Ira Glass with Etgar Keret

THIS AMERICAN LIFE PODCAST EPISODE:
HALF-BAKED STORIES ABOUT MY DEAD MOTHER

Two professional storytellers board a bus headed out of Tel Aviv . . . and a podcast is born.

If that sounds suspiciously like a line from an episode of public radio’s This American Life, it’s hardly surprising because one of those storytellers on the bus was Ira Glass, the architect, host and producer of the show.

The other was one of Israel’s most famous authors, the short-story writer Etgar Keret.

Glass has spent his life telling tales about extraordinary ordinariness — of two warring Mall Santas from the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas; of two infants switched at birth and the mother who waited 43 years to let them know; of the Japanese survivors of the 2011 tsunami and earthquake who’d been unable to say goodbye to loved ones caught in the catastrophe and found consolation in leaving them messages in a phone booth.

Keret, on the other hand, has an affinity for the absurd and a penchant for shaping dreams into logic. He even wrote a tale about a man competing in the World Lying Championship, certain he’d win because he’s “never been afraid to give the truth a black eye and swear it’s pink.”

But the podcast spawned on that bus in Israel, Half-baked Stories about My Dead Mother, reflects simultaneously the intimacy of normal life that is neither the zeitgeist of This American Life nor the quasi-reality of Keret’s imagination.

After all, some characters are larger — even more unbelievable — than life, and Etgar’s mother, Orna, was one of them. A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, she was, in his telling, simultaneously vengeful and loving, Maria in West Side Story and Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In a live performance of their podcast about Etgar’s mother, Glass and Keret bring Orna and their own storytelling prowess to life.