Book review: Maybe Esther

A Nazi killed the eponymous Esther, too frail to flee, outside her own house. But the stand-out character is Petrowskaja’s great-uncle, Judas Stern, assassin, who, in March 1932, gunned down a German diplomat in central Moscow. Despite a show trial, enthrallingly narrated, Stern’s motive remains obscure.

Did he seek to destabilise Russian-German relations? Was he protesting at popular hunger, caused by forced grain exports? Or was there a calculated intent to inspire copycat killings like the Reichstag fire of 1933? “Every family has its one meshuggeneh” shrugs Petrowskaja’s father when she probes this long-held family secret.

Maybe Esther is a lesson in luminous genealogy. What Petrowskaja calls “the rubble of history” is not sifted with a hefty spade. It is spun with the finesse of a lacemaker. It is not always pretty: “The search engine knows my preferences — catastrophes first,” Petrowskaja writes. But even the tragedies are leavened by wit and lyricism, by dreaming up the past where archives, letters, museums and death camps fail to deliver it.

Petrowskaja embraces uncertainty as part of the process (hence the title’s conditional adverb), and accepts that chance often dictates life’s direction. Her brother embraced the Judaism their father had left, starting to learn Hebrew as Petrowskaja herself fell in love with a German and moved to Berlin.

She has written, undoubtedly, to make sense of the world and her place in it. “Maybe,” she writes, “— and this is only a bold assumption on my part – I stirred up the ghosts of the past…touching a tender membrane somewhere in the lowest layer of heaven, one that a human being might still reach.”

Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer