Maybe Esther: A Family Story Between Memory and Forgetting

The writer Katja Petrowskaja 
in conversation with Sasha Senderovich (Slavic)

How do you talk about what you can’t know, and how do you bring the past to life? The writer Katja Petrowskaja wanted to create a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents, some of whom lived through and others died in the 20th century's many calamities, including Stalinism and the Holocaust. In the stories of her travels to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, and the United States, Petrowskaja reflects on a fragmented and traumatized century and brings to light family figures who threaten to drift into obscurity. Maybe Esther is a poignant, haunting investigation of the effects of history on one family as well as a deeply affecting exploration of memory. In conversation with Assistant Professor Sasha Senderovich (Slavic, Jewish Studies), Petrowskaja will discuss her 2013 literary memoir, recently translated from German into English by Shelley Frisch.

Katja Petrowskaja was born in 1970 in Kyiv, Ukraine, studied literature at the University of Tartu in Estonia, and was awarded fellowships to study at Columbia University and Stanford University. She received her doctorate in Moscow. Since 1999, she has lived and worked as a journalist in Berlin. Maybe Esther (English translation in 2018 by Shelley Frisch) is her first book,  was awarded the prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2013 in Germany, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Pushkin House Prize in the U.K.

Free and open to UW students, faculty, staff, and the larger public.

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For more info or questions, please contact Sasha Senderovich, senderov@uw.edu