
The poignant searching haunting story of one family's entanglement with twentieth-century history AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Katja Petrowskaja's family story is inextricably entangled with the history of twentieth-century Europe There is her great-uncle who shot a German diplomat in Moscow in 1932 & was sentenced to death There is her Ukrainian grandfather who disappeared during World War II & reappeared forty years later & there is her great-grandmother
- whose name may or may not have been Esther
- who was too old & frail to leave Kiev when the Jews there were rounded up & was killed by a Nazi outside her house Taking the reader from Berlin to Warsaw to Moscow to Kiev from Google searches strange encounters & coincidences to archives anecdotes & jokes Katja Petrowskaja undertakes a journey in search of her own place in past & present memory & history languages & countries The result is Maybe Esther
- a singular haunting unforgettable work of literature