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author
Josef Fedak
I was born in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania and after several years of contemplating following in my grandfather’s footsteps to prepare for the priesthood, apprehensions of living a life...view moreI was born in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania and after several years of contemplating following in my grandfather’s footsteps to prepare for the priesthood, apprehensions of living a life of servitude changed my way of thinking. However, my passion for knowledge about my grandfather led me to become self-taught in the Theological History of Russia.
My latest novel “Curse of the Beast” was based on the archives of my grandfather, Monsignor Victor Barkov. He was born in the former Soviet Union, grew up in the remote region of Magadan, Siberia, a coal mining town built by prisoners of slave labor camps known as the Gulag before World War II. My grandfather, while studying for the Orthodox Priesthood, was imprisoned in the Gulag as a result of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s systematic campaign of mass terror. My grandfather perished in captivity after just over two years into his sentence. Before his imprisonment, he talked repeatedly to my father about a certain Testament he read as young boy and managed to save hundreds of pages of written notes taken from it.
My father had also been relocated to Magadan, Siberia where he labored in the coal mines until the year 1944. My father’s brother who was a high ranking officer in the Russian army during World War II and something of an opportunist, managed to secure a certain wealth in the underground economy during the war. During the turmoil following World War II, he immigrated out of the country and secured passage to America. After several years of seemingly futile negotiations and a large amount of money paid by my father’s brother, he managed to secure a visa allowing my father to immigrate to America, bringing the written notes from the Testament with him. After spending years having his handwritten scribble translated into English, I decided to put them into a book form and use them as a basis for my latest novel.view less