Seeing the World Through Books

“We’re all one and the same, and I’ll prove it to you.  Take, for example, the merchants of Pinsk.  Just last week, weren’t they all rounded up and interrogated, then imprisoned equally?  The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Jews–no one group got discriminated against.  Hah!  So there you have it, we are all equal.”–Cornelius Kovzalo, Village Chairman of Hlaby, and former horse-thief.

This memorable depiction of the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by the brutal Stalinists in 1939, with their bloodshed and violence, is filled with trenchant observations of real people behaving realistically during times of real crisis.  In clear, unadorned prose, author Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants with sensitivity and an awareness both of their independent spirit and of their shared values, contrasting them with the mindless, bureaucratic officials who enjoy wielding power over human beings who have become mere ciphers to them.  A sense of dark humor and irony, which may be the only thing that makes survival possible, distinguishes this novel from other novels of this period, and no reader will doubt that this book is written by a someone who has seen the atrocities unfold, experienced the injustices, empathized with his fellow citizens, and felt compelled to tell the world about the abuses.  Author Theodore Odrach himself remains a mystery, however–an enormously gifted writer who arrived in Canada in 1953 and lived in obscurity there until his death in 1964, at the age of fifty-three.

In an article entitled “Unsung Writer, Unknown Identity,” Michael Posner, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, tells the stories of “Theodore Odrach” and his daughter Erma, who has become the translator of his novels and short stories, a project on which she has worked for twenty years and which is now beginning to bear fruit.  A number of her father’s short stories have been published to great acclaim in serious literary journals during those years, and this novel has now been published for the first time in English.  Erma Odrach herself is only beginning to discover who her father really was, however.  His life after his escape from the Soviet Union appears to have been devoted to becoming as anonymous as possible in Toronto, thereby protecting his young family there, as well as any surviving family in the Ukraine.  Now, with the publication of this remarkable novel, the world may finally discover a writer whose war-time observations have been compared with those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and whose dark humor has been compared to that of Anton Chekhov, heady company, indeed.

Odrach sets his story in Hlaby, in the Pinsk Marshes, an enormous wetland which extends into Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, a place which is so remote that it cannot be reached except in the winter when the marsh is frozen.  Its people are subsistence farmers who have grown up speaking, first, Polish, and later Ukrainian.  When the Stalinists arrive in 1939, however, they announce that henceforth this village will be part of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic.  All their schools will be taught in Belarussian, and all their business dealings will be in Belarussian,  despite the fact that almost no one in the area speaks that language, knows it, or can teach it.  The penalties for non-compliance are extreme, one of the novel’s many horrors. The largest farm in the area has been collectivized, its owner beaten to death.  The innocent people employed on that farm are under suspicion of subversion.  All churches and temples are outlawed.  The former headmaster of the school has been killed while trying to escape the revolutionaries, and the new headmaster, the intelligent and sympathetic Ivan Kulik, is hard pressed to remain silent as he sees innocent people taken from the village to the nearest rail line and put into boxcars for Siberia–if they are lucky.

The Stalinist officials here are characterized by their stupidity and their mindless adherence to regulations and quotas, which make no sense for this village, and Odrach must walk a fine line as he creates dark humor at their expense while never making light of their very real power.  His sense of what makes these sadistic officials “tick” makes them as frighteningly real for the reader as they must have been for the peasants.  Still everyone tries to lead a “normal” life, and this small village becomes the world “writ small.”  An argument between the Ukrainian parents of Marusia, a beautiful girl to whom Kulik is attracted, is full of hilarious insults, a scene worthy of the best farces.  Marusia, who has Russian pretensions, actually “envied her friends whose parents were able to maintain well balanced arguments in Russian without using the slightest Ukrainian word.”

Details such as this emphasize Odrach’s instinctive recognition of key details to reveal personality, which allows him to tell stories within stories with a straightforward simplicity which makes the novel come alive.  As the winter turns into spring, the well developed characters search for love, go to a New Year’s Eve dance, travel to conferences, attend a general meeting (where they show their displeasure by electing a drunkard, a madwoman, and a murderer to the Praesidium), and deal with rebellious second-graders, always, however, on the lookout for informers and always unable to share their true feelings about the revolution.  Several are arrested, interrogated, and released, raising suspicions that dossiers are being prepared for their eventual expulsion from the community, if not their deaths.  As the novel comes to a close, the reader is reminded again of Theodore Odrach’s own life (described in the Introduction by T. F. Rigelhof), and one can only wonder if this moving conclusion is truth, not fiction.

Notes:  The author’s photo appears on his website:  http://theodoreodrach.com.  Erma Odrach’s photo appears on her author page on Goodreads.

The photo of the Pinsk Marshes is from the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. One of the largest marshes in the world, much of it has been contaminated by the explosion at nearby Chernobyl.  The marshes cover roughly 38,000 square miles.

This novel is on my list of ALL-TIME FAVORITES .