(This novel is a major literary discovery, and Odrach is d...)
This novel is a major literary discovery, and Odrach is drawing favorable comparisons with such eminent writers as Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn. Odrach wrote in Ukrainian, while living an exile's life in Toronto. This remarkable book is a microcosm of Soviet history, and Odrach provides a first-hand account of events during the Stalinist era that newsreels never covered. It has special value as a sensitive and realistic portrait of the times, while capturing the internal drama of the characters with psychological concision. Odrach creates a powerful and moving picture, and manages to show what life was really like under the brutal dictatorship of Stalin, and brings cataclysmic events of history to a human scale.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0897335627/?tag=2022091-20
Odrach was born in Mysatichia, outside of Pinsk, Belarus (then a part of Czarist Russia). Not much is known about his early life, except that he was born to a Jewish family, the youngest of several children and extremely devoted to his mother.
Vilnius University.
He is generally known as the "writer of the Pinsk Marshes."
An unruly child, at the age of nine, after committing a petty offense, he was sent by Polish authorities who then controlled the area to a reform school for boys in Vilnius. After serving his time, doing odd renovation jobs around town, at the age of eighteen, Odrach enrolled in the Stefan Batory University (now Vilnius University), where he went on to earn a degree in ancient history and philosophy. With the Soviet invasion of Vilnius in 1939, Odrach fled and returned to his native Belarus, landing a position as headmaster of a grammar school outside of Pinsk.
Denounced by the Soviets and briefly imprisoned, he then headed south to Ukraine, Volyn Oblast, where he edited several underground newspapers.
Still pursued by the Soviets and ultimately forced into hiding, with his name now changed from Sholomitsky to Odrach, he managed to escape to Slovakia by way of the Carpathian Mountains. With the war’s end, Odrach roamed around Europe for several years.
They lived in Manchester approximately five years and worked as weavers in a linen factory. Working by day in a nearby printing house, by night, returning home, Odrach focused on his writing.
He produced novels and short stories as well as articles for local Ukrainian newspapers.
As his books were banned in the Soviet Union, he depended on the small Western immigrant community for his readership. All of Odrach’s major works were written in his Toronto home until his death from a stroke in 1964. Wave of Terror, detailing the horrors of living under Joseph Stalin, is Odrach’s first novel to appear in English.
(This novel is a major literary discovery, and Odrach is d...)
