31 Days of Short Stories: Day 6. “Siren,” by Etgar Keret

Posted 6 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories

Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret’s short stories shuttle between formal modes and settings, between reality and fable, between comedy and tragedy. The title story of this collection is a brief, ironic fable about degrees of goodness, and about the ways in which even the most beneficent acts can have unintended negative consequences. “Katzenstein” is narrated from hell by a protagonist who is consumed with envy — even after death — for the title character. And the novella “Kneller’s Happy Campers” involves a group of people who have committed suicide negotiating the afterlife.

“Siren” is one of Keret’s most naturalistic stories, but it is nonetheless powerfully affecting, and showcases the author’s trademark irony and his recognition of moral relativism and human frailty.

The story opens in Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The narrator, Eli, attends his high-school assembly, where “an old-looking man in a maroon sweater” lectures the students about Auschwitz. After the assembly, Eli runs into the school janitor, Sholem, who is beset by tears. When Eli asks what the matter is, Sholem says that he recognized the speaker from the assembly: “I know him, I was in the Sonderkommando too.”

The Sonderkommando — the word literally means “special unit” — were a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz who were given special camp privileges in exchange for marshalling other Jews into the gas chambers and disposing of their bodies once they’d been gassed. The student, blithely unaware of this historical reality, assumes that the janitor was a commando in the Israeli army; when the janitor’s bike is stolen, Eli goes to the school principal and rats out the two students responsible.

There are levels of irony at work here. Eli feels justified in betraying his classmates because he believes the janitor to have been a commando who fought bravely for his country. By ratting out Mikey, one of the thieves, however, Eli prevents him from joining the nation’s elite naval commandos. When Mikey confronts Eli, Eli tells Mikey that he has no honour. But Eli’s ahistorical worldview precludes his complete understanding and calls into question his notion of what constitutes honour and betrayal. In turning his classmates over to the authorities, he does the right thing, arguably for the wrong reasons.

None of this is spelled out in the story; Keret is too crafty for that. The significance of the janitor’s comment is not specified in the body of the story; Eli lacks the historical reference points necessary to put his situation into context, but the reader is expected to pick up on these things, and so to question the actions and decisions that lie at the story’s heart. There is no epiphanic moment in this tale, and at the end Eli remains unshaken in his moral certitude. In this, Keret’s story takes on the tenor of a parable, a cautionary tale warning of the dangers of acting with a blinkered understanding, and of assuming that people’s motives are always recognizable, even to themselves.

2 comments to “31 Days of Short Stories: Day 6. “Siren,” by Etgar Keret”

Alex, August 6th, 2008 at 12:59 pm:

• Steven you are indefatigable.

  You have me really looking forward to September’s “30 Days of Victorian Novels.”

Steven W. Beattie, August 6th, 2008 at 2:16 pm:

• Indefatigable? I’m freakin’ exhausted! And it’s only day six.

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