Juras letzter Winter is a self-serious essay-novel about reading, guilt, German violence, fathers, mothers, old age, Ukraine, Leningrad, and the diary of the starving Soviet teenager Jura Rjabinkin. It wants to be morally rigorous, historically alert, intimate, philosophical, and formally daring. Mostly, it is an overextended act of literary self-importance in which a dead boy from the Siege of Leningrad is repeatedly dragged into the narrator’s private German family drama so the narrator can feel, think, confess, correct himself, and then feel superior for correcting himself.
The premise is simple enough. An elderly German narrator becomes obsessed with Jura Rjabinkin, a sixteen-year-old boy whose diary begins on 22 June 1941, the day Germany invades the Soviet Union, and ends in early January 1942, when Jura is too starved and weak to keep writing. Jura lives in Leningrad with his mother Antonia and younger sister Ira. His father is absent, imprisoned in Ufa for “counterrevolutionary” activity after leaving the family. His aunt Tina, a military doctor, raised him for his first seven years and remains his emotional true mother. Jura is sick, nearly blind in one eye, weak-lunged, intellectual, proud, hungry for books, history, chess, the sea, dignity, and eventually for anything edible.
The narrator discovers Jura through Daniil Granin’s 2014 Bundestag speech about the Siege of Leningrad. Granin uses Jura’s diary as an example of conscience under hunger: the boy steals from the food rations of his mother and sister, then records his shame. The narrator’s project becomes to read, translate, interpret, and somehow “speak with” Jura. That could have been a stark book about one diary and one historical catastrophe. Instead, the novel immediately turns into an elaborate mirror chamber in which Jura’s starvation keeps triggering the narrator’s childhood memories, father wounds, mother wounds, failed music career, Nazi inheritance, political guilt, and old-man anxieties.
