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    Maybe Esther
    Maybe Esther
    Maybe Esther
    Audiobook7 hours

    Maybe Esther

    Written by Katja Petrowskaja

    Narrated by Emma Gregory

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The poignant, searching, haunting story of one family’s entanglement with twentieth-century history

    AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

    ‘Intensely involving … a fervent meditation on love and loss, with a remarkable cast of characters’ Financial Times

    ‘Rich, intriguing … Maybe Esther calls to mind the itinerant style of W. G. Sebald’ Guardian

    ‘Unflinchingly potent … Revolutionaries, war heroes, teachers and phantoms populate these magnetic pages’ Irish Independent

    Katja Petrowskaja’s family story is impossible to untangle from the history of twentieth-century Europe. There is her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomat in Moscow in 1932 and was sentenced to death. (Could this act have had more significance than anyone at the time understood?) There is her Ukrainian grandfather, who disappeared during World War II and reappeared without explanation forty-one years later. (How was it that he then went back to normal family life, as though nothing had happened?) And there is her great-grandmother (was she really called Esther?) who was too old and frail to leave Kiev when the Jews there were ordered to leave, and was brutally killed by the Nazis on the street.

    Taking the reader from Moscow to Kiev to Warsaw to Berlin, and deep into archives and pieced-together conversations, photos and memories, Maybe Esther is a journey into language, memory, philosophy, history and trauma, and a singular, beautiful, unforgettable work of literature.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJan 30, 2018
    ISBN9780008245290
    Author

    Katja Petrowskaja

    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.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Katja Petrowskaja, Bachmann-Preisträgerin 2013, erzählt die Geschichte ihrer Familie. Diese Geschichte ist eine Geschichte der Konzentrationslager und der Gulags, der Todesmärsche in Österreich und der Massenerschießungen in Kiew. Eine Geschichte der Juden, der Russen und der Deutschen. Nirgends finden sich platte Faschismus-Keulen, dafür machen sich überall feine und feinsinnige Formulierungen breit, in denen sich Persönliches und Historisches fein verweben. Berührend, wie Petrowskaja ihre Pilgerreise von Salzburg bis Mauthausen auf den Spuren ihres Großvaters schildert, das große Erstaunen darüber, dass es auch in einer Stadt mit KZ-Gedenkstätte schön sein darf. Gleichzeitig macht die Autorin ihre Leser immer wieder betroffen, wenn Sie von Todesmärschen erzählt und davon, wie viel Schweigen in ihrer Familie mit den persönlichen Schicksalen verbunden war.
      Vielschichtig, reflexiv und behutsam zugleich erzählt sie von historischen Begebenheiten, mit denen die meisten (vermeintlich) schon längst abgeschlossen haben und die erst durch die persönliche Komponente als Bedrohung und als Mahnmal wieder auferstehen. Ein wichtiger Roman, der unbedingt in die Schulen getragen werden sollte, weil diese dunkelsten Seiten der neueren Geschichte gerade von Jugendlichen wohl kaum besser zu verstehen sind als mit Hilfe dieses Buches.