And, no, you're not allowed to laugh with us. As Jewish gallows humour expresses an emotional rupture in the ethnic psyche, Israeli laughter emerges as the hysterical cackle of a society set against a world that witnessed one Holocaust and seems complacent about the possibility of a second.

"What is dominant for my characters . . .and this is very Jewish . . . is that they are scared, " says Keret. "It's a kind of metamorphosis of that ancient pogrom everybody dreads." This fear, as Keret's tightly compressed, slightly surreal stories remind us, has consequences . . .not least for the Palestinians locked in a mortal struggle with the Israelis in a divided land, but also for a Jekyll and Hyde Jewish conscience that is fighting a war on one front and watering suburban lawns on another.

Keret didn't fulfill his military service in the West Bank or Gaza . . . his lack of soldierly discipline found him manning a radio outpost where he first began writing fiction . . . but his stories see evidence of the occupation transferred to every facet of Israeli society: in the teenage bully who torments a rival over the affections of a girl, in the insecure son who beats an obstinate tenant over a debt owed to his father, in the exhausted man who drowns himself by gluing his head to the bottom of a bathtub and turning on the taps.

"This dichotomy that on the one hand you have this political-military state and on the other you have your life is a completely wrong perception of things, " Keret explains. "Few people see their friends being killed and then go back to living a peaceful, remote, western life. It just doesn't work. They carry something of this aggressive reality in them."

Despite his commitment to living in Israel, Keret says he feels more connected to golden-age-of-Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer than Israeli authors . . . a position that infamously landed him in hot water with godfather of letters AB Yehoshua, who criticised Keret for a lack of political commitment. The judgment must have surprised the Israeli religious right whose representatives lambasted Keret in the Knesset in a debate over the school literature curriculum, a story about a boy who wears Adidas (ie German) runners on Holocaust Memorial Day taking things a step too far for their political tastes.

These divisions . . . political, psychological, personal . . . everywhere mark Keret's fiction. They mark his life, too. A child of Holocaust survivors, Keret and his siblings, he says, have tried to transcend materialistic life. His brother turned to leftwing political activism, his sister to the ultra-orthodox Breslov sect of Hasidic Judaism; all three symbolising the faultlines of Israeli life. Keret is writing in the fissures.

"I don't write to show a different world, but the world as I experience it, " he says.