Many Israeli writers are still in a state of shock and unable to process Oct. 7
JERUSALEM — After Israel’s war with Hamas erupted, Etgar Keret, who writes surrealist short stories, had an idea for a plot: Aliens from another universe come to Earth looking for a power source. They find it in human suffering. Lights on the alien planet shine bright when Hamas attacks Israel. A huge glow appears again during Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza.
The narrative is at once evocative and fantastical — a nation inured to decades of conflict and bloodshed experiences a pain so deep it becomes a power all its own.
In a post for Substack, Keret, the son of Holocaust survivors and one of Israel’s most admired writers, suggested early in the war the enormity he and other writers were facing: “Since October 7, I haven’t really been able to write. For me, writing is a state in which you briefly release the suffocating grip of rationality and let your guts speak, but ever since this war broke out, my guts aren’t saying anything.
“It’s not that I don’t ,” he said. “I feel too much, all the time. But the things I’m feeling
