A few days ago, a woman I didn’t know messaged me on Instagram to inform me that she was not going to read my books anymore because I’m a coward who is not stopping the genocide in Gaza. I replied that my stories had never been a great match for violent and capricious people, and so I’d like to ask her – on their behalf – never to read them again. As my wife pointed out, this wasn’t a very nice thing to say. She explained that the acceptable 21^st century response to threatening messages is to ignore them. Nevertheless, I continued a dialogue with the woman, who lives in Mexico and turns out to be a very humane, compassionate person. She told me she was spending hours in front of the TV, watching the shocking scenes of dead babies and displaced families in Gaza, and felt she couldn’t do anything to help. This was so upsetting that eventually she could no longer tolerate it, and she decided she had to do something. So she wrote to me – the one Israeli she knew, if only through my books – threatening a boycott and calling me names in an attempt to try and stop the suffering in the Middle East. Her message did about as much to help the Gazans as that little Ukrainian flag on everyone’s profile picture did to help the Ukrainians, but just like all those Facebook users, she felt slightly less helpless.

Deep in his heart, Yechiel-Nachman had made peace with his prayers going unanswered. Because prayer was the pure yearning for compassion and justice, whereas life was life: cruel, dispiriting, insulting. It was therefore only natural that two such contrasting worlds could never converge. But on October 7, 2023 – the 22nd day of Tishrei in the year 5784 – something in Yechiel-Nachman broke.

Photograph: Bumble Dee/Alamy

If Kafka Were Israeli and Wrote About Talking Goldfish

— The New York Times.

Written by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen for “Short Stories on Human Rights“ (2008).