Shoes by Etkar Keret

“Shoes “ is a short story set near Tel Aviv in our days.

It begins with the protagonist (a young Israeli boy) that on Holocaust Memorial Day goes visiting the Museum of Volhynia Jewry with his classmates.

While visiting, he notices a photo of his grandfather in a concentration camp on the wall. After this, an old Hebrew man tells the children his experience in Holocaust, expressing his ineliminable hate and anger against the German People, still Nazi and dangerous. In the end of his speech he even tells the kids not to buy German products because in his opinion they were made with the bones and skin and blood of dead Jews.

One day the protagonist’ s parents, just returned from a trip to Europe, bring a new pair of Adidas Shoes to the Israeli boy, and he immediately thinks, remembering the old man in the museum, that his pair of shoes, made in Germany, were, as a matter of fact, his grandfather.

Etgar Keret tells the story as a child could tell it, the entire story is seen by the eyes of a child (he is the first person narrator, too) and the theme of the memory of Holocaust is faced as only a child can do it. Only a child of our days can make a synthesis of the two extremes: forget totally or nurse a grudge against Germans for the very rest of history.

It is an invitation not to let the faults of the fathers fall on the life of the sons. So the message of the author is probably: people have to be able to forgive and to go on in their life, without forgetting the horror of Holocaust, like the child does in the last talk with his grandfather.

Class V A Liceo Scientifico Tecnologico

ITIS “Stanislao cannizzaro”, Colleferro (Rome), Italy