Mid-east Writers Reach Across the Divide

by Richard Allen Greene

The book, Gaza Blues, is a collaboration between Samir el-Youssef, a

Palestinian, and Israel's Etgar Keret.

El-Youssef came up with the idea just over two years ago, during some of

the worst violence of the current Palestinian Intifada. He called Keret,

who said he liked the idea immediately.

"I wanted to do something, but 'something' is usually to sign a petition

that you have already signed 500 times before. We wanted to make our own

country, in a book if not on land," Keret told BBC News Online.

The result is a disconcerting blend of razor-sharp short stories from Keret

- one of Israel's best-selling writers - and a meandering novella by

el-Youssef, a writer and literary critic living in London. Perhaps most

startling, given the nature of the project, is that their work is not

overtly political.

Rejecting identity politics

That is exactly the quality that drew the Palestinian writer to the Israeli.

"This collaboration would not have worked with any other Israeli writer.

Etgar's stories are not about asserting identity," el-Youssef said. "His

characters know who they are - they are just there."

The Palestinian writer says the aimless protagonist of his novella, The Day

the Beast Got Thirsty, is the same way.

"My narrator does not want to act out his life according to the fact that

he is a Palestinian - so what that he is?" el-Youssef said. Keret echoed

the sentiment.

"If there is some kind of initiation process for society, my characters

failed it," he said.

Fierce humour

His stories are sometimes free-wheeling to the point of absurdity, at other

times painfully simple and direct. Some deal glancingly with the

Israel-Palestinian conflict: Surprise Egg traces the unexpected aftermath

of a suicide bombing, while Vacuum Seal unpicks a tactic for surviving army

duty.

Others look at broader questions affecting Israel and Jews, such as Shoes,

which undercuts the role of the Holocaust in determining contemporary

Israeli identity.

And many are shockingly violent - but always a knife in the ribs, never a

club over the head.

Keret retains a fierce sense of humour that manages to leave the reader

with a twisted smile, even in response to a story like My Brother's

Depressed, where a dog mauls a child.

Michael Handelzalts, the books editor of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz,

praised Keret as one of Israel's major young writers.

"He's looking at reality as something personal - he has a very different,

absurdist point of view," Handelzalts said.

Unpopular truths

El-Youssef's novella, by contrast, is a realistic meander through several

weeks in the life of a Palestinian drug user living in a refugee camp in

Lebanon in the 1980s. It has so far been published only in English, and the

author doubts it would be well received in contemporary Palestinian society.

"You don't write about taking drugs, you don't talk about it, you don't do

it - but of course everyone is doing it," he said.

Despite the difference in style between the two writers, they share a

sympathy for anti-heroes. El-Youssef's protagonist Bassem hatches plans

that come to nothing - even when a friend's life is at stake - and shows

little enthusiasm for politics.

In a conversation with Keret, he emphasised that his story was fiction, but

then the Israeli cut him off.

"It is a mirror of my society," Keret said, drawing a laugh from el-Youssef.

"There are many things that are the same - politics degenerating into

clich