The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret Read Free Book Online

“Daddy,” he asked, “why are you and Mommy fighting?”
    â€œWe are not really fighting.” I tried to come up with something. “This isn’t a real fight, it is just a drill.”
    Since that conversation with Orit, none of the mothers in the park have spoken to me again about Lev’s military service. But I still can’t get that image of him in uniform, armed with a rifle, out of my mind. Just yesterday, in the sandbox, I saw him push Orit’s peacenik son Ron, and later, on the way home, he chased a cat with a stick. “Start saving, Daddy,” I tell myself. “Start saving for a defense attorney. You’re not raising just a soldier here, but a potential war criminal.” I’d be happy to share those thoughts with my wife, but after we barely survived that last clash, I don’t want to start a new one.
    We managed to end our argument with an agreement of sorts. First, I suggested what sounded like a fair settlement: when the kid is eighteen, we’ll let him decide for himself. But my wife rejected that out of hand, claiming he would never be able to make a really free choice with all the social pressure around him. In the end, out of exhaustion, and in the absence of any other solution, we decided to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fifteen years working toward family and regional peace.

Swede Dreams
    M y visit last week to the Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden got off to a stressful start. Several weeks before I arrived in that peaceful city, which boasts northern Europe’s largest amusement park, a local tabloid published a story accusing Israel of harvesting organs from Palestinians killed by the IDF. The story managed to make an impressive quantum leap in logic by linking an unproven accusation against the Israeli army for something it had allegedly done in the early 1990s to a New Jersey rabbi accused of trafficking in human organs in 2009, as if the gap of more than a decade and thousands of miles were merely a trivial detail. The only thing missing in the article was a recipe for matzos made with the blood of Christian children.
    The absurd report received a no less absurd response from the Israeli government, which demanded that the Swedish prime minister apologize for the story. The Swedes refused, of course, claiming freedom of the press, even if in this specific case, the press was not of particularly high quality. And Israel responded immediately with the unconventional weapon it keeps hidden away for conflicts of just such magnitude: a consumer boycott of IKEA. In the midst of this hyperventilated political storm, yours truly found himself spending Rosh Hashanah with an audience of polite Swedish readers who generously thanked him for his stories but also kept an eye open while he autographed their books to make sure he didn’t take advantage of the moment to snatch a kidney or two.
    But my real Swedish drama began when I realized there was a danger that I might not get back to Israel before Yom Kippur. Over the past few years, I’ve spent quite a few holidays outside of Israel, and despite the self-pitying, whiny face I always present to people around me, I have to admit I’ve often felt somewhat relieved to spend an Independence Day without an aerial demonstration of air force planes right over my head, or a Shavuot eve minus aunts and uncles who are insulted because I’ve refused their invitations to a holiday dinner. But I always did everything I could to be in Israel on Yom Kippur. All these years, all my life.
    The night after the problem of my flight back was solved—with the help of my host’s savvy travel agent—I invited everyone to celebrate our success at a local Swedish restaurant called, for some reason, Cracow, which is famous, of course, for its huge selection of Czech beers. “Now that it’s all been worked out, maybe you can explain to us what the