Etgar Keret On Time Travel, TV, and Writing About His Father

In part one of their conversation, Etgar Keret and Paul Holdengraber discuss real estate, time travel, and the pleasures of artistic collaboration.

Etgar Keret on his next project…
I’m working with my wife on a TV series for the French channel ARTE. It’s basically a series about a real estate agent who can travel in time. And it’s a drama. It’s very much based on my personal life. When I lost my father, he left my mother some real estate, you know, a building. Apparently, this building was falling down, with a bunch of problems, and I didn’t have the qualifications to deal with them. But being thrown into them, I suddenly met all kinds of people who were trying to cheat me or to trick me, but at the same time they had known my father from a totally different angle. So this kind of connection between cutthroat real estate business and really heart-warming nostalgia made me want to write this story about this real estate agent who can travel in time. And by moving in time he can also deal with his unsolved past.

Etgar Keret on buildings and memory…
Whenever you go to a building that carries some kind of personal history for you, and you see through the years, the building changes. There’s something that stays with you. I remember the first time I went to Poland, my mother gave me the address of the house where she was born. There was a bank there, and I was walking through the bank trying to imagine my grandmother in labor with my mother, and I couldn’t. And I went back that night, and had this dream: I was at the same bank, and my mother was being born there, and I’m seeing it through the cashier’s glass, you know, the wrong side, and I see my mother in labor and of course nothing made sense…

Etgar Keret on why he can’t just stick to fiction…
To write fiction is the thing which is more natural for me. But at the same time it’s very lonely and what I really like about writing for film or TV is that it’s a collaborative act, working with these people, and you try to imagine with them… I couldn’t see myself for my entire life sitting in a room and just writing and publishing and writing and publishing. I need to interact with people and experiment with things I haven’t done before.

Etgar Keret on why he wrote his memoir…
When my father was diagnosed as terminally ill, I started writing [The Seven Good Years]. My father’s greatest dream during WWII was to survive it and have a family and have children. So for us—for me and my siblings—we always had this feeling when he looked at us that he was already happy. We could be bank robbers, we could be bums. But he had made it, he had made his family, he played the role of father, he did what he dreamed of doing. So writing this book was a kind of literary tombstone….This book was to say, look what an amazing guy, my dad.