‘Maybe Esther’: The Holocaust in Ukrainian

Her great-grandmother lost her name to time, but it may have been Esther. Maybe Esther. Or maybe not.

This story is of maybes, as it's impossible to know everything for sure. Even if this everything is about your family who lived in Ukraine during the World War II. Even if this everything is about massacres carried out by German forces in the Babi Yar ravine, which is in Kiev.

Katja Petrowskaja, a German writer with family roots in Ukraine, was born in Kiev in 1970 and moved to Berlin in 1999. Known for her journalistic works in Neuen Zürcher Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, she stormed into the literary world with her debut novel, Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther), in 2013.

The book, translated into 20 languages, won high-prestige awards, including Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis (2013), Ernst-Toller-Preis (2014), and Premio Strega Europeo (2015). This original autobiographical novel describing Jewish-Russian-Ukrainian-Polish family relations during the World War II and The Holocaust in The Babi Yar ravine couldn't stay unnoticed by Ukrainians who felt the pain of their antecedents killed by the Nazis and considered the victims of terrible massacres that took place on their lands.

Based on the above, it comes as no surprise that Maybe Esther has got its Ukrainian voice when translated by Yurko Prokhasko and presented at Lviv Book Forum in September 2015.a Petrowskaja doesn't consider her book a novel, calling it a collection of stories describing her search for meaning through attempts to create a family tree of relatives scattered across different continents due to The Holocaust. While others read a lot to write better, Katja creates a remarkable cast of characters with her great-grandmother, Maybe Esther, as a central one to help readers see historical facts from participants' perspective and understand the level of this tragedy in people's destinies, not numbers.

On the line between free association and strict structure of narration, this story is about a family, travels, love, and searches… This story is about evacuation, escape, concentration camps, death marches, and the Babi Yar.

Language is one more adventure in the book. Katja admits it, emphasizing the issue of translation in her interviews right along and describing it as follows:

“When I wrote it in Germany, I imagined my reader a German guy of my age, born and raised in particular place and time. It remained unclear for me how to translate all those language games, internal tension, and shyness of the individual who learned German, being an adult already. My German was not good, and I used some words or collocations that only a person from the surroundings could understand.

It's a mess of Russian and German languages with some Ukrainian undertones, so I didn't understand what a translator could deal with that.”

The result was worth the effort.

Ukrainian readers have got a brilliant work of two talented literary figures. Maybe Esther in Ukrainian demonstrates a combination of alliterations, which speak for a high professionalism of the translator.

“I've read the Ukrainian translation of my book,” Katja says. “It's wonderful: stylish, rhythmic, and tasty. And alien at the same time. You see, it's the same problem with all translations: when you read them, you always have this oh-my-god-what-is-that thought in mind. But the Ukrainian translation is surprisingly warm. And the thing is the language itself, not its separate dialectisms. It's about the tone: it sounds as if people who speak it came from a comfortable and warm world. I don't know if this owes to Yurko Prokhasko himself, but it's the different world where everything becomes cozy. The book doesn't have such coziness, but its translation does.”

Judging from the fact that Maybe Esther translation appeared among the 2015 main literature events in Ukraine, it may be concluded that The Holocaust problem remains deeply concerned though still concealed in Ukrainian modern literature.

“It seems I come back here too often,” the last words of the story whisper.

It's a book about travels, real and imaginary ones. The stories from Maybe Esther are attempts to come back to the place you've never been before, listen to the family stories no one has told, and hear your inner self.

It's the attempt to come back to a family tree blossoming with new names of relatives that did not exist before. Mainly dead. Mainly those having come by the death's door during The Holocaust.

Lesley Vos is a writer and passionate blogger who contributes to numerous online publications, including Times of Israel, Elite Daily, and others.