Description:
War Boys is an extraordinary exploration of a family experiencing intergenerational trauma: an adult son seeking to understand his terrifying and abusive father, interwoven with a biography of his father, who experienced unimaginable horrors as a child during World War II.
As a child, Jason Prokowiew lived in fear of his father, an abusive alcoholic. Lonely and full of shame and guilt, Prokowiew recounts a lonely childhood, colored by struggles with weight, self-image, and his emerging identity as a gay man.
Impelled to confront the trauma of his childhood, Prokowiew documents the stories of his father's own trauma that began when Nazis murdered his family at the start of the war. In War Boys, Prokowiew retraces his father's harrowing journey to understand how he survived the war and why he became the terrifying father Jason knew. In an era where generational estrangement is common, War Boys inspires with its account of this father and son, both battle-scarred survivors, and how they heal their relationship through the power of claiming and telling their own stories - and listening to one another.
What is it like to be a child under attack?
At ten, a plane tries to kill you, then you're alone. Even when someone is kind-perhaps a woman who runs a sick house who pulls you into her orbit-they eventually set you out into the fiery world again. The world treats you as a man but you're a child, and you see too much. An enemy employs you, demands maturity from you, and whips you when you're not perfect.
I said to my father, "you were good at surviving, but not thriving."
"What a privilege, to want to thrive," he said scornfully, annoyed as I tried to name the connective tissue between our childhoods, between what each of us lost.
Brief description: Jason Prokowiew received the PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and a Fulbright Scholar Award for War Boys. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, WBUR's Cognoscenti, Roxane Gay's "The Audacity," and on WORLD Channel's Stories from the Stage, where his piece "Sing" is the most watched in the show's history. He's received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. He lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.
Review Quotes:
Once you start reading War Boys, you will not, cannot, put it down. And by book's end, you will be changed. Jason Prokowiew's memoir is a tremendous feat of research, reporting, writing, and heart work. Never have I read a story that depicts family abuse with such vulnerability, compassion, and insight. This book is a marvel. And this author is an exciting new voice in memoir.
-Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
War Boys is immense in its scope yet surgical in its intimacy. Across this memoir's twin, aching narratives, Jason Prokowiew pulls off something expansive and delicate: an unbelievable story of both one man's survival and what it meant, later, to come of age in the darkest shadows of it.
-Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe
Jason Prokowiew's War Boys is an astonishing combination of oral history, research, and imaginative empathy, a tour de force that is both compelling and deeply moving.
-Dan Chaon, NYT best-selling author of One of Us
War Boys is a riveting and moving tale of survival, trauma, and overcoming the challenges of the past. With cinematic prose, Jason Prokowiew not only deftly conjures his father's childhood orphaned in Nazi-occupied Belarus, but he also, with sensitivity and grace, traces the consequences of these early hardships to his own upbringing in America forty years later. By braiding oral history and memoir with meticulous research, War Boys had me in its grip from page one.
-Edan Lepucki, NYT best-selling author of California and Time's Mouth