Katja Petrowskaja — author with roots in the USSR
Katja Petrowskaja is a Ukrainian-born German-language author and journalist whose debut book Maybe Esther (2014) — an exploration of her family's multilingual, multinational history across the 20th century's catastrophes — became an international literary sensation, translated into 30 languages and winning the Bachmann Prize.
Tracing the roots — Kyiv (Ukraine)
Born in Kyiv (USSR) in 1970 into a family that embodies the complexity of the Soviet Jewish intellectual experience — her grandfather was a Zionist revolutionary, her great-aunt was shot by the Nazis in Kyiv — Petrowskaja writes in German, her fourth language. Maybe Esther is one of the most profound literary excavations of what the Russian Empire and USSR meant for Jewish families across generations.
Kyiv (Ukraine). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"Every family has its own Babel — its own story of languages lost and found."