Maybe Esther: A Family Story

Maybe Esther: A Family Story

Maybe Esther: A Family Story

Maybe Esther: A Family Story

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

The International Bestseller

Maybe Esther is the inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving debut memoir that pieces together the fascinating story of one woman’s family across twentieth-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 forty-one 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 this complex question, 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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062337566
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 01/29/2019
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kiev. She studied at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and was also awarded research fellowships to study at Columbia University in New York, and Stanford in California. Katja Petrowskaja received her PhD in Moscow. Since 1999, she has lived and worked in Berlin. Maybe Esther is her first book, and is translated into 20 languages.

 

About the Translator

Shelley Frisch’s numerous translations from the German, which include biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Franz Kafka, have been awarded Modern Language Association and Helen and Kurt Wolff translation prizes. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.



Shelley Frisch’s numerous translations from the German, which include biographies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Franz Kafka, have been awarded Modern Language Association and Helen and Kurt Wolff translation prizes. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Thank Google 1

1 An Exemplary Story 9

Family Tree 11

Negative Numbers 14

The List 18

The Recipe 22

Perpetual Motion 27

Neighbors 31

In the Museum 35

2 Rosa and the Mute Children 39

Shimon the Hearer 41

A Flight 47

The Gate 48

Ariadne's Thread 51

The Last Mother 59

Magen David 63

Divining Rod 67

The Train 69

Facebook 1940 72

3 My Beautiful Poland 77

Polsha 79

Ozjel's Asylum 81

Ulica Ciepla 87

Two Cities 91

Family Heritage 92

eBay Now 94

The Rehearsal 95

Nike 97

The Wrong House 98

Kozyra 100

Life Records 103

Related Through Adam 106

Kalisz 112

Lost Letters 117

4 In the World of Unstructured Matter 121

House Search 123

Van der Lubbe 125

The Sword of Damocles 127

Delusions of Grandeur 128

In the Archive 129

Voices 133

Goethe's Secret Service 136

A Meshuggeneh 137

The Trial 140

Three Cars 145

Random Chance 146

Maria's Tears 148

The Apron 149

Instinct for Self-Preservation 152

Forget Herostratus 154

Gorgon Medusa 155

Karl Versus Judas 158

Wind Rose 159

5 Babi Yar 161

A Walk 163

Riva, Rita, Margarita 172

Anna and Lyolya 175

Lucky Arnold 181

Maybe Esther 185

6 Dedushka 199

Grandfather's Silence 201

Lunch Break in Mauthausen 205

The Garden 207

Friday Letters 212

Pearls 214

At Grandfather's 218

Milky Way 221

Russian Cemetery 223

Hans 226

Trip to Mauthausen 231

Sisyphus 236

The Death March of the Unknown Relatives 241

The End of the Empire 247

Epilogue: Intersections 249

Acknowledgments 253

Illustration Credits 255

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