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Maybe Esther
Katja Petrowskaja
The poignant, searching, haunting story of one family’s entanglement with twentieth-century historyAN 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 IndependentKatja 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.
Copyright (#ulink_f3098e74-ab91-541d-b8df-dc2898e25a67)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © 2014 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
English language translation copyright © 2018 by Shelley Frisch
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, for permission to reprint from “Babi Yar” from The Collected Poems, 1952–1990 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd with Yevgeny Yevtushenko and James Ragan, © 1991 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York.
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cover photograph © Eugene Shimalsky
Katja Petrowskaja asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008245283
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008245306
Version: 2018-01-02
Contents
Cover (#udadb162c-cba0-5e65-a6d6-01c0e9096341)
Title Page (#ub330016f-fb03-5894-ad18-8583530bb840)
Copyright (#ua929647a-70a7-564b-9f35-37a1d4877b81)
Prologue: Thank Google (#ue2887271-0549-56f1-b143-4d11eec55b3f)
1: AN EXEMPLARY STORY (#u9836f1a6-a2ab-5137-8884-9a79c8b36a58)
Family Tree (#ulink_112e2777-d815-54c2-9409-61a8473dd8a4)
Negative Numbers (#ulink_d22fc328-26e7-5304-a0d7-686ce661276c)
The List (#ulink_e2037ed7-5c72-580e-bd72-15d33b7200c8)
The Recipe (#ulink_eb129630-8f34-5881-98ec-d4725c6f1e2d)
Perpetual Motion (#ulink_abeeade8-42f1-5ce4-a4aa-5a5677784a72)
Neighbors (#ulink_cfc5aca8-656e-5ccc-be11-bd59e5b31f94)
In the Museum (#ulink_5d919567-a2bb-57a2-91d6-6949fd074840)
2: ROSA AND THE MUTE CHILDREN (#ue1b8a318-c66e-5a25-bc0f-77e4c558e933)
Shimon the Hearer (#ulink_87110ad1-ed48-5558-b706-cdb6f7c90daa)
A Flight (#ulink_93d95f09-adc9-53da-b4db-de65ed5f6def)
The Gate (#ulink_733b2198-2acd-583d-8d38-a6dfa813c386)
Ariadne’s Thread (#ulink_1cc88923-8709-58ef-a091-88ce5dfd49cc)
The Last Mother (#litres_trial_promo)
Magen David (#litres_trial_promo)
Divining Rod (#litres_trial_promo)
The Train (#litres_trial_promo)
Facebook 1940 (#litres_trial_promo)
3: MY BEAUTIFUL POLAND (#litres_trial_promo)
Polsha (#litres_trial_promo)
Ozjel’s Asylum (#litres_trial_promo)
Ulica Ciepła (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Cities (#litres_trial_promo)
Family Heritage (#litres_trial_promo)
eBay Now (#litres_trial_promo)
The Rehearsal (#litres_trial_promo)
Nike (#litres_trial_promo)
The Wrong House (#litres_trial_promo)
Kozyra (#litres_trial_promo)
Life Records (#litres_trial_promo)
Related Through Adam (#litres_trial_promo)
Kalisz (#litres_trial_promo)
Lost Letters (#litres_trial_promo)
4: IN THE WORLD OF UNSTRUCTURED MATTER (#litres_trial_promo)
House Search (#litres_trial_promo)
Van der Lubbe (#litres_trial_promo)
The Sword of Damocles (#litres_trial_promo)
Delusions of Grandeur (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Archive (#litres_trial_promo)
Voices (#litres_trial_promo)
Goethe’s Secret Service (#litres_trial_promo)
A Meshuggeneh (#litres_trial_promo)
The Trial (#litres_trial_promo)
Three Cars (#litres_trial_promo)
Random Chance (#litres_trial_promo)
Maria’s Tears (#litres_trial_promo)
The Apron (#litres_trial_promo)
Instinct for Self-Preservation (#litres_trial_promo)
Forget Herostratus (#litres_trial_promo)
Gorgon Medusa (#litres_trial_promo)
Karl Versus Judas (#litres_trial_promo)
Wind Rose (#litres_trial_promo)
5: BABI YAR (#litres_trial_promo)
A Walk (#litres_trial_promo)
Riva, Rita, Margarita (#litres_trial_promo)
Anna and Lyolya (#litres_trial_promo)
Lucky Arnold (#litres_trial_promo)
Maybe Esther (#litres_trial_promo)
6: DEDUSHKA (#litres_trial_promo)
Grandfather’s Silence (#litres_trial_promo)
Lunch Break in Mauthausen (#litres_trial_promo)
The Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday Letters (#litres_trial_promo)
Pearls (#litres_trial_promo)
At Grandfather’s (#litres_trial_promo)
Milky Way (#litres_trial_promo)
Russian Cemetery (#litres_trial_promo)
Hans (#litres_trial_promo)
Trip to Mauthausen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sisyphus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Death March of the Unknown Relatives (#litres_trial_promo)
The End of the Empire (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: Intersections (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Illustration Credits (#litres_trial_promo)
