Where Israel's Stories are Born

A man who wants to disappear from this world starts making huge pipes at the pipe factory where he works, making them longer and longer, and finally crawling inside to reach the other side. It is a heaven where "people who have never really come to terms with life" reach. This is "The Pipe" by Etgar Keret, one of Israel's prominent writers.

I like the episode where Keret makes his real brother read this short story he wrote for the first time. His brother reads this story printed on a piece of paper while walking the dog, exlaims, "This novel is amazing", and then scoops his dog's feces with that paper and throws it in the trash can. Instead of being offended by it, Keret said it was the moment he felt that the paper serve as a conduit of emotion from his heart to his brother's, and that was the moment he knew he wanted to be a writer.

Keret is a writer living in Tel Aviv. A few years ago, as I was walking down the streets of Tel Aviv, a pigeon feces suddenly fell from the sky and covered my head in it. When I stood there stunned, a young Asian woman across the street called me and said, "Wait there for a minute." There was an elderly man in a wheelchair next to her and I immediately recognized her as a Filipino caregiver working in Israel. She came back with a baby wet wipe in her hand and carefully wiped my head as she told me her personal story, and when she finished wiping, she gave me the entire extra wet wipe.

In Kellett-esque fashion, the wet wipes were a conduit to her heart to me, though I didn't write the story. An Israeli woman watching the scene from a bench kept saying to me, "Mazal, mazal (this is also fate)," and I felt at ease, thinking, "Well, if it's fate, it can't be helped, and I felt I understood why Keret's work was born from this place.