Free Republic

This essay was first published in Etgar Keret’s Substack newsletter Alphabet Soup, which you can subscribe to here. Jessica Cohen translated it from Hebrew.One evening, exactly 38 years ago, a few weeks before my 18th birthday and four months before my conscription to the Israeli army, I sat on the beach with my two best friends, Uzi and Oren, trying to come up with a good song for our funerals. All three of us had medical issues that meant we wouldn’t be sent to combat or have to risk our lives. But still, we felt that the happier phase of...