and your mother would stand here in the waiting room with no food and no drinks for days, you two are probably going to collapse long before me. So, I suggest that you keep your seat.«
And I think that it was this moment when I saw my mother saying that, that I, not consciously, that I became a writer. Because it was this idea of a person that was being pushed into a slot, was supposed to play a role in exterior life, a reductive role that all the world, not all the world but the entire country wanted her to play. It’s like, I remember that every year in our town they would come and ask my mother to take part in a memorial, a service for the Holocaust. And my mother would always say the same thing: »I’m sorry, I’m afraid that there is some kind of mistake. I’ve been through the Holocaust. I don’t work in the Holocaust.«
And this idea that basically the Holocaust was this mosaic, and my mom was supposed to be a pebble in it, it was something that she just did not accept. She didn’t do anything in her life by the rules of what society expects, had expected from her. For example, we would listen to Wagner in our home and when the neighbors would come, at the time it was a big thing, then the neighbors would say to my mother: »You know, that the Nazis loved Wagner?« And my mother said: »Yeah. And Nazis also liked Apfelstrudel. You want me not to eat Apfelstrudel?« They say: »Yeah, but you know, Wagner himself, he was an anti-Semite.« And my mother said: »Oh, I know. And if he was in this living room, I would have poisoned him. But I think he’s a great composer, don’t you think? I like this part…«
So, this idea of kind of owning your story, being able to hold on to that story and making the story your own, not letting people push you into their story, I think that is something that is crucial for me these days. Because we live in a world in which most of our actions are activist actions, basically, not ones that we initiate. We all put the Ukrainian flag on our Facebook page, it’s not as if like, it’s not our idea. And frankly, I don’t know how much it helps the Ukrainian people. I believe that, they would trade your Facebook page for a blanket. But I’m saying, they won’t even get offended when after two months you change this to a picture of you doing barbecue, while they’re still being bombed. It’s okay. But the idea is, that the act of activism became something that is totally, the way that I see it, totally kind of a narcissistic and many times passive. It’s all about following and following and following.
»All of them now!«
And the one thing that my mom told me … My mom told me: »In good times, do whatever people offer you.« She would call it »hitchhiking«. Every car you get into will get somewhere to… Woodstock, you’ll meet girls, you smoke pot. Things would be okay.« And she said: »In bad times, you can’t hitchhike. You have to walk. Because, she said, I tell you, I’ve been in the ghetto, whenever people would say, »Run there! Run there!«, this would be where they would kill people. So, in these times, she said, you have to dig in the mud and break root. You have to deal with this reality, not as if it’s something that you’re on a field day and your teacher is calling you out because you’re too slow. But to practically sit down and ask yourself »What bothers me? What do I want to do? What is the specific action that I want to take, you know?«
And in this sense, I feel that, me too, I feel that a lot of the things that I do, do not stand this test, it’s really, I tell my wife, I go to the demonstrations of the kidnaped, with the kidnaped families and the reasons that I give to myself, is that, they said, the kidnaped people when they got released, they said, that they sometimes saw the frame on the TV, on a photo, of people, demonstrating for them and it gave them strength. So, the story I tell myself is that I’m doing it for them.
But I said to my wife all this time when I stand every week in the square and I shout in Hebrew »Et kulam akhschav« (את כולם עכשיו), »All of them now!« Then I say to her, Who am I shouting it to? Am I shouting it to Sinwar who wasn’t dead at the time, and hoping that he listened and say, »Oh no, listen, Nasser, we have to free them! Go go go, quickly, we have to free them now, Etgar said so!«. Or maybe Netanyahu says, »Oh my God, Sara, I never thought about it. We should free them now!« Or maybe Biden, because he doesn’t want to free them. Or maybe … Who the hell am I saying it to? I said to her, you know, it’s really like now it became the amen of the liberals, we don’t have amen in our synagogue, which is a world in which people waterboard you and beat you up. But we found our own amen. We say »now« and we think that »now« means something. And I’m saying that, I think that the moral and the responsible process that everyone who wants to change this reality should take, is really the ability not to do things as intense as they could, as powerfully as they could, do the things that are most trendy, right and good. Talk back, do give, do share, but basically try to think about all those things ab ovo, from the egg, to do something that they can do, to do something that they feel that would help.
Each deal with his own
And I know, I’ll be short because I want to hear the concert too, but I just want to end with this thing that happened to me in the beginning of the war.
I think it was a few weeks after the war. I have an Instagram account, as I said, I like to watch cats being petted by monkeys, and I suddenly got a message from a person, I didn’t know her, I didn’t even know where she was, and basically she wrote to me something very angry, saying that she used to read my books, but now that she discovered that I was a bloodthirsty, murderous, racist psychopath, then she will not read my books anymore. And I told my wife, I said: »Oh, I have to write to this woman.« And she said to me: »You don’t understand, you’re an old guy, it’s social media, people write stuff, but you ignore them and it goes away. You’re not held accountable. It’s really, really okay.« But I said: »No, no, no, but this woman …«
And then I wrote to her back and said to her: »Listen, I know that you said you don’t want to read my stories again, but if you ever change your mind and you would feel like reading them, please don’t! Because I spoke to my stories and they don’t want you as a reader. They’re really, really, they’re very ambiguous and obscure and you’re very simplistic and radical and aggressive and violent people, so in behalf of my stories, I ask you, please, for my sake, don’t read them again.«
And then she wrote back and she says: »Me violent? Me aggressive? Why?« And we start exchanging messages. And I apparently understand that she’s from Mexico, she didn’t even know about Palestine up to this conflict, she wasn’t aware, she’s not political. But somehow, she saw in CNN children dying in Gaza.
And she started following it also on social media, and she’s been seeing it a lot, and apparently, she’s crying all the time and she’s depressed and her husband is very angry with her. And she feels totally powerless against this reality because she sees those children dying, and it’s not like in the old time where a sailor would tell us that it’s on the other ocean. It’s on her feed. She sees more and more, there are family, she reads about them, and she’s totally powerless against it. And she said: »I was thinking, I was thinking, what can I do? What can I do?« And she said: »I don’t know any Palestinians and I don’t know any Israelis. And I remember that I read your books, and on the back cover it was written that you’re Israeli. So, I said, Now I know what I can do. Now, I can do something for the Palestinian people.«
And we kept on talking, and in the end, I said to her: »Listen, I tell you what. I’m older than you. It’s very, very difficult to change and to help. And it’s even more difficult when you’re in another continent and you don’t know anybody in the region. You took on yourself a job that it’s too big for you. Now, I said to her, Mexico is a country that I visited a huge number of times, and if I remember correctly, I always saw hungry people there. So, I said to her, we do a deal. Every time that you feel sad and powerless, you go and feed a hungry man in the street. And in return, I promise you I’d do whatever I can to end this conflict. And I live closer than you. And I know people. I’m not promising I’m gonna do it, but let’s deal each with his own, and I said to her, and in three months we write to each other again.«
Now I’m a shifty Jew, you know, what can I do? At the time, I said, no way that in three months this war will continue. And as three months have passed, I find myself kind of thinking I need to write to this woman, but I can’t, what can I write to her? What can I write her more? More failure? More bitter stuff? And she was kind enough not to write to me again.
No change without action
But just to end it, so I’m saying, do what my mother tells you. She’s always right. She was always right. And basically, I’m saying, we see such a huge amount of horror and such horrible thing that it’s really, your body has to do something. But when you want to do this something, think about this thing yourself. Don’t just go on the Internet looking for something that you can do. No change ever came from following. No change ever came from passivity. No change ever came from people practically not getting up from the table and writing stuff, which is either true or untrue.
So, we need you and we need you to do whatever you can, but we need you to do whatever you feel you can. We don’t need you as firewood to light a fire. We need you as thinkers and people who are reflexive and moral and people who can differentiate between a simplistic narrative and a more complex one. And every person who can bring any ambiguity into the dialogue, any hesitation, is really, really needed. Because right now it’s mostly controlled by people who are totally convinced.
So, I wanted to read something in the end, if it’s okay, or they’re gonna kill me? Okay. So. Talking about my mother telling her story as a Holocaust survivor, then the first time, like it was basically a week after the 7th of October, I remember that we went to meet the first community of survivors, and everybody there was really, really shocked. And I met a young girl … The one thing about kibbutz, I don’t know how well you know kibbutzes, but it’s really like, the kibbutz’ thing to do is, let’s say if I’d be here with Daniel, and he’d be wearing a wig, then I would say, »Oh Daniel is bald, come on, Daniel, do this thing with the wig!« Because this is the kibbutz thing to do, to talk about people, about intimate stuff that has nothing to do with it. It’s part of its horror and charm.
So, when I come there, this mother calls me and she says: »Hey, hey, hey, come here, come here.« And she introduces me to her daughter. Her daughter is 14, 15 years old. And she says: »I want to tell you a funny story from the 7th of October of something that happened when we were locked in the room for 32 hours. It’s really funny story.« She was like pointing at the girl. And as she starts talking, her daughter says »Please, sorry, I don’t want you to tell this story, I’m sorry, it embarrasses me.« And her mother says: »Why? It’s so funny! I’ll tell it.« And she says: »No, no, please don’t!« »I tell it, it’s okay, it’s okay.« and then basically, she said: »When the Nukhba entered our home and we heard them shooting in our home and talking in Arabic, she said, she held my hand and she whispered in my ear, ‘There are so many books that I haven’t read yet. I don’t want to die stupid’. Isn’t it funny?«
A printed WhatsApp message
And I found myself speaking with this girl, and it was something that really was magical, but also, listen to her, her father was murdered in the kibbutz while she was in the room. And when they walked us back to our car, there was this voluntary woman, it was obvious that she wasn’t from the kibbutz and she was holding a baby, and my wife always tells me, I don’t know, maybe Eva you can be witness, that she tells me: »You’re always so driven that when people help you, you never ask them, ›What’s your name‹, ›Where you came from?‹ ›Who are you?‹ You know, you just say, ›Get me two chairs!‹ ›Is the microphone working?‹
So, she said, ›You have to chill. You know, those people, you have to acknowledge them.‹ And I said, okay. And when we went to the car, I said, okay, it’s too late to ask the woman what’s her name, she’s been with us for three hours, but she was holding the baby and the baby was asleep for the entire time. And I said to her: »Hey, this baby, it’s amazing, our kid would cry all the time. What’s her name?« And I see her looking at her arm as if, like, she didn’t even know she had the baby there and looking up at me and she says: »I don’t know.« And I said to her: »What do you mean you don’t know?« And she said to me: »You know, I came to volunteer, I came to help, and there was this woman and she was breastfeeding, and they came and they told her that her husband was murdered and she fainted, and somebody caught the baby when she fell and they gave me the baby, and then you came and I forgot I have to bring it back.«
And I remember that I went to the car and I was going back, and the girl, the one that didn’t want to die stupid sent me a text and I wanted to send her a text and everything was in my mind, and then I remembered my mother telling her story and I said to myself, you need to write what you feel now, you know. And I read it, I wrote this and I sent it to the girl, and she told me that she read it in her father’s funeral. And this short text, basically it’s a WhatsApp message, okay, I’ve printed it so it will look more impressive.
It’s called »Signs of Life«:
Now close your eyes and try to stop being angry. Try to stop raging at all those who deserve your righteous fury. Close your eyes and allow yourself, just for a moment, to simply feel the pain. To hesitate. To be confused. To feel sorrow. Remorse. You still have your own life to spend persecuting, avenging, reckoning. But for now, just close your eyes and look inward, like a satellite hovering over a disaster zone, searching for signs of life. A lot has been taken away from you – but you’re still a human being. Wounded, bloodied, angry, hurting, frightened, drowning in sorrow, but still: human. Take a deep breath and try to remember the feeling. Because you know that a minute from now, when you open your eyes again, it will be gone.
Thank you.
Slightly edited transcript of the unscripted speech given by Etgar Keret on Saturday, 2 November 2024 at the PEN Berlin Congress at Fabrik Altona in Hamburg
* Etgar Keret, born in Ramat Gan in 1967, is a writer, screenwriter and film director. His books have been translated into 37 languages. In 2006, he published the volume ‘All of Gaza: Shared Stories’ with the Palestinian author Samir El Youssef. In 2007, he and his wife were awarded the Caméra d’Or for Jellyfish. In 2019, he received the National Jewish Book Award. His most recent work to appear in German is the novella collection Tu’s nicht (Aufbau, 2020).
[Introduction into the work of Etgar Keret by Daniel-Dylan Böhmer as text and as audio (in German)]
[Overview of all speeches and panels at the congress, in English/German]