ABSTRACT
The chapter deals with Katja Petrowskaja’s text Maybe Esther. A Family Story as a trans-generational European-Jewish memory book. The book may be characterized as a deeply poetic and—at the same time—mainly non-fictional text, based on Petrowskaja’s family biography but not limited to the family’s memory. Catastrophes are omnipresent in this text and are the basis of a melancholic and ironic view on contemporary Europe. The understanding of the European history and present time is deeply postcatastrophic, sometimes hidden behind irony. But at the same time, the portrait of the family background is filled with a utopian hope, fueled by a belief in the power of language, culture, and “Bildung.” Therefore, the chapter focuses on the tension between traditional cultural values, generational perspectives, and a completely dislocated, postcatastrophic family memory. Although German is the current literary language of the Ukrainian-Jewish-born author, Petrowskaja is writing between languages as different as Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and German, thus reflecting her family’s migration and flight through East and Central European countries. Although the Holocaust experience is the most important reference and remaining dark shadow in the author’s writing, a fact that is underlined in the statement “The holocaust is our antiquity,” there is a strong positive energy in this family history, an outcome of their educational engagement for deaf-mute children. Thus, Maybe Esther presents the Jewish family tradition as a true European heritage.
