Maybe Esther: A Family Story by Katja Petrowskaja, Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch, 2014
Updated: 3 days ago
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2026, 10 AM-NOON, PACIFIC TIME
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About the Author:
Katja Petrowskaja was born in Kyiv in 1970, to a Russian-speaking family. She studied literature in Tartu, Estonia and then completed her PhD in Moscow. She has lived in Berlin since 1999. She won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2013 and wrote her bestselling first book Maybe Esther, in German. It was published in 2014 and was awarded the Premio Strega Europeo Prize, the Aalen Town Schubart Literary Prize, the Ernst Toller Prize and the Aspekte Literature Prize. It was a Spiegel bestseller and has been translated into nineteen languages Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6893299.Katja_Petrowskaja
About the book, from Goodreads:
An inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving literary debut 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.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
FROM LOIS MORGAN, DISCUSSION FACILITATOR
The facts that Katja was born on Feb. 3, 1970 in Kiev, lived there until Chernobyl when the family moved to Moscow, and that her father, Miron Petrovskii was/is a professor of literature and her mother, Svitlana Petrovska was/is a teacher, and that her brother, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, is an historian is the important information here. This places her perspective from growing up in the 70's and 80's Soviet era, with all that that entailed.By the way, I have read her brother, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's book "The Golden Age SHTETL--A New History of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe". Fascinating and fabulous book, historical and cultural with reinterpretations of events and their meaning. -- Lois Morgan, 9/19/26
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