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Four Stories
This booklet includes a lecture called "Second Generation" and four remarkable short stories by Etgar Keret: "Asthma Attack," "Shoes," "Siren," and "Foreign Language," the last of which has never before appeared in the United States. Openly discussing his family background for the first time, Keret brings to life the confused experience of growing up as an Israeli child of Holocaust survivors. One of Israel’s leading voices in literature and cinema, Keret mixes wry humor, keen intelligence, and subtle tenderness to create some of the most provocative and entertaining stories of his generation.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
24 pages, Paperback
First published June 28, 2010
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306 people want to read
About the author
Etgar Keret
140 books2,451 followersBorn in Ramat Gan in 1967, Etgar Keret is a leading voice in Israeli literature and film. His books have been published in over four dozen languages and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde and The New Yorker, among others. His awards include the Cannes Film Festival's "Caméra d'Or" (2007), the Charles Bronfman Prize (2016) and the prestigious Sapir Prize (2018). Over a hundred short films and several feature films have been based on his stories. Keret teaches creative writing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Since 2021, he has been publishing the weekly newsletter "Alphabet Soup" on Substack.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 3, 2019
Israeli author Etgar Keret, whom I recently discovered after reading a couple of reviews of his excellent short stories collection Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, delivered the annual B.G.Rudolph Lecture in Judaic Studies in 2009 at Syracuse University on the Second Holocaust Generation. He spoke about his experiences as the child of Holocaust survivors, and read 5 stories from his short fiction:
‘Shoes’ : a young boy visits the Volhynia Memorial Museum with his class on Holocaust Memorial Day where he hears a hate speach against Germans delivered by a skinny old guy. Two weeks later, his parents return from abroad and bring him a gift : a pair of Adidas sneakers from Germany...
‘Siren’ : on Holocaust Memorial Day, Eli sees the janitor of his high school, Sholem, sitting on the steps by the nurse’s room, crying, after he heard the short speach of one of the students’ father who was in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz...
‘A Foreign Language’ : quirky story in which a narrator talks about his Dad who is a fanatical shaver, and about his ex-girlfriend who once asked him to tell her he loved her, in a different, exotic language. She went into a state of complete hysteria when he couldn’t. Dad shaved the back of his neck and spread glue on it. Then he took a bath. With his shoes on. It was his fifty-first birthday, and he had received a pipe and a piece of cake that Mom had baked...
‘Asthma Attack’ : a one-paragraph story about the importance of words, especially when someone has an asthma attack. There’s a difference.
The fifth read story, ‘Pride and Joy’, isn’t included in this book.
I suppose they couldn’t include it after it was decided that the title of the book would be ‘Four Stories’.
To read the fifth story, I’ll have to buy his other book, The Nimrod Flipout.
‘Shoes’ : a young boy visits the Volhynia Memorial Museum with his class on Holocaust Memorial Day where he hears a hate speach against Germans delivered by a skinny old guy. Two weeks later, his parents return from abroad and bring him a gift : a pair of Adidas sneakers from Germany...
‘Siren’ : on Holocaust Memorial Day, Eli sees the janitor of his high school, Sholem, sitting on the steps by the nurse’s room, crying, after he heard the short speach of one of the students’ father who was in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz...
‘A Foreign Language’ : quirky story in which a narrator talks about his Dad who is a fanatical shaver, and about his ex-girlfriend who once asked him to tell her he loved her, in a different, exotic language. She went into a state of complete hysteria when he couldn’t. Dad shaved the back of his neck and spread glue on it. Then he took a bath. With his shoes on. It was his fifty-first birthday, and he had received a pipe and a piece of cake that Mom had baked...
‘Asthma Attack’ : a one-paragraph story about the importance of words, especially when someone has an asthma attack. There’s a difference.
The fifth read story, ‘Pride and Joy’, isn’t included in this book.
I suppose they couldn’t include it after it was decided that the title of the book would be ‘Four Stories’.
To read the fifth story, I’ll have to buy his other book, The Nimrod Flipout.
November 27, 2010
over thanksgiving break I did almost nothing. well that isn't exactly true I learned 2 way strumming on the guitar in rock band, I learned to play pro keys in rock band, and I played a song on the expert drums in rock band. Basically, I played rock band for 3 days. Then I read this booklet.
It's great, I mean it's really great.
Saunders wrote the introduction which is a beautiful piece about how what truly makes a great author is a great person. And yeah we spend a lot of time talking about the use of nouns and verbs and stuff, but that isn't it, what you really respect when you read a book is the person behind the book. This is also the thing that makes some books so disappointing, when you know an author and you have come o expect a level of beauty and personal responsibility from that author it is seriously upsetting not to get it. This has nothing to do with etgar keret himself, but it has to do with how we actually approach fiction which is more important. When we read we establish a relationship with an author. This is important both for us as a reader to understand and for the author as a writer to understand. There is a lot of talk around about the death of the author, but all you really get out of that is blandness, the author is what makes the book worth reading, worth experiencing. The reason people love milan kundera is because just the idea of being in his presence is overwhelming.
On that note. The lecture by mr. keret follows from this. It's about how his writing is informed by who he is as a person and his childhood. If you haven't read him this is a little bit hard to understand so lets take some examples from other authors. Lord byron found a skull accidentally while digging in a grave yard and had it turned into a mug. He wrote a poem about how having wine where your brain use to be was better than having worms. The guy who wrote legend of a suicide (vann, I believe) was trying to cope with he death of his father, my friend Mike can't write a female character to save his life and he can't talk about women like they are real people. Our writing is a reflection of ourselves, the great authors know that, the authors that try to hide that lose something. This is not to say that everyone likes each reflection of self, I believe that same lipstye writes a reflection of himself and I find it fundamentally boring, and the fact is I probably wouldn't like him as a person either. But there are books like less than zero where it feels like the author is trying to defend his perception of self against outer criticism and it hurts the book, it makes it less fun. Writing is about telling truths that you don't actually want people to know, and revealing in those truth. Etgar Keret knows that, and that is why his stories are as good as they are.
It's great, I mean it's really great.
Saunders wrote the introduction which is a beautiful piece about how what truly makes a great author is a great person. And yeah we spend a lot of time talking about the use of nouns and verbs and stuff, but that isn't it, what you really respect when you read a book is the person behind the book. This is also the thing that makes some books so disappointing, when you know an author and you have come o expect a level of beauty and personal responsibility from that author it is seriously upsetting not to get it. This has nothing to do with etgar keret himself, but it has to do with how we actually approach fiction which is more important. When we read we establish a relationship with an author. This is important both for us as a reader to understand and for the author as a writer to understand. There is a lot of talk around about the death of the author, but all you really get out of that is blandness, the author is what makes the book worth reading, worth experiencing. The reason people love milan kundera is because just the idea of being in his presence is overwhelming.
On that note. The lecture by mr. keret follows from this. It's about how his writing is informed by who he is as a person and his childhood. If you haven't read him this is a little bit hard to understand so lets take some examples from other authors. Lord byron found a skull accidentally while digging in a grave yard and had it turned into a mug. He wrote a poem about how having wine where your brain use to be was better than having worms. The guy who wrote legend of a suicide (vann, I believe) was trying to cope with he death of his father, my friend Mike can't write a female character to save his life and he can't talk about women like they are real people. Our writing is a reflection of ourselves, the great authors know that, the authors that try to hide that lose something. This is not to say that everyone likes each reflection of self, I believe that same lipstye writes a reflection of himself and I find it fundamentally boring, and the fact is I probably wouldn't like him as a person either. But there are books like less than zero where it feels like the author is trying to defend his perception of self against outer criticism and it hurts the book, it makes it less fun. Writing is about telling truths that you don't actually want people to know, and revealing in those truth. Etgar Keret knows that, and that is why his stories are as good as they are.
October 31, 2012
"Every person is a world champion in something",
the father told his young son,"but [...] most of us will never discover what we are really good at." Etgar Keret has taken his father's words very much to heart: he has become an award winning story teller, a film producer and, first of all, an astute and candid observer of life in his country, Israel.
FOUR STORIES is much more than the title suggests. Two introductions to his person (by Ken Frieden and George Saunders) are helpful and add to our understanding of Keret, the author and his work and thinking. The four stories selected for this slim volume, expand on the topic of his lecture, especially how exposure to the experiences of the generation of Holocaust survivors can impact the life of the young, the second generation, in different ways. Two of them stand out for me in particular. In the first, Keret describes a visit to a Holocaust Memorial by a boys' class, in the second he illustrates schoolboys' behaviour in competition. In both, the relationship to an older person, a survivor, is the moral focus of the story.
The centre piece of this booklet is Keret's B.G. Rudolph Lecture in Judaic Studies, presented in 2009 and edited for this compilation. It is more an informal talk than a lecture in the academic sense and its title is deceptively simple: Second Generation. In it, Keret reflects on his personal perspective on being a second generation Holocaust survivor. He summarizes his parents' ordeal and their way of coping with it. Like in his short story writings, he is open, direct, informal and candid here. He raises his concerns about the trends in the nineteen-nineties of publishers and film makers to search out any kind of second generation survivor story. His personal experiences, he explains, have, in some ways, set him apart from others of his generation. "When they wanted to "classify me under this second-generation token", he felt," that it was some sort of reduction of my family and of my relationship with my parents..." In contrast to many survivor families where the past is solidly covered with silence, his parents and "never denied the horrifying experience they had gone through, but there was something in the way they told it." It was in this context that his father spoke about every person being a world champion: he told his son what made him one and how it helped him survive...
Reading this booklet will encourage any reader to pick up one or the other collection of Etgar Keret's short stories. I had the privilege to hear him speak recently, capturing the audience with stories and candid answers to the interviewer's questions. His reading of the title story from his upcoming collection in English, with the current draft title "Then there was a knock at the door", makes me impatient to read more
June 23, 2012
I bought this very slim volume mainly because I wanted to read "Siren" after it was described in this article on The Millions. I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was surprised to find--and appreciated greatly--the inclusion of an accompanying lecture, "Second Generation," that Keret gave at Syracuse University, as well as the text of the introduction George Saunders delivered for that occasion. Definitely glad I bought this one.
May 6, 2011
I don't care how many times I read these stories. I can just keep reading them over and over again. There is no one quite like Keret. No one as tender, with as much sympathy, as completely insane. These stories are delightful and even the lecture at the beginning is entertaining. Stellar all the way.
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December 9, 2010Wed, Apr 6 at 7 pm
The wildly inventive Israeli master joins forces with the author of Everything is Illuminated to present an evening of surprising tales.
The wildly inventive Israeli master joins forces with the author of Everything is Illuminated to present an evening of surprising tales.
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December 31, 2013Excellent writing 100% entertaining!
December 16, 2017
These stories certainly were breath of fresh air. Enjoyed them all.
November 15, 2019
As a collection of short stories, I wouldn't recommend this book since you'd be better off buying the larger collections they're pulled from (I think mainly "The Nimrod Flipout").
However, the short essay "Second Generation" is a moving and insightful personal reflection on the memories of Holocaust survivors and the way they're portrayed in education and media. Unfortunately, this essay doesn't seem to be available anywhere other than this book. For that, I'd highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book one way or another.
However, the short essay "Second Generation" is a moving and insightful personal reflection on the memories of Holocaust survivors and the way they're portrayed in education and media. Unfortunately, this essay doesn't seem to be available anywhere other than this book. For that, I'd highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book one way or another.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews