“A Common Memory”: Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther

Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther, in contrast, is typical of a second strand of contemporary German Jewish writing, resembling twentieth-century modernism and in fact often citing German, German Jewish, and European authors of the period before the Second World War. In this novel—and in the novels by Grjasnowa and Salzmann that are analyzed in the next chapter—formal complexity, a questioning of historical truth, and a striking interest in narrating the past as a “what if” suggest ways of articulating a Jewish identity that is at least potentially available for reframing as truly worldly, that is, pointing beyond the immediate Jewishness of the Jewish experience. At the same time, of course, this provisional Jewishness is also highly unstable, oscillating between particularism and universalism. More than anything else, therefore, Vielleicht Esther is marked by radical uncertainty, as its Russian-speaking Ukrainian-born narrator Katja endeavors to formulate a philosophy of history—and an approach to storytelling—that can reconcile the in any case unrecoverable specificity of the Jewish experience with the potentially limitless generality of global solidarity.

Katja confesses at the very start of her narrative that her Jewish origins are “eher zufällig” (rather accidental).1Petrowskaja, Vielleicht Esther, 10. Hereafter VE. Indeed, Russian vocabulary and references to Russian literature feature throughout the text—including Tolstoy, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Blok, Turgenev, and Bulgakov—while, as Andree Michaelis-König notes, “we find only a few Yiddish words in the text, and almost all of them are treated rather contemptuously.”2Michaelis-König, “Multilingualism,” 151. To this extent, Katja resembles many Soviet-born Jews who moved to Germany beginning in the early 1990s, including, of course, the novel’s author, with whom she shares a first name and many biographical details. (Petrowskaja immigrated after the “quota refugees,” in 1999). What Katja recounts in Vielleicht Esther, correspondingly, is her travel from Germany to Warsaw and Kyiv, where many of her kin had once lived, and her efforts to recover a Jewish family history that had faded in Soviet times, including as a result of antisemitism. Piecing together the sparse information she can glean in archives and from anecdotes, photographs, and even recipes, Katja suggests the intellectual, cultural, and linguistic richness of Jewish life from the eighteenth century, including the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, until the Holocaust.

Most obviously, Vielleicht Esther is a work of painstaking historical reconstruction that also reflects on the impossibility of recreating the past as it actually occurred.3See Osborne, “Encountering the Archive.” Indeed, the inadequacy of archival, photographic, or anecdotal evidence is demonstrated in a series of episodes interspersed throughout the narrative, all with a similar outcome. It is only luck, for example, that a photograph that an archivist in Kalisz procures for Katja from Ebay—most likely taken by a German soldier in 1940 (VE, 109)—shows the house that her ancestors had occupied (VE, 113–14). When she tries to examine files relating to her great-uncle Stern (VE, 151), the paper crumbles, and archival records are in any case inaccurate, for example when her ancestor Simon Geller is listed as running a school for the blind rather than for deaf and dumb children (VE, 54), or are unreliable translations of lost originals, as with the Russian rendering of the Yiddish newspaper article on which her family history depends (VE, 52–53). Names change, or are forgotten, as is the case for her great-grandmother Esther—“vielleicht Esther” (VE, 208–9)—as well as other relatives, known only by nicknames. The Holocaust caused ruptures in family history, of course, but there are often more prosaic reasons too. It would be tempting to link the uncertainty around Esther’s name to her murder in Kyiv in 1941. However, the truth is that Katja’s father only ever knew her as Babuschka (VE, 209).

Scholars have variously referred to Katja’s—or Petrowskaja’s—technique for compensating for the inadequacy of the historical record as “subjunctive remembering,”4See Caspari, “‘There Are No ‘Other’ People’” and Caspari, “Subjunctive Remembering.” as the “subjunctive approach” or “subjunctivity,”5Roca Lizarazu, “Moments of Possibility,” 406–26. and as a method of “finding and fabricating” through “interweaving documentation and invention.”6Rohr, “On Finding and Fabricating.” Here, it is important to emphasize that this subjunctive remembering does not invent something that never happened in one form or another but rather gives access to particular events that would otherwise remain obscure. This is a distinction that underpins the novel’s ethics: the obligation to narrate the past responsibly, even if the details must be fabricated. In one of the novel’s most horrific episodes, Katja imagines her great-grandmother Esther dutifully responding to the German instruction for Kyiv Jews to present themselves for deportation. She pictures the German and Ukrainian patrols and speculates that Esther might have believed that Yiddish-speaking Jews were the “nächsten Verwandten” (closest relatives; VE, 213) of the German occupiers and thus safe. Finally, she describes how an officer shoots her great-grandmother, “mit nachlässiger Routine, ohne dass das Gespräch unterbrochen wurde, ohne sich ganz umzudrehen, ganz nebenbei.” (In a casually routine fashion, without his conversation being interrupted, without turning around fully, just in passing; VE, 220.) Katja admits that she has fabulated this event, decades after, and even celebrates the author’s privileged perspective—“Ich sitze oben, ich sehe alles!” (I’m sitting upstairs. I can see everything!)—before she notes the inadequacy of her imagination and of historical accounts: “Ich sehe die Gesichter nicht, verstehe nicht, und die Geschichtsbücher schweigen.” (I can’t see the faces, don’t understand, and the history books remain silent; VE, 221). Even though Katja cannot be sure of exactly how this one woman was killed, however, her duty is to narrate a possible, plausible version of a historical reality that, in its sum, is well evidenced and incontestable.

The subjunctive mode is not an imagining of infinite alternatives—even including a world in which the Holocaust did not happen—but an appropriate response to the uneven distribution of what knowledge has been preserved about the genocide. Notwithstanding Katja’s proclivity for supposition, speculation, and even fabulation, Vielleicht Esther is a surprisingly grounded work of historical fiction. This is demonstrated, for example, when Katja relates how her father owed his life to her grandfather’s insistence that a neighbor’s ficus tree be removed from the cart on which families were fleeing the Nazis, to make room for the boy (VE, 217–18). Katja’s narration of a foundational family myth stretches plausibility and is almost farcical. Her father denies ever having told her this story but relents when he sees how invested she is in it and indeed believes her own existence to depend on it. He consoles her, therefore: “Manchmal ist es gerade die Prise Dichtung, welche die Erinnerung wahrheitsgetreu macht.” (Sometimes it’s the pinch of poetry that makes memory align with the truth; VE, 219.) What is important here, however, is not whether her father’s escape happened exactly in this manner but the historical reality that an individual’s survival was often entirely dependent on the actions of others, and on circumstances. Immediately following this episode, Katja relates how all the other Jewish boys still in Kyiv were shot in the ravine at Babi Yar (VE, 218).7See Snyder, Bloodlands. In all, more than 34,000 Jews were disposed of over two days, September 29–30, 1941. Esther was executed on her way to the ravine, as previously noted, and it is significant that Katja’s reflections on poetic invention and the ficus tree that most likely never existed are interjected into the middle of her detailed fictionalization of how that particular killing could have happened. Esther’s murder, like millions of others, is historical fact, not supposition or speculation, even if the details are unrecoverable.

Vielleicht Esther is not only—or simply—a Holocaust novel, however. Its innovation derives from its interweaving of three complementary narrative strands ranging from the eighteenth century to the postwar Soviet Union. The first is Katja’s efforts to recover her Jewish heritage. This endeavor underpins the entire novel. The second is her grandparents’ proximity to the Holocaust, including the narrator’s more abstract reflection on how the genocide should be memorialized. And the third is her repeated return to Soviet crimes and Soviet antisemitism. Each of these three strands, it can be argued, is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism. To what extent are the Jewish lives (and deaths) that Katja imagines in her parallel narration of these interlinked pasts universalizable within a discourse of global solidarity and human rights?

As noted, Katja’s connection to her Jewish heritage is initially weak. She summons her ancestors to her, “aus der tiefen Vergangenheit” (from the deepest past), they speak languages that seem familiar to her, and she hopes to populate her family album, “den Mangel auffüllen, das Gefühl von Verlust heilen.” (To fill the lack, to heal the feeling of loss.) Ultimately, however, they appear to her in a huddled mass, “ohne Gesichter und Geschichten” (without faces, without stories; VE, 25). Unlike Samuel, the American Jew whom she meets at Berlin central station at the start of the book, Katja has no Jewish languages and no Jewish geographies. Sam is originally from Iran and still speaks Aramaic; he is traveling with his wife to the village in Poland that her grandmother emigrated from, even though they know that nothing remains of the thriving community that existed before the Holocaust (VE, 10). Katja, on the other hand, is a “Weichensteller,” a pointsman whose job it is to switch railway tracks. On the one hand, this can be read as an affirmation of her role as narrator, managing the convergences of the different pasts she recounts. (Literary scholar Eneken Laanes argues that the pointsman is a “central metaphor for code-switching and linguistic and cultural translation in the text.” In this persuasive reading, it refers also to Katja’s switching between languages to create a transnational memory narrative.)8Laanes, “Katja Petrowskaja’s Translational Poetics of Memory,” 51. On the other hand, Katja seems to be without a history of her own, reduced to the function of an intersection rather than being an active participant in an ongoing story. Indeed, this applies to her Russian identity as much as her Jewish background. (Katja notes that in Russian the word pointsman, or стрелочник/strelotschnik, carries a negative connotation). She has married a German and is not teaching her children her mother tongue—she is a “dead end” (VE, 8–10) as far as her Russianness is concerned, she notes. Here, the English words in the German-language text reinforce the point about successive degrees of alienation from her first language.

Katja’s efforts to recover her Jewish past appear, in part, to be in fulfillment of a debt that she feels she owes to older generations of her family. She recalls her mother’s older sister, aunt Lida, who had been such a key figure in her childhood. Lida’s death prompts her desire to research and write her family history and causes her to reflect on the transition from a living memory of the vitality of European Jewish culture before the war to her generation’s dependence on photos, archives, and stories in the family to generate its own fragile and fragmented relationships with the past. To relate this past is an obligation as binding as the unpaid bills she discovers among Lida’s effects: “als ob ich auch bei Lida Schulden hätte.” (As if I too had a debt to pay to Lida; VE, 30–31.) More generally, Katja ponders how a recipe her aunt had left exemplifies the uncanny fusing of Jewish sensibility and European culture, which seemed to derive “aus einer Wurzel” (from one root; VE, 31). The recipe is at least partly Jewish but this element is now suppressed in favor of its description as Ukrainian, just as Lida prefers to suppress her youthful beauty and intellectual curiosity, the slaughter that followed, those who were murdered, or indeed anything at all relating to the traumatic past: “den Krieg und das Davor und das Danach.” (The war and what came before and after; VE, 33–34.) As with the story of the ficus tree, Katja retells an eccentric family legend, honors its meaning for her and her relatives, but also intimates more general historical realities, for example the interdependence of Jewish and European culture and the hurt felt by Jews once the illusion of belonging had been destroyed in the mass shootings, ghettos, and camps.

Katja consults multivolume encyclopedias on the history of Judaism and of eastern European Jews (VE, 54), struggles to enunciate the Hebrew phrase Sch’ma Israel (Hear, O Israel; VE, 55), and tries to imagine her grandmother in Warsaw and what kind of Jewish life Rosa would have led if she had emigrated to America in 1915 (VE, 77). This follows an episode in which Rosa sings along to a Yiddish soundtrack after decades of forgetting her mother tongue. However, none of this brings Katja closer to her Jewish past—the thread is too tenuous. She wonders whether there is an echo of the Yiddish Wille in her uncle’s name Wil (VE, 36) but knows that he was actually named for Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin. Her father had little connection to his Jewish background (VE, 36), and her own efforts to uncover family history depend on an unreliable Russian translation of a Yiddish newspaper article (VE, 52–53). Katja, in fact, is ignorant of her ancestors’ languages: “kein Polnisch, kein Jiddisch, kein Hebräisch, keine Gebärdensprache, ich wusste nichts über die Shetl, ich kannte kein Gebet.” (No Polish, no Yiddish, no sign language, I knew nothing about the stetl, I didn’t know any prayers; VE, 101). Her brother is learning Hebrew and studying the Torah, she reports, whereas she has married a German and writes in the language of the perpetrators (VE, 80).

Katja’s account consists of six chapters, following a brief prologue in which she recounts how she met the American Jew Samuel at Berlin main railway station just as she was about to board a train to discover her family roots in Warsaw and Kalisz, the town inhabited by generations of her relatives. Each chapter focuses on an episode in her family history, except for chapter 1, which introduces the characters who will feature in the novel and inaugurates the meta-reflection on how the past is reconstructed that will be a major theme throughout the book. Chapter 1, then, introduces the reader to an almost unfathomable array of relatives. These include a Bolshevik revolutionary, whose decision to change the family name from the Jewish-sounding Stern to the “Russian” Petrowskaja resonates even in the present; a mention of several others who labored in a shoe factory in Odessa about whom nothing more is known; and a physicist who disappeared during Stalin’s purges and whose brother-in-law, a secret policeman, was required to investigate. They also include a war hero nicknamed Gertrud, the husband of her aunt Lida; Katja’s great-grandfather Ozjel, the grandson of Simon, who inaugurated the family vocation of schools for the deaf and dumb; and a reference to the many other ancestors who taught in such schools across Europe. And they include Katja’s great-grandmother Esther, who was killed in Kyiv; her grandmother Rosa, and Rosa’s mother Anna and sister Ljolja, murdered in Babi Yar; and Katja’s great-uncle Judas Stern, who, in the interwar years, tried to assassinate the German envoy in Moscow and may have been manipulated by the forerunner to the KGB. Finally, there is Rosa’s non-Jewish Ukrainian husband, Wassilij, who was a Soviet POW in Mauthausen and who, after his return to Kyiv, failed to make contact for forty-one years (VE, 18–20).

Most immediately, Katja’s quest to reconnect with her ancestors seems to be focused on establishing the singularity of their lives. As discussed, this involves collecting—or speculating—details from family legends, archives, photographs, and even Google, and it appears designed to emphasize individuality, even exceptionality, over the ordinary. For example, there is her great-grandfather Ozjel, who moved from Warsaw to Kyiv in 1915. Katja’s enquiries reveal that Ozjel’s claim that his first wife Estera had died was untrue. He had in fact abandoned Estera and his sons, Zygmunt and the unfortunately named Adolf, following an accusation of spying for Austria and a period in prison (VE, 96). (Deaf and dumb people, Katja notes, are often presumed to be spies.) In addition, Ozjel was born a bastard, a disgrace the family strives to conceal even now (VE, 133). This account of Katja’s Polish ancestors is narrated in chapter 3, titled “Mein schönes Polen” (my beautiful Poland), and her revelation of these secrets seems to suggest a personal reckoning with family history. Then there is her great-uncle Judas Stern. His story, Katja implies in a forty-page rendition of what she has found, is truly unique. Stern had tried to kill the German envoy in Moscow in 1932, was convicted by the Soviet authorities in a show trial, and executed. This bizarre episode is related in chapter 4, “In der Welt der unorganisierten Materie” (in the world of unorganized material), and seems to illustrate Stern’s idiosyncratic nature, even madness. Later, Katja suggests that her paternal grandmother Rita might also have been insane (VE, 194–95)—with good cause, since she had witnessed how her baby brother’s head was smashed against a wall during the 1905 pogrom in Odessa (VE, 195). As a final example, there is the story of the family’s involvement in education for the deaf and the dumb, over seven generations, beginning with “Schimon der Hörende” (Simon, the listener) who founded a school in Vienna (VE, 49–50). (The name Simon is related to the verb “to hear” in Hebrew.) Indeed, the spread of Simon’s descendants across Europe, founding schools for the deaf and the dumb everywhere they settled, is presented almost as the fulfillment of a biblical mission: “Abraham zeugte Isaak. Isaak zeugte Jakob. Jakob zeugte Juda und seine Brüder and so on and so forth.” (Abraham begot Isaac. Isaac begot Jakob. Jakob begot Juda and his brothers and so on and so forth; VE, 50.) Katja admits here that she does not know whether she is alluding to the Old or the New Testament—more evidence of her lack of religious understanding—and the English addition further emphasizes her distance from this extraordinary history.

For all that Katja focuses on exceptional characters, however, her account of family history also presents, thus the title of chapter 1, “eine exemplarische Geschichte” (an exemplary story). Indeed, it can be argued that this representativeness motivates and propels her narrative. Her revelation of Ozjel’s secret life thus prompts her search to discover the fates of his first wife Estera (deported, destination unknown; VE, 132), their son Zygmunt, who was shot to death in Lublin, and his spouse, Hela, who was murdered in Treblinka (VE, 108). This discovery, in turn, leads Katja to Zygmunt’s niece, Mira, whose astonishing—but also entirely typical—story she learns when she speaks on the phone to the elderly survivor, now living in the United States: a ghetto; five camps; a death march; daring escapes; typhus; luck, cunning and deception; and occasional help from others (VE, 126–27). (Through Mira, Katja discovers living relatives on that side of her family, including distant cousins in London, who unwittingly are continuing the family vocation as teachers; VE, 125.) In the case of Stern, potential insanity initially appears to point, as noted above, to another family secret. Katja’s lengthy description of his show trial, however, suggests that his assassination attempt might well have been orchestrated by the GPU—the precursor to the KGB and, nowadays, the FSB—in an effort to destabilize the relationship with Germany. And there is a related plot strand in which the secret police in Odessa visit her grandfather Semjon—Stern’s brother—and intimidate the family, causing her father’s premature birth (VE, 141–42). Semjon, the onetime Bolshevik revolutionary who changed the family name, doesn’t tell his son about his uncle for many years and in any case keeps a low profile, for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. At the same time, he too worked for the secret police, although he resigned when he was ordered to investigate his brother-in-law, a physicist accused of an unspecified crime (VE, 141–45). Both Stern’s show trial and Semjon’s harassment thus hint at something more general, namely the opaque, absurd machinations of the Soviet state—and quite likely Soviet antisemitism. Katja summarizes all this via an allusion to Kafka’s Der Prozess (The trial; 1925), relating to the arrival of the GPU at Semjon’s house to pursue a crime of which he is not even aware: “Dieses Gesetz kenne ich nicht, sagte K. Desto schlimmer für Sie, sagte der Wächter.” (I don’t know this law, said K. All the worse for you, said the guard; VE, 141.)

The most exemplary aspect of Katja’s family history, however, may be contained within her account of her ancestors’ commitment to educating deaf and dumb children. She comments: “Unser Judentum blieb für mich taubstumm und die Taubstummheit jüdisch. Das war meine Geschichte, meine Herkunft, doch das war nicht ich.” (Our Judaism remained deaf and dumb for me and the condition of being deaf and dumb remained Jewish. That was my history, my origins, but it was not me; VE, 51.) At first glance, this confirms the gulf of incomprehension that separates her from her Jewish heritage. Yet her addendum that the state of being deaf and dumb is itself intrinsically Jewish is still more suggestive. Most obviously, this may be an allusion to family members who prefer not to speak about the past. Lida prefers not to speak about murdered relatives. Semjon remains silent about Stern. And her grandmother Rosa scribbles furiously in a notepad, slowly going blind, writing on the same sheet over and again, and never intending that her memories should be read (VE, 61–63). Yet there is also another possibility, even probability. For Katja, Jewishness cannot communicate itself to others and, as such, it remains esoteric at best and at worst “set apart.” To what extent can—or should—Jews emerge out of their ethnic, religious, and cultural particularity and participate as hearing and speaking citizens in non-Jewish majority discourses?9See Endelman, “Assimiliation and Assimilationism.”

A response to this question is implied in her family’s dedication to the education of deaf and dumb children, mostly Jewish, in schools founded across central and eastern Europe. Drawing on the Russian translation of the lost Yiddish newspaper article that is the starting point of her reconstruction of family history, Katja describes how her ancestor Simon Geller (or Heller) developed a technique for teaching the children to speak using a pencil to transmit the vibrations of the instructor’s voice to their mouths. In this way, she reports, the children learned to speak, in Hebrew and German, and with such great fluency that their speech was hardly different from that of people born hearing (VE, 53). This implies assimilation, even integration—Hebrew and German—even as it also alludes to how Jews are understood as not quite native. In addition, however, there are several other dimensions to the story—these are almost certainly unfamiliar to the reader, but we can suppose that the author Petrowskaja uncovered them in her research. First, Jews were overrepresented in the education of deaf and dumb children from the eighteenth century. Second, in the nineteenth-century debate between proponents of teaching sign language only and those who championed the acquisition of spoken language, Jewish instructors were pioneers of the new method, to better “integrate” their pupils into mainstream society. Third, both of these historical facts can be linked to certain features of Judaism, and especially to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.

Teaching deaf and dumb children to speak made it possible for them to become fully accepted as active participants in Jewish ritual. Within a religious tradition with a strong emphasis on orality, Marjoke Rietveld-Van Wingerden and Wim Westerman argue, being able to speak was a precondition for being seen as legally and morally competent.10See Rietveld-Van Wingerden and Westerman, “‘Hear, Israel.’” Katja’s ancestors had been enablers of this “becoming Jewish” for deaf and dumb children. Like many European Jews, though, they had later fallen silent themselves—in giving them back their voices, Katja revives their Jewish identity, and her own. More generally, Katja’s family is representative of the Haskalah that, from the late eighteenth century across central and eastern Europe, sought to introduce Judaism to Western modernity by emphasizing secular languages, abandoning traditional garb, and reforming Jewish ritual, and participating as active citizens in the majority society.11See Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment. The long-lost Yiddish newspaper article about Simon Geller’s pioneering work with deaf and dumb children was written by Faiwell Goldschmidt, a “Schriftsteller und Aufklärer” (writer and Enlightenment figure; VE, 52), and, as she researches this aspect of family history, Katja thinks of the “zahlreiche selbstlosen Männer der jüdischen Aufklärung” (numerous selfless men of the Jewish Enlightenment). These men (inevitably), she notes, were “beseelt von der Idee, Wissen zu verbreiten, es von Mund zu Mund weitertrugen. Für dieses vom Hören bessenene Volk war die gesprochene Sprache alles.” (Inspired by the idea of spreading knowledge, transmitted it from mouth to mouth. For this people, obsessed by listening, the spoken word was everything; VE, 55.)

Katja’s reconstruction of her family’s past frames her ancestors as representative, therefore, and specifically of the emergence of European Jews out of the ghetto over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12See Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation. This was a journey toward emancipation, assimilation, and integration that, after the Holocaust, many would renounce as a fateful error on the part of a community that had fooled itself that it could truly belong. Indeed, Katja’s account of the murder of her relatives in Babi Yar and elsewhere might appear to endorse this viewpoint, though there is no hint in the narrative that a different historical development would have been possible or even desirable, for example an embrace of the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine.13See Wistrich, “Zionism.” (Unlike in many other recent novels, Israel does not feature at all.) More generally, however, Katja’s family is representative of the relationship between Jewish particularism and a Jewish commitment to universalism that key proponents of the Haskalah movement emphasized time and again. Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783), for example, attempted to reconcile a defense of the particularity of Jewish rituals and practices, including rabbinic traditions, with his embrace of “natural religion,” that is, an Enlightenment view that all monotheist faiths are in essence expressions of a universalistic commitment to love, tolerance, and equality, and that these eternal truths can be arrived at through reason.14See Breuer, “Rabbinic Law.” See also Fogel, Jewish Universalisms. More concretely, Katja’s family embodies this same tension—sometimes productive, other times less so—between their dedication to their Jewishness, including Yiddish and Hebrew, and their aspiration to be worldly, that is, to engage beyond their Jewish context on behalf of humankind as a whole, as teachers, scientists, or revolutionaries.

The Holocaust largely destroyed the dense networks of Jewish social and political activism that reached across Europe, or displaced them to the United States, Britain, and Palestine/Israel. Genealogies were interrupted or eliminated. This is the novel’s second strand, and, here too, Katja’s subjunctive narration suggests the representative nature of what her relatives suffered. A succession of passages relating how different relatives were connected to the massacre at Babi Yar typifies the different ways in which Kyiv’s Jews more generally were exterminated in late 1941: the decision to flee or to remain, the march to the assembly point, casual executions, mass shootings and internment under mounds, betrayal, and—in very few cases—escape and survival. Katja reveals that she had requested books on the massacre from the library, and her account is no doubt shaped by the exemplary fates that works of history tend to offer up, therefore (VE, 183). A first section describes the ravine’s location (previously at the edge of the city but now enveloped by postwar developments), Katja’s visit to the site with her parents, the logistics of the killings, the memorialization of the event during the Soviet era, and a new memory culture after Ukrainian independence in 1991 (VE, 183–93). A few pages later, Katja picks up again, with an account of how her maternal great-grandmother, Anna, was killed in Babi Yar, having decided to stay in the city, along with her daughter Ljolja (VE, 197–203). (She notes the coincidence of Ljolja’s birthday with her nephew’s. His Bar Mitzvah affirms the family’s return to its faith seventy years after Ljolja, a non-practicing Jew, was killed; VE, 203.) Ljolja’s husband, a non-Jew and much older, saves himself and flourishes after the war. The following chapter concerns her great-uncle Abram, who hid when the order was given for Jews to assemble but whose Christian wife was betrayed and shot (VE, 205–8). (After the war, Abram changed his name to Arnold to evade Soviet antisemitism. Thousands of deaf and dumb Kyiv residents attended his funeral.) Finally, there is Esther’s story, including the invented account of how Katja’s father was saved by the removal of a ficus tree during his family’s escape (VE, 208–33).

Katja’s reconstruction of her family’s Jewish past and her reconstruction of her relatives’ murder as Jews in Kyiv in September 1941 both oscillate between singularity and representativeness. In the first strand, key figures in family legend appear as extraordinary, even exceptional, while the clan as a whole is seen to embody the assimilation and integration of broad swathes of the Jewish population from the eighteenth century. In the second strand, integration is followed by extermination, and the fates of individual family members are imagined, even invented, and exemplify the Holocaust by bullets (VE, 185–86). The question now arises, then, of whether this representative function extends beyond Jews to encompass the world, as it were. Certainly, Sabine Egger suggests that Katja frames Babi Yar and other sites of atrocity as “multidirectional memory spaces,”15Sabine Egger, “The Poetics of Movement.” while Godela Weiss-Sussex argues that the novel’s juxtaposition of pasts indicates an “extended and inclusive understanding of remembrance and belonging for the conceptualization of future communities.”16Weiss-Sussex, “‘Dass die tauben Geschichten aufflattern,’” 14. Likewise, Maria Roca Lizarazu speaks of the novel’s “futurity,”17See Roca Lizarazu, “Moments of Possibility.” and Susanne Rohr points to its “globalised transnational and trans-generational locus of consciousness.”18Rohr, “On Finding and Fabricating,” 538. For these scholars, in essence, Katja’s narrative points toward a universalization of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust and implies—potentially, at least—a basis for global solidarity.

There is plenty of evidence for readings of this kind. In her introductory summary to what happened at Babi Yar, correspondingly, Katja notes that the ravine continued to be used for mass killings for two more years after September 1941, until the Red Army took the city, and the victims included not only Jews but also Soviet POWs, sailors from the Kyiv fleet, young women, passer-by’s gathered up from the streets, Roma and Sinti, priests, and Ukrainian nationalists who had previously collaborated with the Germans (VE, 186). Later, Katja visits the former concentration camp at Mauthausen, in Austria. Her great-grandfather Wassilij had been interned as a Soviet prisoner-of-war, and she seems to parallel his fate not only with the Hungarian Jews who started a forced march from there in April 1945 (VE, 242) but also—with some ambivalence—the suffering of German POWs (VE, 253), when she cites the comments left by visitors to the website of the Austrian war graves commission.

Above all, it is during Katja’s observations on her visit to Babi Yar that she comes closest to universalizing the (largely) Jewish suffering that occurred there as a template for expressions of solidarity with all victims of persecution and genocide. In a passage also cited by some of the literary scholars mentioned above, she comments:

Katja’s meta-reflections on her response to Babi Yar once again raise the particularism/universalism issue, this time more explicitly. If her reconstruction of family history alludes to the enduring debate on how Jews can negotiate between ethnic, religious, and cultural particularity, on the one hand, and assimilation and integration, on the other—perhaps including a commitment to universalistic values and the betterment of the world—then her account of her relatives’ representative Holocaust experiences invokes a related discussion about what “meaning” is to be assigned to the genocide. Is the near-eradication of European Jews to be thought of as a singularly Jewish experience, or does it have universal significance as a crime against humanity? In some versions, this debate builds on a long tradition in Jewish and Christian religious thought of framing Jewish suffering as redemptive for all humankind20See Moyaert, “Redemptive Suffering.” and is set against Orthodox responses to the Holocaust (God’s absence, indifference, or anger, or the birth pangs of the coming of the Messiah) and restorative or Zionist interpretations (Jews must survive; they must be safe in their own state).21See Katz, “Shoah.” In recent years, specifically, the globalization of Holocaust memory has underpinned a broader political imperative to defend and even enforce universal human rights. This is what Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider describe as “cosmopolitan memory.”22Levy and Sznaider, The Holocaust. The violence inflicted on Jews, it is suggested, embodies the violence inflicted on other minorities, in the past and still today, and forms an injunction to intervene, morally, politically, and even militarily.23A. Dirk Moses argues that the construction of Jews as “exemplary victims” risks a depoliticization of the specific mechanisms of state violence. See Moses, The Problems of Genocide, especially 477–511.

Katja’s endorsement of a common—or cosmopolitan—memory is less emphatic than it at first appears, however, and it is not unconditional. When she asks her friend David whether any of his relatives were murdered at Babi Yar, for example, there is a hint of skepticism in her response to his pronouncement that it doesn’t matter whether he has this personal connection or not: “oder wünschte er sich, dass es unwichtig war?” (Or did he wish that it was not important; VE, 184). Katja’s interjection may suggest that, ultimately, we can only relate to suffering in which we are directly implicated. Immediately following this, Katja summarizes her own wishful thinking, that is, that she could walk through the site at Babi Yar and remain silent about the fact that her own relatives were murdered there:

Just as undermining of the universalizing potential of Katja’s Holocaust narrative is her detailed account of her grandfather Wassilij’s internment as a Soviet prisoner-of-war in Mauthausen, and of her visit to the former concentration camp. This report comes directly after her reconstruction of her relatives’ murder in September 1941. It could be assumed that the two episodes—Jewish suffering and the maltreatment of Soviet POWs—might shape a common memory of Nazi barbarism and the potential for solidarity. Indeed, Katja asks herself whether what she learns about Wassilij’s internment in Mauthausen implies “eine Mission” for her in the narrative present: “Ich werde nicht in die Vergangenheit katapultiert. Es passiert jetzt. Wann, wo und mit wem es passiert spielt keine Rolle.” (I am not catapulted back into the past. It is happening now. When, where, and to whom it is happening is not important; VE, 248.) It is not clear whether she means that the past is vivid to her today, or that similar things are still taking place, or both. In any case, she seems to imply that there is a responsibility to speak out on behalf of victims of persecution, whether then or now.

Yet Katja is not able to connect to her great-grandfather’s experience in any real way. Just as she did during an earlier visit to Auschwitz (VE, 58–60), she is at a loss to truly feel her way into what the victims endured and is incapable of generating anything more than a ritualistic, empty, and fleeting solidarity. In part, this has to do with the routinized and sanitized nature of contemporary memory culture, which can never reproduce the real horror: “Es müsste doch überall Dreck sein. Ich habe davon gelesen. Der Tod müsste stinken.” (There should be filth everywhere. I’ve read about it. Death should stink; VE, 247.) But it is also linked to our inability to put ourselves in others’ shoes and to imagine our way into their lives. In a dream sequence that transports her back to Mauthausen in 1945, she is not able to cross the threshold of Wassilij’s barracks in order to approach her grandfather in his bunk (VE, 245–48). (She also imagines herself pulling a variety of ribbons out of her pockets, as if to add color to a scene that she can only imagine in black and white; VE, 246.) If a descendant—with a special right of access to the victims’ authentic suffering, she speculates (VE, 258)—cannot mobilize empathy as a bridge between traumatic pasts, what chance do those not directly affected have, including perhaps the narrative’s likely non-Jewish readers?

Wassilij is not only a victim. He might have played a part in Stalin’s collectivization program, which resulted in the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s (the Holodomor; VE, 238). And Katja speculates that her grandfather might have mistreated fellow Jewish inmates in Mauthausen (VE, 249; 274–75), notwithstanding his marriage to a Jewish woman, Rosa, and their Jewish children. These possibilities again disrupt the potential for a common memory. After the war, Wassilij fails to contact his Jewish wife for forty-one years while living in secret in the same city. On his reappearance, it transpires that he has a vegetable garden, a typically Ukrainian pastime (VE, 234). His Jewish granddaughter Katja, however, is unable to enter this garden when she dreams of it decades later (VE, 238–39).

On his return from captivity, Katja’s grandfather was suspected of collaboration, interrogated, and subsequently marginalized, as many Soviet former POWs were (VE, 231). Wassilij’s story, therefore, connects Katja’s Holocaust account—Babi Yar, Mauthausen, and, told in interwoven passages, the forced march of Hungarian Jews through Austria (VE, 271–77)—with the novel’s third narrative strand, namely Soviet crimes. In general terms, these include show trials, the secret police, and torture (VE, 237–38), and Stalin’s collectivization program in the 1930s (VE, 178; 238). More specifically, however, the narrator’s focus is on the emergence of state-sponsored anti-Jewish sentiment from the 1950s.24See Korey, “Soviet Anti-Semitism.” The context, of course, is Stalin’s execution of members of the Jewish anti-fascist committee, Jewish intellectuals, and Yiddish poets—“Hitler hatte die Leser getötet und Stalin die Schriftsteller” (Hitler killed the readers, Stalin the writers; VE, 188)—establishing, Katja implies, a degree of continuity between the Nazis’ murderous designs and Soviet persecution: “Diejenigen, die den Krieg überlebt hatten, waren wieder in Gefahr. Juden, Halbjuden, Vierteljuden.” (Those who survived the war were in danger again. Jews, half-Jews, quarter-Jews; VE, 188.) The likely antisemitic machinations behind Stern’s show trial and his brother’s Semjon’s intimidation by the GPU have already been discussed above. Above all, however, it is the Soviet regime’s denial of the Jewishness of the Holocaust that concerns the narrator, since this amounted to a second erasure of those in her own family who were killed. It was only thirty-five years after the massacre at Babi Yar that the first monument was unveiled—for Soviet victims of fascism, as they were described, and “am falschen Ort und am falschen Tag.” (In the wrong place, and on the wrong day; VE, 187).25For a detailed analysis of Katja’s reflections on the Soviet repression of the Jewishness of the massacre, see Ortner, Transcultural Memory, 122–28. The fact that the 34,000 people killed on September 29–30, 1941, were not named as Jews reflects Soviet antisemitism, Katja insinuates.26For the Soviet memorialization of Babi Yar, see Baranova, “Conceptualizations.” For an account of how the Holocaust more generally was—or was not—remembered in the Soviet Union, see Weinberg, “The Politics of Remembering.” She describes how the ravine, once 2.5 km long and 60 m deep, had been filled with factory waste after the war and how, in 1961, the dam broke, resulting in 1,500 deaths (VE, 189). The Russian writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko is lauded for his (now well-known) poem recalling the Jewish tragedy—and ruing the Soviet repression of its memory—but this was a rare attempt to break the silence (VE, 189–90). (Yevtushenko’s poem “Babiyy Yar” appeared in 1961 and sparked a forceful response from the authorities and even other artists.)

The three juxtaposed strands of Katja’s narrative—Jewish family history, Nazi crimes, and Soviet repression—together present a picture of the violent disruptions that occur when one epoch ends and another begins, of the clash of ideas and ideologies, and of how ordinary people are caught up in conflicts that they can barely grasp. Within the broad sweep of eighteenth to mid-twentieth century European history that she describes, therefore, the near-extermination of Jews is clearly unique in its scale, geographical extent, and fanaticism, but it may also be representative of the persecution of other national, religious, and ethnic groups, including gypsies, Russian and even German POWs, Ukrainians, and many others not named in the novel. (And some, of course, were both victims and perpetrators.) Set against this exemplarity, however, is the specificity of what Katja discovers—or speculates—about her Jewish family, and especially about the murder of her relatives. This includes her great-­grandfather’s first wife, their son and his wife, Katja’s maternal grandparents, and, of course, Maybe Esther and her daughter Ljolja, as well as some more distant relatives, recently learned about, such as Benno, the seventeen-year-old brother of the niece of the son of her great-­grandfather’s first marriage, who was killed on a death march in May 1945 (VE, 276). These are the particularly Jewish stories that Katja seeks to recover from oblivion—and even erasure—and in imagining, or inventing, the detail of what might have happened to them, she also hopes to memorialize the millions of other Jewish victims of the Holocaust (VE, 268–69).

Like her fellow Soviet-born protagonist Izy in Superposition, Katja remains fixated on the specificity of the Jewish past that she has only just recovered. Yet she at least speculates what solidarity could look like, in contrast to Lola in Winternähe, whose sentimental empathy devolves into globetrotting and then back to resentment.27Kilcher, “Diasporakonzepte,” 135–36. In Vielleicht Esther, in summary, Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism seem to be finely balanced. A conceptual framework is created for a truly “universalistic, cosmopolitan” (Kilcher) Jewish worldliness but in the end history, and historical detail—whether fabulated or real—weigh too heavily.

Chapter 3 examines three recent novels whose Soviet- and German-born protagonists make a less ambivalent commitment to worldliness—whether to tikkun olam or a more prosaic kind of self-understanding within the Western secular mainstream—and who attempt to articulate more definitively what Jews are for, again with different outcomes. In these narratives, a more assertive self-positioning as post-religious, post-solipsistic, and even post-Holocaust implies less emphasis on Jewish particularism and instead a more allusive referencing of Jewish suffering as a trope connoting a history that inhibits integration into the global present or even as a metaphor that can be deployed as a resource for cosmopolitan engagement. In Trzebiner’s Die Enkelin, then, the Jewish experience is a trauma to be overcome rather than an ethical imperative, and popular culture is embraced as an escape from its oppressive legacy. In Salzmann’s Außer sich and Grjasnowa’s Der verlorene Sohn, in contrast, the Jewish past—and Jewishness itself—is queered, meaning that it is deliberately alienated from its conventional context, as a memory of the genocide or of what Jews have endured as Jews, and inserted into new forms of relationality with others.

Once Jewishness is largely cited rather than expressly articulated, it may be that it becomes so diffuse that it appears hardly legible. This ambivalence of “Jewish purpose”—to adapt British historian Adam Sutcliffe’s term29See Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For?, 1–24.—and Jewish invisibility is explored in Der verlorene Sohn, and in relation to Polish Jewish philosopher Isaac Deutscher’s typology of the “non-Jewish Jew.”30See Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew.” It is further scrutinized in the conclusion, which asks whether and to what extent German Jewish writing is becoming increasingly less Jewish and speculates what its future might be following the atrocities of October 7, 2023.