Katja Petrowskaja

The narrator-protagonist sets off from Berlin on a long journey through the countries to the east of Germany, across that vast geopolitical space where everything seems to have taken place unbeknownst to us Western Europeans. First, she visits the grand German Historical Museum in Berlin with her daughter (a visit I recommend to everyone), and in the area dedicated to the Shoah, her daughter asks her: > where are we here on this panel, Mama? (...) I would have liked to add that we did not appear in that image at all . Yet that is not true, and it is perhaps for this reason that she seeks to trace back her family tree: Jewish, partly Polish and partly Russian, victim of dramatic upheavals: the collapse of great empires, the Russian Civil War, the rebirth and partition of Poland, Nazism and Stalinism with their massacres, slaughters, ghettos, concentration camps, millions of dead; and worse still, the loss of one's own language and one's own history. And indeed the author skips, “in an odd and clumsy way, like the needle on a record that has reached its end.” Names and pet names follow one another along the family tree, and it is futile to identify and remember them; the confusion is perhaps intentional. Certain passages of the narrative leave a lasting impression, such as the genocide at Babi Yar, not least through the words of the great poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (“Every old man shot here/me. Every child shot here/me”). In general, people, events, places, and words are like “lost scripts,” inscriptions found by chance that one tries to decipher, without even understanding which alphabet they belong to. > I realized that I had arrived too late, that knowledge had been lost, and I lacked the strength to recover it; I had lingered, with my birth and in general; it was not a fault, it was just too late . But does it make sense, then, to search for one's roots? Or does that “naturally” used by the author at the opening of the story serve to > underline the senselessness of her journey, (...) as if that disappearance and that nothingness were natural or even obvious phenomena . In Warsaw, the author believed she had found the house where her family had lived, only to discover it was another one, now destroyed. > During the night I couldn't sleep, I dreamed of the sauna, the ghetto, naked bodies twisted in death or pleasure, I dreamed of difference, men and women, (...) I don't know whether I was ever among my own people and who my people are, these ruins around us and inside us, and the transition from one language to another that I undertake in order to be on both sides, to be at once me or not-me, (...) in German language is feminine, in Russian it is masculine, what have I done with this exchange? It is a difficult book due to its disorderly plot, as if it were an assemblage of anecdotes, places, and characters crowding the mind without finding an order, a rational arrangement. It is as if memory loomed over and overwhelmed the protagonist; the images are too powerful, the pain too intense. > Knife blades emerge from the wall and move a short distance from the body. They hang somewhere, (...) and you describe them from a theoretical perspective, (...) but you cannot convey that terror, nor the horror of their presence, because to convey it means acknowledging it and granting it access. So terrible are these things. Granted, the family history is exceptional, but one wonders whether it truly makes sense to lift the lid on the past—what does it lead to, if not tears and delirium? The novel closes with an emblematic episode. > When I found myself in front of the house that was supposed to be mine, (...) an elderly lady (...) said to me—or was it perhaps a reprimand?—I've run into you a bit too often around here lately! And in astonishment I replied that I hadn't been there in years. That doesn't count for anything, she said . It is a splendid metaphor for the dark fascination of remembrance. Why read it? It is difficult, yet elegant and refined. It offers a narrative reflection of a history and culture unknown to us