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.
Theodore Odrach wrote three novels, two collections of short stories, and two non-fiction works, all but one (Wave of Terror) published during his lifetime in Ukranian, the language of their original composition. He was born Theodore Sholomitsky in 1912 near Pinsk, Belarus, in the heart of the Pinsk Marshes. At the age of 9, he was caught stealing and was sent by the Polish authorities to reform school in Vilnius. He remained in Vilnius and, when he came of age, enrolled in Stephan Bathory University (now Vilnius University) where he studied philosophy and ancient history. When the Bolsheviks invaded Vilnius in 1939, Odrach returned to Pinsk, where he became a teacher and, later, the editor of an underground, anti-communist newspaper, The Informer. Denounced by the Soviets, he fled to Ukraine where he assumed a Ukranian identity, then found his way across the Carpathian mountains into Czechoslovakia. Eventually, he made his way to Germany, then England, and settled in Toronto in 1953. He died in 1964.
For the past twenty years (on and off) Erma Odrach has been translating the works of her father. Many of her translations have appeared in literary journals in Canada and the U.S.: Translation (Columbia University), Mobius: the Journal of Social Change; Flipside (California University of Pennsylvania); Antigonsh Review and Connecticut Review, to mention a few. In 1993 Erma received an honorable mention from the Translation Center at Columbia University for her translation of Whistle Stop and Other Stories. She is a member of the American Literary Translators Association (University of Texas at Dallas) and lives with her husband and two daughters in Toronto.
