Talk: Shards of Places, Shards of Time: Katja Petrowskaja’s Modernist Poetics of History
ZoomZoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89607162040 A family story, a memoir, a travelogue, an intimate history of Jewish migration and persecution in the twentieth century—fitting into neither of these categories neatly, and yet resonating with all of them, Katja Petrowskaja’s Maybe Esther (2019; Vielleicht Esther, 2014) relates the narrator’s journey from Berlin to piece together her family’s history across Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia. This presentation considers fragmentation as the text’s key aesthetic quiddity to ask how ...