Etgar Keret spoke Tuesday night in the Hollings Program Room in the Thomas Cooper Library for USC’s third series fall literary festival. Keret is a well-known Jewish storyteller and writer, famous for his short stories, films, children’s books and sequential art.
Jewish studies professor F.K. Clementi introduced Keret as an author who writes about the modern and postmodern spiritual struggle that is reflected in a struggling language. Keret writes many novels in Hebrew.
“[Keret] uses Israeli Jewish humor and adds strong visual component to his language. His stories really flow before a reader’s eye the way a motion picture would," Clementi said.
Keret began by telling the audience how he earned an appreciation and love for writing. He started writing when he was in the army at 19 years old and remembers the first story he ever wrote.
“I knew I needed at least one super power to survive my army years, which wasn’t pleasant, so I turned to writing,” Keret said.
Keret read several of his famous short stories including one of his most notable, "Pipes." After finishing the short story, Keret continued to talk about his parents and how they inspired him as a writer.
“The best influence for my stories were the bed time stories my parents told me as a child,” Keret said.
He went on to tell the audience about how both of his parents were Holocaust survivors, and that his mother’s favorite memory was when her parents would tell her bedtime stories.
“She grew up in the ghetto so her parents had to make up the stories,” Keret said. “She felt when she became a mother she had to do the same thing.”
In contrast to his mother, Keret talked about how his father’s storytelling skills did not come as easily as his mother’s.
“Unlike my mother he couldn’t make up anything. He would tell stories about things that really happened,” Keret said about his father’s stories.
His father used to tell him how he and his family hid from the Nazis, which Keret explained as being a strange story to tell such a young boy. But it was from his father’s stories about the Nazis, prostitutes, mafia men and drunkards that Keret’s storytelling style developed.
Keret explained that he never intentionally and explicitly says he will write short stories, but it is something he seeks for when he writes.
"I’m a control freak and what I look for in writing is to find a space where the things I do have no consequences, where I’m completely free,” Keret said.
After his hour-long discussion, Keret signed copies of his stories for those in attendance.