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As a child I thought a family tree was something like a Christmas tree, a tree with decorations from old boxes - some baubles break, fragile as they are, some angels are ugly and sturdy and remain intact through every move.

Katja Petrowskaja was born in Ukraine, to a Russian speaking Jewish-descended but now non-religious and Soviet family, with tradition of teaching deaf-mutes; she has a Polish-born grandmother and a father who read literature in Polish not available in Russia; she studied in Estonia and Russia and lives in Germany. This book was written in German � a language she picked up at the same time as her brother decided to learn Hebrew � neither of them speaking the historical amalgam of Yiddish, the near eradication of which her father explains as “Hitler killed the readers and Stalin the writers� - a language her great-grandmother (the maybe Esther of the book’s title) was shot for speaking to a German officer as she tried to make her way to the Jewish round up in Kiev that would preceded the Babi Yar massacre.

And there is much of the sense of this book � ostensibly a documented research into family history, written in what could be described as a Sebaldesque style (the rather lazy comparison being enhanced by the inclusion of black and white photos of family members), but one which explores the terrible and lasting impact of the Holocaust on Central/Eastern Europe, but one which also explores the extra ambiguities in that impact due to the blurring and mixing of national, super-national, political, linguistic and religious influences. For example, the hopelessly and fatally optimistic view of the Jews in Kiev that the common root of their Yiddish with the language of the invaders meant that they should not fear the Germans, in willful denial of reports that they were already aware of from their fellow Jews in Poland..

The author’s research really started when her mother’s sister � the last of the family to maintain the deaf-mute tradition and witness to many events dies:

History begins when there are no more people to ask � I had no one left to question, no one who could still recall those times. All I had were fragments of memory, note of dubious value, and documents in distant archives �. I was at the mercy of history

The search is also motivated by a family belief in the complexity of her family and its role in the centre of some of the most terrible events of the 20th Century - a great Uncle whose attempted assassination of a German ambassador played a part in increasing the tensions between Russia and Germany, various relatives killed in concentration camps or massacres.

I had thought that telling the story of the few people who happened to be my relatives was all that was needed to conjure up the entire twentieth century ……�. My family had just about everything I had arrogantly thought

Her quest to understand the family history leads her to return to areas where some of the most important family events occurred:

I was travelling to Poland with the same destination and the same train- assuming the urge to search for what has vanished can be defined as a destination at all

Her research makes extensive use of Google � which enables her to trace distant family members, those who witnessed events which occurred to her family and leads her to meet others on similar quests.

if you google yourself, at some point your namesakes vanish, and what remains is only you �. How is democracy supposed to work if you get only what you have searched for and if you ware what you search, and you never feel alone or you always do since you never get the chance to meet the others, who are not like you, and that’s how it is with the search, you come across like minded people. God googles our paths, so that we stay put in our grooves

I sifted through � old papers � on the internet. The search command highlighted the word deaf in yellow, as though Google knew yellow was the colour of Jewsihness

Her task is made harder by the complexities in her family history � people changing their name to disguise their origins or to re-signal their loyalties, and whole branches of the family being effectively taken out from the family history in the interests of self-preservation.

In an earlier time �. having a large family was a curse, because relatives could be members of the White Army, saboteurs, noblemen, kulaks, overeducated “enemies of the people� living abroad, their children, and other dubious characters and everyone was under suspicion, so families suffered a convenient loss of memory, often in order to save themselves, even though it rarely helped, and on special occasion, any relatives who might fit these categories were generally forgotten, often hidden from their children, and families dwindled: whole branches of families were pared down

And by the realisation that not all of the stories passed down in her family are either fully substantiated

Our family’s history is predicated on a questionable translation without a source text, and I am now telling the story of this family in German without there ever having been a Russian original

Or given to neat explanations � a series of revelations which do not fit her mental pictures, including a family ancestor known as Adolf, leads to:

The past betrayed my expectations, slipping out of my grasp and committing one faux pas after another …� [these] confirmed my fear that I had no power over the past, it lives as it pleases, and just does not manage to die

At times its clear that the historical records, the power of Google and the remaining eye-witnesses still leave gaps � at which point the author fills in the gaps with her imagination:

As I was speaking so enthusiastically and offhandedly and saying things I would certainly not define as a lie, my imagination took wing, and I drifted further and further without the slightest fear of going over the cliff

This is a complex book � and not one where the reader can easily follow the different family relationships; at times the author’s research can (at least as written down) to lack order and logic, but nevertheless the book gives a powerful and moving historical insight.

Sometimes I had the feeling that in picking my way through the rubble of history, I was gradually losing the sense not only of my search, but of my entire life. I wanted to bring far too many of the dead back to life and had not thought through a strategy to do so. I read random books; I travelled through random cities and in the process made pointless, even false movements. But maybe � and this is only a bold assumption on my part � I stirred up the ghosts of the past with all this moving around, touching a tender membrane somewhere in the lowest layer of heaven, one that a human being might well reach.