Examiner.com

Before reading Wave of Terror, by Theodore Odrach I was only aware ‘in passing’ of the history of Stalin’s Russia. This is a time period that I haven’t read, in fact I’m not sure how much literature there is out there on the subject that would be as true to life and as Wave of Terror while still being a pleasure to read.

From the first page I was sucked into Kulik’s world, his loves, his dreams and eventually his terror. This is not a novel to be read as ‘candy’; to idly flit through the prose without paying much attention to the story. Wave doesn’t allow that. It is a story to be savoured slowly so that every layer, every nuance, is fully understood.

Odrach’s depiction of the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by the Stalinists in 1939, with their bloody violence and sweeping paranoia, is filled with sharp observations of real people behaving as they would during times of real crisis. And sometimes, that isn’t ‘flattering’, but the author made sure it was at least amusing, which took some of the weight off the topic of this novel.

Theodore Odrach depicts the lives of rural peasants in ‘Stalin’s Russia’ with sensitivity and he focuses on their independent spirit and values that the bureaucratic officials try to crush from them. The underlying humour and irony sets Wave of Terror apart from other novels of this period, and it is obvious that this is a firsthand account of the atrocities and injustices experienced by the people at the time.

Odrach sets his story in Hlaby, (in the Pinsk Marshes; an enormous wetland that extends into Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine) a place so remote that it can't be reached except in the winter when the marsh is frozen. Its people are farmers who have grown up speaking first Polish and later Ukrainian. When the Stalinists arrive in 1939 they announce that the village will be part of the Belarus Soviet Socialist Republic. As ‘Russians’ all of their schools must now be taught in Belarussian, never mind that almost no one in the area can speak the language, much less teach it. The penalties for non-compliance are extreme and just one of the many horrors shown in breathtaking realism by Odrach. The largest farm in the area has been collectivized, its owner beaten to death. The people employed on the farm are under suspicion.

All churches and temples are outlawed. The former headmaster of the school has been murdered while trying to escape and the new headmaster, intelligent and sympathetic Ivan Kulik, is forced to watch silently as people are taken from the village to the nearest rail line and put into boxcars for Siberia or, he fears, far worse.

Odrach balanced a thin line when he depicted Stalinist officials by characterizing their stupidity and their mindless adherence to regulations and quotas through his darkly humorous prose, while at the same time never making light of the power they held over the people or the terror they invoked with their cruelty. His ability to get inside the ‘enemy’s’ head and understand as well as convey what their motivations were makes them frighteningly real for the reader. This is no easy task for a writer, to make the bad guy 'human' is quite a feat. 

On the other hand, his description of the villagers lends brightness to an otherwise bleak tale. Dounia, the school teacher, lustful lover, and eventually village ‘chief’ is one of the most memorable. Kulik of course, with his class, intelligence and almost naïve optimism early in the story is one that lingers in the reader’s mind.

Wave of Terror, lovingly translated by Odrach’s daughter, Erma, has been compared to Orwell’s Animal Farm as a chronicle of how a greater force moves into a small area assuring the people of a prosperous future for ‘one and all’. Of course those who dissent disappear. Soon, suspicion among neighbours grows. The sound of a motorcar coming to a stop outside your home, or how two doors slamming may as well be gunshots in the night; perhaps the stuff of nightmares, but very real for Kulik and his neighbours.

In Wave of Terror, Odrach makes the fear of the new regime and the secret police palpable as the backdrop for this fictional cat and mouse game between Kulik and the authorities, who will stop at nothing, including manufacturing truths, to remove anyone they perceive as a threat to Stalin’s plan for what they see as the greatest socialist regime in history.

In the end, the black motorcar does come for Kulik. What happens? I don't want to spoil it all for you. Read to find out.  

What makes this novel especially poignant is that where Kulik’s story ended, Odrach’s continued. After escaping to Slovakia through the Carpathian Mountains, he changed his name from Sholomitsky to Odrach and eventually made his way to Germany and England where he was married; ending up in Toronto where he wrote novels, short stories, memoirs and articles for local Ukrainian newspapers until his death in 1964.

His books, all written from his Toronto home, were banned in the Soviet Union. Wave of Terror is his first novel to appear in English.

In an article entitled “Unsung Writer, Unknown Identity,” Michael Posner, of the Toronto Globe and Mail, tells the story 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. A number of her father’s short stories have been published to great acclaim in literary journals during those years.

Erma Odrach herself is only beginning to know who her father really was, as she was quite young when he died. Through his work she's become close to the man she wasn't given the time to know. His life after his escape from the Soviet Union appears to have been devoted to becoming as anonymous as possible in Toronto, protecting his family, as well as surviving family left in the Ukraine. With the publication of Wave of Terror, the world has rare opportunity to discover a writer whose war-time observations have been compared with those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and whose dark humour has been compared to that of Anton Chekhov.

Definitely a must read and a Canadian talent to be proud of.