IN CONTRAST TO MANY OF the other authors associated with the eastern European turn, Katja Petrowskaja spent a considerable part of her formative years in the Ukraine, during the Soviet regime. Born in 1970, she only moved to Berlin in the year 1999 and began her career as an author shortly thereafter. Vielleicht Esther (Maybe Esther, 2015) is therefore informed by her own experience of being raised under the Soviet system. The book has many autobiographical elements, and there are some clear indications that the author is identical with the narrator and the character. According to Zipfel, these are the main characteristics of autobiographical narrations. This supposition is strengthened by the fact that the author and the narrator share the same name. At some point, the narrator reports that her family name would have been Stern if her grandfather had not changed it to Petrowskij, which is the male version of Petrowskaja (VE, 142; ME, 124). Thus the book is often perceived as an autobiography. However, the book does not coincide with the definition of a classical autobiography in which an author at a late stage of life reconstructs his/her individual life story from childhood onwards. It is only partly a retrospective account of the author's own life. It seems more adequate to define the book according to its subtitle in the English translation: “A Family Story.” However, the subtitle of the German original, “Geschichten” (stories), complicates that definition by implying that it is an assemblage of stories. Furthermore, the German word “Geschichten” connotes fictionality. Thus the book conjoins autobiography, a (factual) family story, and fiction. The element of fiction seems to have a distinct function in the novel, which is explained in a sequence where the narrator's father comforts her in her despair about the unreliability of her own and her father's memory. He says: “Manchmal ist es gerade die Priese Dichtung, welche die Erinnerung wahrheitsgetreu macht” (VE, 219; Sometimes that pinch of poetry is the very thing that makes memory true, ME, 195). Thus the narrator has to realize that she is unable to tell the whole truth about either her own or her family's past. Rather, the disjointedness of the book, which is fragmented into different “stories,” underlines the impossibility of writing a coherent narration about the past.