Maybe Esther

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. And there is her great-grandmother, 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. From Moscow to Kiev to Warsaw to Berlin, this is a journey into language, memory, philosophy, history and trauma.