Victor

by Oscar Pinkus

Victor is a man of the borderlands, a child of Russian-Jewish parentage, his rhapsodic childhood spent on the Byelorussian Polish frontier. As a Russian soldier he goes through the searing experience of fighting in WWII, becomes a prisoner and then escapes, living in the forests and ghettoes. When the war ends he has no home to return his parents had been killed, his hamlet burned to the ground, and Stalin had labeled all POWs traitors. Bearing the legacy of these ordeals, Victor walks on the margins of society, careful to not fall through the cracks. A man without ideology, secular, religious, or fashionable, he gravitates to a world of safety and prosperity. Aware that the New World’s neon lights are thinner than his nightmares, he sails for New York, and there he finds Romy, friendship, success. By nature a poet, he makes his living as a physicist—a normal man. In his new life Victor is destroyed by a seemingly small act, which shatters his life with a finality that war and genocide had failed to do.

406 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2001