Fifth Issue, Winter 2018
Publish Date: March 2018
Series Editor: Yigal Schwartz
Guest Editor: Dekel Shay Schory
Editorial Board: Eitan Bar-Yosef, Hanna Soker-Schwager,
Anat Weisman
Editorial Assistant: Yaara Keren
This issue is based on the conference
Keret's Happy Campers:
Etgar Keret and the Fate of Israeli Culture in the World Today, which was held at the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago in 2015. The conference was initiated and organized by
Prof. Na'ama Rokem from the University of Chicago and
Prof. Yigal Schwartz, Director of Heksherim: The Research Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
In the opening article,
Christopher Merrill shares his thoughts regarding Keret's prose in light of his personal and literary acquaintance with the author.
Yigal Schwartz, from a panoramic perspective, discusses two main poetic and philosophical moves that characterize Keret's entire artistic oeuvre: “mechanical reproduction" and the “random" deviation from it.
Three of the articles offer a broad perspective on Keret's work.
Takafumi Akimoto compares the way Etgar Keret's work is read in Japan with the way Haruki Murakami is read outside of it, and from that perspective offers thoughts regarding world literature, translation, and literature studies. Keret's humor is the focus of Roman Katsman's article, in which he analyzes Keret's humor and argues that the “explosion of the banal" is at its core.
Adia Mendelson-Maoz discusses Keret's image of Jewish masculinity and particularly his shaping of the figure of the living dead, with which he confronts both Diaspora and Zionist myths.
Nurit Buchweitz reads
The Seven Good Years, demonstrating how it can be read as a memoir that centers on the birth of a writer, as a self-reflexive work in which the author addresses his own writing in behind-the-scenes episodes, and as a script that provides a key to understanding Keret's poetics. Finally, Michal Peles Almagor and Dekel Shay Schory offer two very different interpretations of the same story, “Lieland," demonstrating the depth and complexity of Keret's work.
