The Haunted Landscape of Babi Yar: Memory, Language, and the Exploration of Holocaust Spaces in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014)

Summary

Introduction

The Tower of Faces, a permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, comprises some one thousand photographs of the residents of Eisiskes. Over a two-day period on September 25 and 26, 1941, the entire Jewish community of this town in southeastern Lithuania was murdered by Nazi Einsatzgruppen with the help of local auxiliaries. The photographs that constitute the towering memorial are reproductions of those taken in Eisiskes between 1890 and 1941 and later collected by the historian Dr. Yaffa Eliach from former shtetl residents who had fled Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. Documenting the vibrancy of Jewish familial, societal, and economic relationships, these images are a haunting photographic memorial to a lost community and a lost way of life. Carved in stone at the entrance to that same museum, the words of Romanian-born Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel are a powerful, poignant reminder: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

In what follows, I will explore how the author Katja Petrowskaja bears witness in her critically acclaimed literary debut Vielleicht Esther (2014, Maybe Esther, 2018) to familial bonds so brutally ruptured by the Holocaust. Photographs of family members and of various locations that feature in the first-person narrator’s quest to learn more about her ancestors are inserted at various points in the text, even if, as Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer observe, photos invariably remain “haunting spectres,” signaling not only “a visceral material connection to the past” and carrying its traces forward, but also embodying “the very fractured process of its transmission.” Hirsch has written extensively about the concept of postmemory, which she defines as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.” Postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Vielleicht Esther explores what Hirsch has described as “the connections and discontinuities between generations, the gaps in knowledge that define the aftermath of trauma.”