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Holy Communion
Holy Communion is a rite-of-passage novel that follows a seven-year-old boy's first communion preparations and celebration.Throughout the four-day peroid the boy deals with cruel nuns,sadistic babysitters,his mother's unfortunate accident,a drunken father,plus a pedophile or two, but finds a way to cope in the midst of so much tragedy-first by indifference,later by defiance and rebellion.He also discovers that his urban surrondings in New York City give him autonomy,comfort, and satisfaction.Holy Communion is full of the boy's dispair and self-questioning,along with the author Mykola Dementiuk's powerful insights into the human condition.
220 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2008
About the author
Mykola Dementiuk
33 books7 followersMykola Dementiuk was born in 1949 of Ukrainian parents in a West German DP camp, immigrating to America when he was two. After Catholic grade school & public high school in New York City, he graduated from Columbia University in 1984.
A writer with varied employment, from gyro seller at Lollapalooza to roustabout at the Big Apple Circus, Mykola helped create the magic of the Cirque du Soleil performances of “Alegria” in Santa Monica, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, and New York with his electrical work.
After suffering a massive debilitating stroke in 1997, Mykola eventually returned to writing, using one finger to execute the fantasies and psycho-sexual stories of his mind.
Mykola’s writing has appeared in issues of Paramour, EIDOS, BNI, Aphrodite Gone Berserk, Atom Mind, Jack & Jill Off, and the Hair anthology from Synergy. Synergy has also published chapbooks Times Queer, Baby Doll, and Selected Tales as well as softcover editions of Times Queer and two full-length novels, Vienna Dolorosa and Holy Communion. Online credits include Pink Pages, Frequently Felt, and Velvet Mafia.
A writer with varied employment, from gyro seller at Lollapalooza to roustabout at the Big Apple Circus, Mykola helped create the magic of the Cirque du Soleil performances of “Alegria” in Santa Monica, Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, and New York with his electrical work.
After suffering a massive debilitating stroke in 1997, Mykola eventually returned to writing, using one finger to execute the fantasies and psycho-sexual stories of his mind.
Mykola’s writing has appeared in issues of Paramour, EIDOS, BNI, Aphrodite Gone Berserk, Atom Mind, Jack & Jill Off, and the Hair anthology from Synergy. Synergy has also published chapbooks Times Queer, Baby Doll, and Selected Tales as well as softcover editions of Times Queer and two full-length novels, Vienna Dolorosa and Holy Communion. Online credits include Pink Pages, Frequently Felt, and Velvet Mafia.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 9, 2014
Sometimes books stick in your brain because they are pure joy. Holy Communion resonated because it was horrific. But I’m so glad I read it. For a sheltered female raised by loving parents in a safe middle class environment, it exposed the underbelly of the opposite. Why read it then? Isn’t there enough misery and sadness in the world? Because not doing so is like ignoring the cries of a seven year old boy who needed love and care but was denied it, either by intent or chance.
It’s almost ironic that the only touches of affection and softness came at the hands of a person society deems the most evil. For someone too young to know right from wrong, how confusing would it be to discover that receiving presents and being touched “there” is shameful while being mentally, sexually and physically abused by adults, other children, family and teachers is, if not accepted, able to be covered up or ignored? What sort of a message is that? What if being touched by that man felt good? How does that affect the child’s attitude to sex in the future? That’s as much the tragedy of sexual predation as the physical pain that might be inflicted. But who is more to blame? The perpetrator or society that is so cruel that unthreatening, pleasurable attention from a man felt like a safe haven?
The main plot of “Holy Communion” involves the Catholic Church. Ironically, given the tales that have surfaced, church officials are about the only ones who don’t sexually abuse the boy. Instead they inflict a different type of abusive torture, full of threats of dire retribution and instilling shame.
The boy is dreading his first communion because he has been told over and over again that he will die that day. Why? Because he has sinned. By the time the book ended, he couldn’t wait for that day to come. All he wanted to do was:
No characters in the book have names. By robbing them of these personal distinctions, we are reminded of the roles these people take in the child’s life: the father, the mother, the godmother, the nun, the young priest, the man in the comic store. The list goes on. Surprisingly this disassociation works brilliantly. Many of these people occupy positions of authority, but in most cases their actions are harsh, unforgiving, uncaring, frightening to a sensitive young boy who is still wetting the bed.
No wonder, when he has a father who beats and molests him.
The story is told through the eyes of the young boy and we get his bewildered, immature, innocent perspective, but occasionally like in the excerpt above and the one below, we see through the eyes of the man this child became.
This is why “Holy Communion”, “Times Queer” and “Trysts” almost make up a trilogy. Even if they are different protagonists, different worlds, you can see how the confronting, almost toxic environment from one could lead to the other as the protagonist gets older. All three are worth reading, and as we do, what role do we occupy? The critical reader filled with perceptions of what a book should be like? What a person should be like? The unsympathetic bystander who is dismissive because his life was just as bad and he turned out okay?
In Holy Communion, Mykola Dementiuk has written a powerful book that is guaranteed to make you think. Well worth a read.
It’s almost ironic that the only touches of affection and softness came at the hands of a person society deems the most evil. For someone too young to know right from wrong, how confusing would it be to discover that receiving presents and being touched “there” is shameful while being mentally, sexually and physically abused by adults, other children, family and teachers is, if not accepted, able to be covered up or ignored? What sort of a message is that? What if being touched by that man felt good? How does that affect the child’s attitude to sex in the future? That’s as much the tragedy of sexual predation as the physical pain that might be inflicted. But who is more to blame? The perpetrator or society that is so cruel that unthreatening, pleasurable attention from a man felt like a safe haven?
The main plot of “Holy Communion” involves the Catholic Church. Ironically, given the tales that have surfaced, church officials are about the only ones who don’t sexually abuse the boy. Instead they inflict a different type of abusive torture, full of threats of dire retribution and instilling shame.
The boy is dreading his first communion because he has been told over and over again that he will die that day. Why? Because he has sinned. By the time the book ended, he couldn’t wait for that day to come. All he wanted to do was:
“Go to church and be slain. Then it would be finished. He’d be able to sleep and not be afraid when he awoke that things had gotten worse. He’d be able to sleep and not have to wake.”And what was his sin? Buying a comic for a quarter and lying about the price to his mother to conceal the fact that he hadn’t used the money for a school excursion because he had “made” it in class after being denied permission to go to the boy’s room when he raised his hand.
“How many lies can one say in a lifetime? How many sins can be committed? Isn’t the first one always the decisive one, since that’s the one that dooms you forever? And what of truth? If it’s a sin to tell a lie, is there credit or reward for speaking the truth?”Around him, the “sins” that are committed against him by mean-spirited adults and children pile up on one another like layers of dung. Yet for all this, the story is not depressing because the boy is too young to recognize these greater wrongs. When you don’t know anything better, you don’t know what you are missing. Pleasure is found in snatched moments on the street, unexpected glimpses of kindness. Having his picture taken with his godmother’s children. At that point of his life, he has never experienced anything different, so he doesn’t know what he is missing.
No characters in the book have names. By robbing them of these personal distinctions, we are reminded of the roles these people take in the child’s life: the father, the mother, the godmother, the nun, the young priest, the man in the comic store. The list goes on. Surprisingly this disassociation works brilliantly. Many of these people occupy positions of authority, but in most cases their actions are harsh, unforgiving, uncaring, frightening to a sensitive young boy who is still wetting the bed.
No wonder, when he has a father who beats and molests him.
The story is told through the eyes of the young boy and we get his bewildered, immature, innocent perspective, but occasionally like in the excerpt above and the one below, we see through the eyes of the man this child became.
“At what point in time does indifference and insensitivity enter a soul and stifle potential love and compassion and drive out altruism and empathy? Is there one sole event that occurs, forever making one possessive rather than generous, stagnant rather than growing, spiteful rather than loving?”Brought up in this poisonous, confusing world where no one cares, it’s almost inevitable that teenagers or young adults feel that nothing they do matters. Who cares if they scrawl graffiti, break that window, steal that car, rape that female, break that guy’s nose? Who was around to care for them when they were vulnerable and alone and thus the cycle goes on.
This is why “Holy Communion”, “Times Queer” and “Trysts” almost make up a trilogy. Even if they are different protagonists, different worlds, you can see how the confronting, almost toxic environment from one could lead to the other as the protagonist gets older. All three are worth reading, and as we do, what role do we occupy? The critical reader filled with perceptions of what a book should be like? What a person should be like? The unsympathetic bystander who is dismissive because his life was just as bad and he turned out okay?
In Holy Communion, Mykola Dementiuk has written a powerful book that is guaranteed to make you think. Well worth a read.
May 17, 2011
When trying to compose my thoughts about the tiny hero in Mykola Dementiuk’s novel, Holy Communion, the above quote seemed to be hand-crafted for him. And the power of Tait’s words nearly made me cry, bringing the initial impact of the book back to me.
Holy Communion is not a book you grab in the airport gift shop and breeze through between Houston and Atlanta. For me, the novel had to be read in increments and, to be truthful, took me quite a while to finish. Not because it wasn’t that good, but because it WAS that good. It was powerful. A gritty, sweet, heart-wrenching, poignant dose of, as the blurb says, the human condition.
I’ve tried to think of an adequate description for the narrative voice in this novel, and the only thing that comes to my mind—and I hope you’ll understand what I mean when I say it—is that Mykola Dementiuk writes in Technicolor with Michelangelo brushstrokes tossed in for pure artistry. For this Texas gal who swears she was a New Yorker in another life, the imagery of the New York streets, the shops, the traffic, the people, the smells, the crummy apartments and stoops, the whole scene, was painted so vividly by the author that I saw the bustling city as clearly as he lived it. But the hero. The little fellow I fell for. The diminutive kid I wanted to take home with me, to hug, to shelter. Let me tell you about him.
I don’t know his name. He is only called “the boy”. He’s seven years old, and it’s the week of his Holy Communion with the Catholic Church. The tyke is abused, both physically and emotionally, by his alcoholic father, his bullying baby-sitters, and a pedophile comic bookshop owner. The boy is a bed wetter and often “makes in his pants” during the day, much to his own mortification and the harsh disapproval of the nuns at school.
Dementiuk somehow takes the reader’s hand and guides them into the head of this child in a way I can’t say I’ve ever seen an author do with main character this young. And that was what endeared me to “the boy”. Dementiuk dragged me into this child’s mind so close, so personal, that I WAS the boy. I lived in constant terror of the upcoming Holy Communion, convinced my sins were sending me straight to Hell. I was tiny and at the mercy of tired, cross, cruel nuns. I was molested by the pedophile in the comic book store. I was teased mercilessly by my godmother’s daughters who figured a child was nothing more than a doll to play with and torture.
The shocking part of this deep insight into the boy’s psyche was that, in a rare but crystal clear revelation—because I lived the horror through HIS intensely personal and baby-like vision, not my own adult eyes—I saw with great sadness but understanding, how even sick and misguided attention was just that to this little victim—attention.
One of the most important facets of this book, to me, was the fact that we can and indeed DO experience physical and emotional sensations at a young age, long before society has had a chance to hand out the checklist of what’s right and what’s wrong.
In a technique that impressed me—which I thought was genius—Dementiuk chose to assign no names to any of the characters. They were merely the nuns, the priests, the mother, the father, the old bald man in the comic book store. That anonymity somehow put me in the story as the character, right in the middle of the child’s world. And, oddly, gave it a touch bit of a make-believe aura, in which I could pretend—if the reality of it all was too harsh—that it was not real.
Dementiuk said of Holy Communion: The reality of Holy Communion tormented me for many, many years even before I became a writer. I was just too young to have experienced those religious questions, I thought, and forebodings in my mind, but truth to tell I certainly wasn't. I've always been tormented by Christianity forcing me to look upon the good and bad aspects of my daily life and in this way I always went against the norm. I became a rebel pretty early; after all, I had confronted God and found that God to be lacking…or at least that’s what I imagined. After a lifetime of screwing and drinking, with all sorts of drug taking, I found myself defeated with no place left to turn except inwards, into myself. I began, “Screams stirred him. He listened and drifted.” And wrote and wrote. I was ready to look at my past, and the world opened up and I never looked back.
Holy Communion was the Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2009/Bisexual Fiction.
As I said, this is no breezy read. But it is a commanding read, in a voice which combines eloquence and urban grit to perfection. It is a most unusual look into the deepest, most private thoughts of a child in such detail and soul that could only have been penned by the man who lived it.
And I WILL tell you this. The ending made me smile. The tyke’s quite a little fighter.
Holy Communion is not a book you grab in the airport gift shop and breeze through between Houston and Atlanta. For me, the novel had to be read in increments and, to be truthful, took me quite a while to finish. Not because it wasn’t that good, but because it WAS that good. It was powerful. A gritty, sweet, heart-wrenching, poignant dose of, as the blurb says, the human condition.
I’ve tried to think of an adequate description for the narrative voice in this novel, and the only thing that comes to my mind—and I hope you’ll understand what I mean when I say it—is that Mykola Dementiuk writes in Technicolor with Michelangelo brushstrokes tossed in for pure artistry. For this Texas gal who swears she was a New Yorker in another life, the imagery of the New York streets, the shops, the traffic, the people, the smells, the crummy apartments and stoops, the whole scene, was painted so vividly by the author that I saw the bustling city as clearly as he lived it. But the hero. The little fellow I fell for. The diminutive kid I wanted to take home with me, to hug, to shelter. Let me tell you about him.
I don’t know his name. He is only called “the boy”. He’s seven years old, and it’s the week of his Holy Communion with the Catholic Church. The tyke is abused, both physically and emotionally, by his alcoholic father, his bullying baby-sitters, and a pedophile comic bookshop owner. The boy is a bed wetter and often “makes in his pants” during the day, much to his own mortification and the harsh disapproval of the nuns at school.
Dementiuk somehow takes the reader’s hand and guides them into the head of this child in a way I can’t say I’ve ever seen an author do with main character this young. And that was what endeared me to “the boy”. Dementiuk dragged me into this child’s mind so close, so personal, that I WAS the boy. I lived in constant terror of the upcoming Holy Communion, convinced my sins were sending me straight to Hell. I was tiny and at the mercy of tired, cross, cruel nuns. I was molested by the pedophile in the comic book store. I was teased mercilessly by my godmother’s daughters who figured a child was nothing more than a doll to play with and torture.
The shocking part of this deep insight into the boy’s psyche was that, in a rare but crystal clear revelation—because I lived the horror through HIS intensely personal and baby-like vision, not my own adult eyes—I saw with great sadness but understanding, how even sick and misguided attention was just that to this little victim—attention.
One of the most important facets of this book, to me, was the fact that we can and indeed DO experience physical and emotional sensations at a young age, long before society has had a chance to hand out the checklist of what’s right and what’s wrong.
In a technique that impressed me—which I thought was genius—Dementiuk chose to assign no names to any of the characters. They were merely the nuns, the priests, the mother, the father, the old bald man in the comic book store. That anonymity somehow put me in the story as the character, right in the middle of the child’s world. And, oddly, gave it a touch bit of a make-believe aura, in which I could pretend—if the reality of it all was too harsh—that it was not real.
Dementiuk said of Holy Communion: The reality of Holy Communion tormented me for many, many years even before I became a writer. I was just too young to have experienced those religious questions, I thought, and forebodings in my mind, but truth to tell I certainly wasn't. I've always been tormented by Christianity forcing me to look upon the good and bad aspects of my daily life and in this way I always went against the norm. I became a rebel pretty early; after all, I had confronted God and found that God to be lacking…or at least that’s what I imagined. After a lifetime of screwing and drinking, with all sorts of drug taking, I found myself defeated with no place left to turn except inwards, into myself. I began, “Screams stirred him. He listened and drifted.” And wrote and wrote. I was ready to look at my past, and the world opened up and I never looked back.
Holy Communion was the Lambda Literary Awards Winner 2009/Bisexual Fiction.
As I said, this is no breezy read. But it is a commanding read, in a voice which combines eloquence and urban grit to perfection. It is a most unusual look into the deepest, most private thoughts of a child in such detail and soul that could only have been penned by the man who lived it.
And I WILL tell you this. The ending made me smile. The tyke’s quite a little fighter.
July 2, 2009
2009 Rainbow Awards Honorable Mention (5* from at least 1 judge)
February 18, 2019
Shocking heartbreaking this book stays with you even after you finish.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews