ISBN: 0-88739-355-1
406 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 1/2002
Paperback
Price: $17.95
Hardcover
Price: $25.00
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Victor
Oscar Pinkus
Victor was a child of the borderlands, son of Russian Jews, raised in an idyllic hamlet on the Polish border, where life is defined by spectacular forests and rivers, logging rafts and farms. His rhapsodic childhood offered no preparation for the searing violence of life as a Russian soldier in WWII. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he narrowly escapes their wholesale massacre of Russian POWs, and survives the rest of the war by hiding like a hunted animal in the forest. But even when the war ends, Victor has no home to return to: his parents have been killed, his beloved hamlet burned to the ground, and Stalin has labeled the POWs traitors.
Bearing the legacy of his ordeals, Victor moves on the margins of European society, child of the borderlands, exile, a man without ideology-neither religious or secular, traditional or fashionable. He studies physics in Sienna, and then he gravitates toward safety and prosperity, toward a place where the neon lights will outshine his nightmares-he sails for New York. There he finds a good job; meets his friend, Claridge, a Manhattan surgeon to whom nothing remarkable has ever happened; falls in love with Romy, who marries him despite his refusal to have children, and leads a normal, even happy, life...until a seemingly trite act of betrayal shatters it with a finality that war and genocide had failed to do.
Review: Praise for Oscar Pinkus' earlier work:
"The House of Ashes is an extraordinary and harrowing book. Mr. Pinkus writes beautifully."
-The Herald Tribune
"[A] magnificent and appalling epic of misery... illuminating and hauntingly beautiful even when it is most horrible."
-The New Yorker
Bio: OSCAR PINKUS was born in Poland and survived WWII by hiding in a forest for two years. He is the author of two novels, a volume of poetry, two autobiographies, and several scientific texts. A 1984 PBS documentary, "The Unsettled Ashes," was based on his autobiography The House of Ashes. He divides his time between homes in New Mexico and Israel.
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