Across academy and industry, theory and practice, translation is increasingly understood to be a “cluster concept.” In other words, this fuzzy term encompasses a broad spectrum of practices that are inherently interdisciplinary, versatile, open-ended, and collaborative. Katja Petrowskaja’s translingual autofiction Vielleicht Esther (2014; Maybe Esther, 2019) likewise resists easy definition. Presenting readers with a patchwork of genres and languages, it weaves together diverse interdisciplinary strands, from historical documentation and autobiographical introspection to philological and philosophical meditation. At times, these pursuits appear contradictory, and Petrowskaja knowingly frustrates our desire for a historical work that demystifies. Her hydra-headed “Text des Nachgedächtnisses” (text of postmemory) is only incidentally a travelogue, only superficially a family history, and only tangentially a novel; it betrays diffuse personal, authorial and translational desires, since her practice is led by conflicting urges to disentangle threads and to multiply entanglements. In a series of interconnected narrative fragments, the first-person narrator (also named Katja) sets off from Berlin to venture across Central and Eastern Europe, gathering traces of her ancestors who were murdered in the Holocaust. Petrowskaja is a Ukrainian Jew born twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, who has since married a German, migrated to Germany, and ostensibly integrated into German culture and language. She admits that her knowledge of German far outstrips her grasp of Yiddish or Hebrew. Her historical investigation is simultaneously a linguistic adventure. As she traverses ghostly landscapes across Poland, Ukraine, and Austria, visiting concentration camps, mass graves, museums, archives, and memorials, Katja is constantly translating. Her self-conscious, translingual narration offers a poignant commentary on the challenges and opportunities arising from linguistic contact. The translational hurdles she encounters reflect the shifting borders, bodies, languages, and ideologies that constitute Europe’s hybridity, particularly Central and Eastern Europe over the last century. Each stop on her journey provides clues, but also poses further questions. Cities like Kyiv and Berlin sustain multiple conflicting memories and evoke contradictory associations that complicate the traditional binary between the foreign and the familiar, rendering the very notion of Heimat (homeland) irrevocably unheimlich (eery/uncanny). German, Russian, Ukrainian, English, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew terms surface unexpectedly.