The Seven Good Years

by Etgar Keret

In the Middle East, people feel their mortality more than anywhere else on the planet, which causes most of the population to develop aggressive tendencies toward strangers who try to waste the little time they have left on earth.

“Even worse,” I said. “I dreamed we were making peace with them.”

“Don’t worry, honey. We’re both survivors. We’ve already survived quite a bit together—illnesses, wars, terrorist attacks, and, if peace is what fate has in store, we’ll survive it, too.”

Angry Birds is actually a game that is consistent with the spirit of religious fundamentalist terrorists.

dollar-green capitalist pigs. By the way, I’m not saying that this is necessarily bad. I guess launching square-headed birds into stone walls is as close as I’ll ever get to a suicide mission in this incarnation. So, this might be a fun, controlled way of learning that not only birds or terrorists get angry, but so do I, and all I need is the right and relatively harmless context in which to recognize that anger and let it run wild for a while. A few days after that odd conversation with my mother, she and my father appeared

“So, when you were a kid,” Lev asks, “every time you wanted to cry, you sang instead?” “No,” I admit reluctantly, “I don’t know how to sing. So most of the time when I felt the tears coming, I hit someone instead.” “That’s weird,” Lev says in a contemplative voice, “I usually hit someone when I’m happy.” This

promised that he would not die before he returned to the ways of the Torah. It wasn’t clear at the time if that was a blessing or a threat, but the words were spoken with such conviction

a slice of bread and jam that is sweet with generosity and sour with memories.

things like that were as transparent as those glass doors at the bank my wife keeps crashing into, while the rest of the human race is totally insensitive to the status of other people’s bladders.

it’s like a subpoena—the minute the envelope touches your hand, you know you have to show up. That’s the thing about wedding invitations—the less you know the person inviting you, the more obligated you feel to go.

seven is the age when it’s not considered cool to talk about fear, so the word nervous is used instead.