“Maybe Esther” by Katya Petrovskaya as an Attempt to Overcome and Tame the Traumatic Past

Abstract

This article focuses on the specificity of looking at family past in Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014), Katya Petrovskaya’s debut novel. Born in Kiev and living in Germany, a writer of Jewish descent tells the story of her family. By doing this, Petrovskaya tries to overcome the traumatic experience and gain her own identity. The purpose of the reflections presented in the article is to show the multidimensionality of memory and its key role in the process of forming an individual’s self-consciousness. The analysis of the research material is largely based on the theoretical assumptions of J. K. Olick, A. Assmann and E. Rybitskaya (memory in the perspective of geopoetics).