Narrative Nonfiction Review: Maybe Esther

Summary: The sentence-level writing in this book was beautiful and I enjoyed the unique look at WWII history, but parts were too surreal or too poetic for me to follow.

Ruminating. Obsessive. Anxious. These are the words that come to mind if I try to capture Maybe Esther in just one word. There are obvious subject matter words I could reach for – Holocaust, family, WWII. These feel generic to me though. The unique part of this book is the style and tone in which it’s told. It made me feel as though I had joined the author in a claustrophobic room, pacing around her memories of her ancestors and the horrors inflicted on them during WWII.

The book is written as collection of very short vignettes. Initially, this felt quite disjointed. I struggled to follow exactly what the author was telling me about her childhood due to the poetic language she used. The writing was gorgeous. I frequently had to pause and spend time with the poignant sentiments she expressed in beautiful prose. Even early on, when I struggled at the paragraph level, the author’s sentence level-writing stopped my in my tracks.

The book does become more cohesive as it goes. Vignettes are more likely to occur linearly in time. They’re also grouped by topic, mostly about specific family members. The breaking up of the narrative into pieces also felt appropriate as I began to understand the impact of family trauma on the author. Some of her family were Jewish and some are Jewish again. Others discarded that identity to survive. Some branches of the family forgot other politically inconvenient branches, first intentionally and then habitually. All of this leave the author was a shattered sense of identity. She seems uncertain about both her nationality and her Jewishness. And in this book, she desperately pursues the truth of who here ancestors were and what they experienced.

This book was a little too surreal and experimental to be my very favorite kind of read. I loved the sentence-level writing though and thought the author told an important story from an interesting perspective. I learned a lot and I enjoyed doing it, despite the difficult subject matter. Definitely one I’d recommend to people who like more literary nonfiction; who want a unique take on WWII; or who are interested in ideas about the unreliability of memory.

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