Though he's a bestselling author in his native Israel, Etgar Keret is hardly a household name among American readers. The publication of THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS, a memoir in essays, should help change that. The 36 pieces that comprise this pleasing book reveal a writer with a keen eye for life's oddities and an ability to share his insights with humor and frank emotion.

The "seven good years" of the title are bookended by the birth of Keret's son, Lev, in a hospital simultaneously treating the victims of a terrorist attack, and the death of the author's father. As reflected in the story of Lev's birth, Keret is able to shift his focus effortlessly from the intimate details of family life to the wider world. All of the pieces range between three and six pages, but there's nothing monotonous about them, and their brevity permits no wasted words. "My wife says that I'm too nice, while I claim that she's just a very, very bad person" is the opening sentence of "Fare and Good," an essay describing their passionate debate over his practice of inviting cab drivers who need to use the bathroom up to their Tel Aviv apartment. "There's nothing like a few days in eastern Europe to bring out the Jew in you," Keret, the son of Holocaust survivors, writes in introducing his encounter with anti-Semitism in Germany and Hungary.

"The 36 pieces that comprise this pleasing book reveal a writer with a keen eye for life's oddities and an ability to share his insights with humor and frank emotion."

Keret possesses the timing of a veteran standup comic, a skill essential to humor writing, which lacks the elements of voice or gesture the comedian can bring to bear on the stage. He's at his best in self-deprecating pieces like "Poser," where he describes how his rejection from a beginners yoga class led to his enrollment in a "special" group made up of "a bunch of women in advanced stages of pregnancy." "About three months after I joined the class," he writes, "all the members had given birth except me." He explains, in "Call and Response," how his "poor Grandma strategy," which "invokes a woman for whom I've arranged dozens of virtual burials in order to get out of futile conversations," morphs into his own fake death to avoid persistent calls from the satellite TV company.

One needn't be Jewish or even familiar with life in Israel to appreciate Keret's default point of view --- that of a "stressed-out Jew who considers his momentary survival to be exceptional and not the least bit trivial" --- but anyone who is will find his writing especially appealing. His tone of absurdist realism aptly reflects life in a country whose existence often seems improbable and whose survival frequently has been imperiled.

Only in Israel could Keret be drawn into a playground debate about whether he and his wife, Shira, will allow then-three-year-old Lev to perform his compulsory military service upon reaching age 18. That discussion sparks an argument that concludes with their decision "to compromise on the only principle we both truly agreed on: to spend the next fifteen years working toward family and regional peace." His decision to grow a mustache at Lev's insistence leads him to share an implausible (everywhere except Israel) story, told by his acupuncturist, that begins by describing the role of a fake mustache in an undercover military mission. "Reality here is confusing enough as it is," he then confesses, in explaining his decision to remove his facial hair. Like many Israeli Jews, Keret is not religious ("Me, when it comes to religion, I have no G-d"), but his sister lives, with her 11 children, in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem's most Orthodox neighborhood. In "My Lamented Sister," Keret expresses his dismay over her religious choice in the refrain, "Nineteen years ago, in a small wedding hall in Bnei Brak, my older sister died." By the end of the essay, he tells a gentle story that reveals how they've reached at least a tentative reconciliation.

That essay demonstrates Keret's deftness in pivoting away from humor with no lessening in the quality of his work. "Shiva" recounts an incident that occurs while he observes the seven-day mourning period after his father's death. An ultra-Orthodox relative tells Keret a story about his nonreligious father's act of devotion that has an almost Talmudic quality. In "Jam," he describes the construction of the Keret House, a roughly four-foot-wide installation in Warsaw near the place where his mother's family lived in the Jewish ghetto in World War II. "And I feel that my mother and I have now fulfilled my grandfather's wish, and our name is alive again in the city where almost no trace of my family is left," he writes.

While he never takes himself seriously, Etgar Keret views the writer's vocation with utmost gravity. "The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate;" he observes, "he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world." From what's revealed in the pages of THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS, Keret seriously underestimates himself.