Maybe Esther

A Family Story

By: Katja Petrowskaja

Narrated by: Emma Gregory

An inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving literary debut that pieces together the fascinating story of one woman's family across 20th-century Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany.

Katja Petrowskaja wanted to create a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents. Her idea blossomed into this striking and highly original work of narrative nonfiction, an account of her search for meaning within the stories of her ancestors.

In a series of short meditations, Petrowskaja delves into family legends, introducing a remarkable cast of characters: Judas Stern, her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomatic attaché in 1932 and was sentenced to death; her grandfather Semyon, who went underground with a new name during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, forever splitting their branch of the family from the rest; her grandmother Rosa, who ran an orphanage in the Urals for deaf-mute Jewish children; her Ukrainian grandfather Vasily, who disappeared during World War II and reappeared without explanation 41 years later - and settled back into the family as if he'd never been gone; and her great-grandmother, whose name may have been Esther, who alone remained in Kiev and was killed by the Nazis.

How do you talk about what you can't know? How do you bring the past to life? To answer these complex questions, Petrowskaja visits the scenes of these events, reflecting on a fragmented and traumatized century and bringing to light family figures who threaten to drift into obscurity. A true search for the past reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, and Michael Chabon's Moonglow, Maybe Esther is a poignant, haunting investigation of the effects of history on one family.

©2014 Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin; English translation copyright 2018 by Shelley Frisch (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Journey to Understand the Past

I listened to the audio version of this book, and it was an experience I will never forget. A totally different way of telling the story of the horrors of WWII for the Jewish people, Maybe Esther is poignant, revealing and thought provoking. Revisiting the paths that her family were forced to take in Russia, Poland, Austria and Germany, the author brings to the forefront those places then and now. It is as if you were walking with her, looking at the areas where death and deprivation were a daily occurrence, and trying to reconcile in your mind how seemingly normal individuals were willing to outright murder the same people who had been their neighbors. I recommend the audio version, because the inflections and tones of the narrator is excellent. Highly recommend this book for all.

Novel memoir

This is a lyrical family history/memoir/reflection that journeys into the realms of a Jewish family’s roots across Russia and Ukraine and explores the disruptions brought about by Soviet revolutions and World War 2. For me it was a singular read.