Authors

Katerina Pavlidi¹;  ¹ University College Dublin, Ireland

Discussion

In her debut book, Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014), Katja Petrowskaja sets out to map her family’s history onto the histories of twentieth-century Poland, Ukraine and Russia. Born to Jewish-Polish parents in Kyiv and speaking Russian as her first language, Petrowskaja wrote Maybe Esther in German — a language which she claims to have learnt in her late twenties. Not only did she write her book in a unique version of German, which is interpolated with semantic structures characteristic to Russian and with what might come across as the grammatical mistakes of a non-native speaker, but she also vetoed, at least initially, its translation in Russian. 

This paper explores the significance of, what Maybe Esther presents as, Petrowskaja’s inability to entrust Russian language with the narrativization of her family’s history. I demonstrate that Petrowskaja’s distrust in Russian indicates a distrust in the habitual and hence uncritical use of grammatical structures and vocabulary which, imbued by Russia’s imperialism, reproduce a version of history and a mode of speaking about it which remains deaf to the lived experience of Petrowskaja, that of her family and the marginalised communities they represent. I argue that through her experimentation with language and form, Petrowskaja reinvents historiography itself. The non-linear and fragmentary form of the text as well as the language which deliberately exposes its author’s uncertainty, ignorance, and struggle with verbalisation serve a twofold purpose: on the one hand, they expose the disorderly, spontaneous, and emotionally charged process that precedes the organisation of memories, collected testimonies and documents into a coherent historical narrative. On the other hand, they preserve the ruinous nature of memory, the dubious workings of speech, and the affects that emerge from the thresholds of semantics. Thus, Maybe Esther calls for a mode of historiography that not only acknowledges but also incorporates in its form the plurality of languages and cultures, personal histories, imaginings and feelings which altogether shape history which itself transcends both physical and imagined borders. I finally argue that Maybe Ester presents the writing of history as a collective act, where each of the participants – authors and readers – has responsibility in its making.