The Sojourn

By Andrew Krivak

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE WINNER

A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming of age, and survival during World War I

The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When war comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy.

Strikingly contemporary though replete with evocative historical detail, The Sojourn is the freestanding, first novel of Andrew Krivak’s award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which concludes with Like the Appearance of Horses. Inspired by the author’s family history, it is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amid the unfolding tragedy in Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781934137413

Andrew Krivak

Andrew Krivak earned degrees from St. John's College (Annapolis) and the graduate writing division of Columbia University before entering the Society of Jesus. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, DoubleTake, and elsewhere. He lives in London.

Book preview

DARDAN, PENNSYLVANIA THE LAST NIGHT OF MARCH 1972

AND SO I WAS SAVED BY THE SIMPLE ACT OF A BOY WHO dived into that river, icy as hell and too strong for even a grown man to swim, stroked hard to reach a babe sinking under the weight of the wraps that bound him, and floated to the safety of the opposite shore almost a half mile downstream. The Pueblo Star-Journal called him a hero, the rescue a deed that rivaled the world’s greatest, and headlined their front page TRAIN CARRIES DEATH TO PLEASURE PARTY. Two days later, the paper long blown away, discarded, or used to wrap parcels and cuts of beef, the town had forgotten all but the reminder that death was indiscriminate.

But not my father, who knew that fortune, too, was equally thoughtless. Before the train set off again, the conductors took up a collection from the passengers, who chipped in fifty dollars cash, though more out of guilt than pity. And the next day, while the news was being hawked from the streets, the railroad company was writing Ondrej Vinich a check for five hundred dollars, in addition to paying the hospital and funeral expenses, afraid, no doubt, that I would die of pneumonia or some such thing, and there would be another round of headlines on which the story would drift farther east and west.

What the papers didn’t tell was that Anna went into labor when she heard the news about her son, and the baby, a girl, was stillborn, and the woman’s grief at the loss of her children nearly killed her as well, until the same doctor who had delivered me took me to my aunt (who lay empty and worn in her bed), placed me in her arms, and she nursed me with her daughter’s milk and cared for me as we both recovered, and then brought me into her home as though I were her son, except that she and her husband never spoke again to my father and always left the house when he came around to visit me on Sundays, while everyone else was in church and he could be alone.

The following spring, my father took me east to Pennsylvania, where he had relatives and friends in the mining town of Wilkes-Barre, and we lived with a young couple who had come from his home village of Pastvina, looking (as he and my mother had years ago) for the opportunity due anyone who was willing to work and pray and accept the blessings that would be, as a result, bestowed upon them.

But all he could find was work in the mines, and he came back to the row house on Charles Street every night exhausted and coughing, so that I’d wake up, and the woman of the house, young as she was, chided him for disturbing the baby and asked him why he didn’t take a shower at the breaker like all the other men, and he said that he just wanted to come home. He washed in the sink and ate soup with bread and a bottle of beer while I got rocked back to sleep.

One Sunday, these same friends took the train out of the city to the town of Dardan. And I was so struck by this place, my father said, its small center on a tributary of the Susquehanna that they called Salamander Creek, and the farms, large and not so large, that radiated out toward mountains that were in no way comparable to the Rockies, but commanding in their own right. At the local feed mill, he began to ask about hunting, and a man named Zlodej, who was kin to the couple we lived with, asked my father where in the old country he was from and my father told him.

But, he said, I’d been living with my family out in Colorado.

Colorado, Zlodej said. Now that’s country out there.

He said he knew a Czech man named Orten in Leadville who could shoot a tick off a dog’s ass, and my father said, George. George Orten. Zlodej asked him if he was Ondrej Vinich and my father said he was.

Heard about your wife, Zlodej said, and told my father that he should come back in the fall and he would take him deer hunting on his land.

The last thing my father did before he left Colorado was purchase an M1896 Krag Jørgensen rifle, just like the one George Orten had in Leadville. He wrapped it and crated it and it came with us to Wilkes-Barre, and, after me, it was, I think, the only thing my father really cared about, and he waited and waited for the day when he would get to hunt with it, and fire it, and dress what he killed with it, as he had done in the days when he hunted with Orten, and which made him feel, he said, as though I was the maker of my own fate.

All that summer and into the fall, my father worked in the mines and clung to his renewed hope that he might yet make a home in America. He picked and blasted and shoveled and dreamed of buying a small house in Dardan, where land was still cheap and he figured he could find a job at a lumberyard until something better came along. Or maybe that would do just fine. And one Saturday morning in November, looking like a trapper he once knew in Leadville (but for the fact that he had shaved earlier in the week), he rose and, rifle case in hand, got on the trolley that ran past Charles Street and down along River, boarded the light-gauge train that carried most everything from Wilkes-Barre into the farming towns west of the river, and jumped off at the feed mill at Dardan corner, where he met up with Mr. Zlodej and another man he had never seen before, a man of means who was visiting Zlodej and looking into buying the feed mill and the 550 acres of land Zlodej owned and wanted to sell.

I could tell right away that he had likely never fired anything bigger than a twenty-two, my father said, and yet he spoke of having shot a lion in East Africa and hunted bear in the Colorado Rockies, and I said, ‘Bear?’ and he said, ‘Grizzly. Yep, grizzly.’ And I told him that Colorado wasn’t the best place to hunt for grizzly, and regardless, grizzly wasn’t the kind of animal I’d want to go after for sport. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘then you ain’t a sport,’ and my father decided right there that this was a man one did well to stay away from.

The rain that had fallen the night before in the city was snow in Dardan, a wet six inches of ground cover, and the mountainside they approached that day was a steep and wintry landscape of pine interspersed with hardwoods and outcroppings of rock and small caves, which Zlodej said were once home to the Susquehannocks when they roamed those hills before the Europeans arrived.

The snow gave fresh evidence of deer moving that morning, and Zlodej suggested that he retreat along the base of the mountain around to the other side, where there was a stream and large swaths of wintergreen patches, and he would drive any deer that might be grazing there over the mountain to my father and their hunting companion.

I would have happily gone on that trek if I had known the terrain, my father said, but I was stuck with the man hunting with us, and I began to feel so uneasy about his presence that I almost told Zlodej that I thought it was time I made it back to Wilkes-Barre, even though it was barely morning.

When Zlodej disappeared, his gait so quick that the woods were silent in an instant, my father suggested that he and the man find a hide from which they could observe the widest arc of the summit.

The man said, Ah, we won’t be seein’ no deer anytime soon. Now lemme lookit yer rifle.

My father said that if he wanted to see a rifle like this, he knew a gunsmith who could show him one, and sat quietly with it resting on his knee. But on that mountainside in Dardan, the man got irate and said, Who d’ya think yer talkin’ to, son? and without warning lunged and grabbed the rifle from my father’s hands and shoved him hard against a rock.

You see, he said, holding the Krag up and inspecting it, "I ain’t used to hearin’ the word no. That’s why I aim to own most of this town, and Zlodej’s mountain with it."

What could I do? my father said. He wasn’t going to shoot me, at least I didn’t think so, because he didn’t seem to know the first thing about handling a rifle like that. He just said, ‘She’s a beaut,’ propped the Winchester he came with against a tree, and began to trudge up the hill toward a rock cave, carrying the Krag like it belonged to him.

And when my father asked him where he was going, the man said that he was going to climb over the caves to the top of the hill. Got to have the vantage of height if yer goin to kill anything, he said.

So my father watched him as he climbed, the grade getting steeper and steeper, the snow-dusted tree line turning into a surface of packed dirt and wet scree, the man holding the Krag by its bolt like a shopping bag in his right hand and grabbing on to roots and saplings with the left as he struggled to ascend, until his foot slipped from the poor hold he had chosen on the next step and he pitched forward and began to slide and spin sideways down the hill, letting go of the rifle, which picked up its own speed and outstripped him as it dropped straight and slammed into a rock not twenty yards from my father and went off, shooting the man through the heart. He was dead before he came to rest.

No one loved him, but he had a lot of friends, my father said, or maybe people who clung to him for his money. Anyway, it didn’t look good, no matter how much Mr. Zlodej came to my defense. I don’t think anyone thought I was foolish enough to have killed him, but he was American-born and Philadelphia-raised, a Morgan they said, and I was a Slav, good for work and nothing more, an immigrant whose luck was bad since having come over, and getting worse by the day. I had to make some decisions fast, and I needed someone to take care of you.

So he wrote letters to what family remained in Pastvina, a small Rusyn village in a far northeast corner of the Hungarian Empire, and through negotiations with the local priest he arranged to remarry. The woman, whose husband had been killed felling timber, needed someone to support her own two sons in return for care of a child. So, after what he said was a long, long winter and late spring, around about the time I turned two, we packed a trunk and boarded a ship in New York harbor and made our way back to the country from where he’d come.

As a young boy, all that I could claim of my mother was a face I had seen in a daguerreotype my father had brought with him from America and kept next to him wherever he slept. And because I always shared his bed, that framed and static vision of the woman, who appeared somehow meek and stern in the same stilted pose, entered my memory from early on, and it was on the crossing back to Europe that I had—I hesitate to call it a dream, I was so young, but the memory of her in my presence then is strong to this day—the first dream of her that I can remember. She didn’t speak and she didn’t move; she just stood before me, radiant and iconic, her arms outstretched without beckoning, as though having held something she had just let go. Only her face was changed. Instead of the motionless and serious demeanor the photograph held, her features wavered and I felt anticipation that she would speak and move, and that if I woke, I would find her among us, as she had been once before, living and breathing and whispering to me.

But even as my father sought, for his own reasons, to give some life to that lifeless past on an early summer evening in June 1916, while dusk settled, too, upon the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it came too late for me to understand or even forgive him, spent and weakened and alone that he was in the light of the candle flame around which we sat in our village hut while he talked and drank plum brandy and told me of what he had done and wanted to do in those last few months of life in America, before he took me to the old country. Over the years of my youth and young manhood there, he had decreased while I struggled to increase, bent that I was on the promise of a journey to the edge of the culture and land in which I had been raised and believed was my own (although I was, in truth, a stranger), with the imagined valor of heroic battles, and the thought that death would be a thing I doled out to others who dared resist. For, by the time I had heard the story of my birth, and my father’s leaving the land of my birth, war was imminent, and I was hungry to call myself Infanterist, Frontkämpfer, Soldat. Anything. Anything but the son of the shepherd, because shepherd was all that my father—once he returned to Pastvina—wanted to be, and I wanted to become what he was not.

IF, WHEN WE, A LOST-LOOKING FATHER AND HIS RETICENT SON, first arrived in Pastvina in 1901, the people of our village had heard or whispered among themselves tales of prospecting and silver and the dangers—gunfights and murders—of the Wild West, stories they should expect a man who had seen that world to weave with suspense and nostalgia in their presence, they were soon forgotten, for there seemed nothing about Ondrej Vinich’s attitude or demeanor (against the fiery young man intent on leaving Pastvina to make his fortune) to suggest that he’d ever lived one of those storied lives, but in fact seemed content and almost grateful to have to take up what was the loneliest existence a man could live in that part of the old country. Which is strange, when I think about those villagers and how they seemed to cling to one another and yet blame one another for the harsh lot from which not one of them could

Reviews for The Sojourn

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Three stars because I enjoyed rather than loved the book, even though I think it is well-written."The Sojourn" is a good title for this book which really is about the narrator's journey. There is no typical plot line with a specific conflict that must be resolved by the end of the novel. Characters enter and exit as they do in real life, often leaving an impact but not necessarily having grand literary significance. In this way the novel is not American (something I appreciate) and if someone told me it was a true story, I would readily believe them. I can't recall having read a WWI book in which the protagonist is on the Austria-Hungary side, or even one that takes place in this part of Europe. There was a lot of narrative spent on the guns and locations involved in the character's movements during the war, and most of this went over my head. I'm sorry to admit I found that section rather dull, but it did have the bleak effect of conveying some metaphor of what the war may have been like in the character's memory (I say this very lightly, because obviously the war was MUCH worse, unbelieveably worse than a dull part of a novel). There is very little colour in the book, likely intentionally.My one criticism is that some of the subtle references to Scripture and religion in the first half of the book were not picked up/continued/resolved in the latter half. They seem to be dropped (though perhaps I missed something). I wanted to see that developed further.Overall, a unique story.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Andrew Krivak's The Sojourn follows young Jozef Vinich through his life being born in America to a family of immigrants, growing up in the old country, fighting in World War I, and coming back home to America. Krivak's writing style is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy in that he writes with great imagery despite an economy of words. Likewise, his writing is reminiscent of Hemingway in the stoicism of his protagonist despite adversity and Remarque in his portrayal of World War I from the perspective of a soldier fighting for the Central Power.I found this to be a very compelling book. The biblical imagery comparing Jozef's life to Moses and well as references to Shakespeare in having Vinich meet a character named Banquo, who correlated strongly with the character of the same name in MacBeth, was very appealing to me as a reader. As much care as was given to use biblical and literary symbolism, every bit as much care was put into ensuring that the characters were believable and relateable enough so that the reader would begin to question the same things about the world that Vinich questions in the novel. In the end, this is a novel that has a lot to say about war, peace, life, death, and why we live. I came away very impressed with this novel.

[susiebookworm · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a result of a series of tragedies during the first years of his life, two-year-old Jozef Vinich and his father return from America to rural Austria-Hungary in 1901. There the elder Vinich takes up shepherding and, realizing that Jozef's stepmother does not treat her stepson well, takes Jozef with him. The duo are eventually joined by an orphaned relative known as Zlee. In 1916, Zlee and Jozef - now teenagers - sign up as sharpshooters with the Austrian army. Sent to the Italian front, Jozef's "sojourn" will take him to the trenches, the Alps, and a Sardinian POW camp before he begins to make his way home to his father after Austria's defeat in WWI.This book and others have begun to increase my understanding of what makes a particular type of fiction "literary." The writing, the tone, the general slowness of plot that still draws in readers and leaves time for them to think on what the author's saying - The Sojourn matches my characteristics of literary fiction. It's not the absolute best that I've read, but it's still a worthwhile read. The setting itself is interesting (Austria-Hungary and Italy in WWI) as are the characters' nationality (Slavic). And while at times I wished the novel had been more detailed instead of dealing more in generalities of conditions and events rather than specifics, the writing seems in keeping with the fact that when Jozef is recording his experiences in 1972, he is writing from his memories. For readers who enjoy literary fiction, well-written historical novels, and war literature, I recommend this book.

[dcblack_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This short novel tells the story of Jozef, a young man who is raised as a shepherd in the mountains of Austria-Hungary just prior to World War I. His father instructs him in the use of a gun, both to hunt for food and to kill predators, such as mountain lions, that might threaten the flock. Together with his cousin Zlee, who is raised with him as a foster brother, Jozeph becomes a proficient marksman and hunter. As a teenager, he grows apart from his aging father, and his dissatisfaction and restlessness lead him to join the Austrian army along with his cousin. Their proficiency as marksmen result in them being trained and assigned as a sniper team. This assignment spares them to some extent from the horror of the trenches, as their main task is to sight and kill enemy officers and other high value targets from hidden locations away from the main body of their own force.The author utilizes first-person narration and a spare prose style that suit the story very well. However, the flow of the story is marred on occasion by convoluted, run-on sentences that required two or three readings to tease out the meaning. This was most noticeable in the middle portion of the book where Jozeph is serving in the war.

[artymedon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A truly mesmerizing book which starts like "The deer hunter" transitions to a war story exploring the less known but well researched by Andrew Krivak, role of snipers during the mountain wars of the Italo-Austrian Theater in 1917, starting in the trenches and climbing to a Dino Buzzatti like mountain fort where an invisible ennemy sniper gives random death to the sentries. It ends poignantly with an encounter with a gypsy woman and then her tribe. It is also a book that has its Hemingway moments inevitably thinking "Farewell to Arms" also around the same period and war theater. A trek novel starting in Pueblo Colorado, then back to Europe and then back again for America. Splendid prose and moving encounters throughout. Five stars!!!!

[eduscapes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Andrew Kriviak's novel follows the exploits of a sharpshooter, an expert sniper who fought on the southern front in World War I. Through a set of uncommon and tragic events, the young man born in Pueblo, Colorado returned to Europe at age two with his widower father. In Austria the boy grew up poor and in the summer followed his father, a shepherd, into the Carpathian Mountains. Under his father's tutelage, young Jozef learned to blend into the natural landscape, became expert with a rifle, and hunted wild game. As the war broke out, Jozef and his cousin join the Austria-Hungarian Army. This is a great coming-of-age novel that exposes the hardships and horrors of trench warfare. lj (May 2011)

[rebarelishesreading · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Chautauqua Institution initiated a new literary prize this year, "The Chautauqua Prize" and the first winner is The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak. This debut novel was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Mr. Krivak came to Chautauqua to speak and receive the prize. He said the book, while fiction, is based on stories his grandfather told him from his life in what is now Slovakia. The story begins with a young mother in late 19th century Colorado who is caught on a railroad tressle with her infant son and a young nephew as a train is bearing down on them. The bulk of the story deals with the life of her son growing up in Slovakia and his time in the Austro-Hungarian Army during WWI. The book is beautifully written. It's a story of love and war and coming of age...but more about war than I prefer to read. If that's not a problem for you, I would definitely recommend it. Here is an example of the writing:"And for a few late-autumn days, during which we hiked steadily and without rest until we came to the mountain-top refuges along our way and slept, I felt a sense of peace in that war, within myself, and without, amid the unexpected beauty of those peaks that lured and threatened us like enemies themselves, ..."

[john_pappas_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A debut novel, recipient of the Chautauqua Prize and National Book Award Finalist, this short 130pp tale was an intense and moving book. Very simply written with a memorial stark. Very humane treatment of the effects of war on the psyche; the ephemeral nature of family; and the process of growing into and then out of a world.

[terribooks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a short book, that kind of rambles around the young life of the protagonist as he grows up in the part of eastern Europe that later becomes Czechoslovakia, then with his experiences as a sharpshooter, then a prisoner, during WWI. Relationships, rather than plot, move the story along. Many things happen that cause him emotional and psychological wounds, yet, when healing is needed, a person appears that provides that healing. Although I kept waiting for a plot climax that never occurred, I enjoyed reading the book. Although I probably should have had a map beside me.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A mix of family memoir and WWI fanfic, walking around with a vocabulary it doesn't quite know how to handle. No, but there's no point in hating on this, both because it clearly means something particularly personal to Kravik and because it has real merits (below--I think I often tend to start with the negatives in these reviews. Why?). There are too many adjectives, but that is my illness as well. And there are errors and places where you lose the plot because Kravik is trying to be allusive perhaps beyond his abilities and maybe just needs to get it together and end that sentence and not spend all night on the internet reading about pioneer days. Or mitteleuropaeische squalour, or, like, flaccid, pedantic allusiveness. (Where do you go to read about that? Henry James?)BUT I like the reverse migration from the New World to the Old--we have the "Over There" trope, but this is different because it's a single alienated young dude and his soulforging. It's the kind of thing we're tired of seeing play out in the Old West. I like the fact that it's about Austria-hungary and the Italian campaign, an underremembered empire and an underremembered war.BUTbut he's so fucing pushy. My family are all magnificent heroes, tougher and gentler than the haters. Fuck off. Lecturing us about hard work? Really?(and I suddenly recognize that this is a bit analogous to my criticism in a recent review of Henry Miller and the worst is when people mistake the first person for the author's own real personal voice, but I stand by it, cos in both cases, the narrative is so rooted in personal or family history and the characters are so suggestively similar to their authors that ... sorry, man, you're writing a fictionalized you, or in Krivak's case putting yourself in the pants of a fictionalized great-grandfather, and people ae gonna read you that way).You can't do this stuff in first person without a filter--but there is no suggestion that the kid's hagiography is anything but the correct reaction to his father's austere majesty. Which is forgivable when Krivak has something to say, but a downer when he puffs up on inferior details, loses the laconicity that a war narrative like this wants, goes all-out glorified transcriptionist on his research or the stories he was told or whatever.I was involved in a memory-book writing project in Uganda, and I know how important this kind of stuff can be. And remember the memor boom? It can be meaningful to the public. But it needs curation. It doesn't need Krivak's squeamishness--his stepbrothers are goona rapehim and it's all "I'm first" and "alcohol on his breath" and nothing is ever said directly but wink YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE TIRED FIXTURES INDICATE. You don't need endless untranslated Slovak authenticity tags, and awkward circumlocutions to express the German ones in English. "Hallo, he growled, and I knew that he was saying hello." Almost that.It's better when we get images of Italy as a dirty almost Balkan war, village to village, hunters with little flasks, kill a man and have a litttle schnaeppsle. There's something anti-imperial about that, making the mountain war more than a comic sideshow. And the sociology of the Austrian army--demoralized Slavs, bolshy Hungarians, loyalist Tirolers and Carinthians who nevertheless have the biggest chips on their shoulders of all about the wienerisch officer class. The Alpine hillbillies fighting for their quiet ways against the tide of nationalism of which the Italians are an early adopter. Except that also the protag has all the attitudes of a modern liberal except for his quixotic warlust, and the book is weirdly set up to make liberal America the future's promise and have him be like "your primitive racial hatreds" with a conveniently sexy Romany stalking horse.The British as combat monsters, like we're supposed to cheer for Tommy but the biggest horror is how being a superpower meant raising a nation of killers. And all his sources are about the Brits, not the Austrians, which is weird but doesn't stop the speculation on the mood at the end of the war from being compelling, just a bit suspect. When the Bosnian holds Krivak's Mary Sue protagonist up and stops him from falling you think, wow, Panslavism, suffering under the yoke of even the buffoonish empires, and what would it have been like to have Viennese civil servants and junior lecturers discussing your plight in between melanges and mistresses, and you start to understand how the Soviet bloc developed not only out of tanks and Marxian togethermanship but also a vision of common blood, a geocultural civilizational sphere that was in some ways so much the antithesis of the Habsburg regiments but in other ways learned so much from it. Imagine Czech and Vorarlbergisch SSRs.And other things--the disdain for death that covers a man like a filth and stops you from valuing life, or anything other than death, anymore. Well noted.That is all fine, but this is also not a well-written book, and so that's a problem. Overall it had its moments.

[highcotton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

LOVED IT!!!!

[auntmarge64 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An engrossing and moving story of a young man's life through his military service in WWI. Born in the US but taken to his father's native Austria-Hungary as an infant, Jozef and his adopted brother Zlee grow up a shepherds and hunters and, as young men, leave their father and village to join the Emperor's army as a spotter/sniper team. Their experiences are somewhat different than the average foot soldier's, as they roam the hills looking for officers, gunners and other important targets in the Italian army. After the war, following a stint in an Italian concentration camp, Jozef struggles to return to his father and to find a path for his own future.

[bemislibrary · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Jozef returns to Austria-Hungary with his father after a tragedy strikes the family. It was not an easy life and circumstances seemed to conspire to make everything his does subject to violence and mayhem. When he enlists and becomes a sharpshooter in the war, the violence intensifies. This is not a feel good, fighting for a good cause type of book, but is decent enough for historical fiction.

[samfsmith_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

No happy ending here. But then it’s a war novel, the Austrian/Italian front in WWI. The hero is a young US citizen, whose father took him back to Hungary as a child. He grows up herding sheep with his father, enlists, becomes a sniper for the Austrians, and has some horrific adventures before the war ends. His troubles don’t end there, since he has to get “home”. But where is home?It’s well written and captivating, if depressing. An interesting look at a forgotten front in a war that is fast receding from human memory.

[convivia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sojourn: To dwell for a time. To live in a place as a temporary resident or stranger, not considering the place as a permanent habitation; to delay, to tarry; temporary residence, as in a foreign land.-Webster’s dictionary“To sojourn signified to be instructed; and therefore sojourner signified those who suffered themselves to be instructed in the statutes and doctrinal things……Hence a sojourner before Jehovah partakes of the statutes of eternity. ” -Swedenborg“Sojourn” to me has held the connotation of a moment within a period of transition. In terms of Andrew Krivak’s novel, THE SOJOURN, this may actually have represented a relatively short period in protagonist Jozef Vinich’s life, from infancy until the age of twenty or so when he lived in Europe. The amazements of this finely cut novel shine like a polished gem’s facets. One doesn’t even imagine that some emigrants returned to their European home countries disillusioned and scarred by grief, after their sojourn in the United States. On the other hand, his father’s brief but eventful period of employment as a silver miner in Leadville, Colorado where he lived with his wife, Jozef’s mother, ended in disaster, when she perished under a train after throwing the young infant Jozef to safety. Shortly after this, Jozef’s father decides to return to his life as a shepherd in the mountains of Slovakia near Hungary in the 1890’s. Jozef develops rugged outdoor skills, as he becomes a topnotch rifleman. His father also reads to him in English from such texts as he brought back with him, e.g. Moby Dick, Thoreau, Ulysses Grant’s autobiography, etc. His command of outdoor skills and marksmanship later set him up to become at a very early age a sharpshooter in the Austrian Imperial regiments. Krivak has managed to compress the horrors Jozef participates in as the struggle to save the Empire in the Balkans during World War I unfolds into an amazingly visualized telescopic panorama of the battlegrounds, filled with fox holes, snipers’ nests, and reconnoiters in icy Alpine terrain in the Dolomites. Eventually captured while injured, then force marched south where he boards a freighter for a prison camp in Sardinia, Jozef returns to civilian life through burning cities and villages, walking past starving civilians, and abandoned farms where military deserters lurk.The young man’s encounter with a young gipsy girl almost ready to give birth may mark a turn in his development toward adult responsibility. As a child, Jozef had adopted the peasants’ distrust of the Rom. Now, in his search to find the child’s grandparents he must break through their antipathy toward his folk. By the time he reaches his home village in Slovakia, Jozef is ready to return to the United States as an adult. Some problematic issues: Jozef’s father, a Slovakian shepherd, has become sufficiently literate to read Thoreau in English. Just how he had gained such proficiency became a slight enigma, never clearly explained. He had obviously chosen to speak English before his marriage, and insisted that Jozef’s mother speak it all the time during their brief stay in Leadville, Colorado despite her lack of tutelage and supportive friends to help her learn contexts in this difficult second language. Taking these classics back to the old country into the rural isolation from which he had emerged seems amazing. But then fiction is always stranger than truth, I find!As to the book’s form: novel or novella? This saga could have become a hefty tome on the order of Tolstoi’s War & Peace. The entire narrative encompasses or encapsulates a man’s childhood, youth, and premature adulthood in less than two hundred pages. Nothing important has been omitted. Vinich’s experiences of abuse f rom women from his very earliest days : To have been thrown from a railroad trestle as a train approached might superficially seem abusive. However his miraculous salvation from the fate that met his mother lifts us to a different plane. The irony of his subsequent suffering at the hands of a cruel stepmother (part of Propp’s tool kit of morphologies!) and his brief alliance with the gipsy woman who entrusts her newborn child to him form a trajectory clearly inviting the reader to reflect upon the mysteries of our survival and salvation. It also provokes some reflection on human resilience and the individual’s cultivation of moral values. The choice of first person narrative from an aged man's perspective (Jozef tells about this in 1972 in a Pennsylvania town.) resonates with Krivak’s contact with St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Augustine, Rousseau and other contemplatives. The first person narrative also gives us who are elderly an opportunity to admire Jozef’s command of relating all that he saw and experienced as a youth. The narrator gradually reveals some profound insights about his development of faith in God and trust in man. The unswerving loyalty of his years as a soldier, leading to the ultimate betrayal of thousands of comrades to unremitting attack, the eventual fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the seeds of the Holocaust to come only twenty or thirty years later – all this in such an economy of text constitutes a triumph of concision.[ This differs from the oral histories taken by interviewers in the 1970's, e.g. Foxfire volumes, historical society archival material collected around the Bicentennial, etc. when Vinich writes his memoir.]This reader stepped away at the end of THE SOJOURN wondering how Jozef fared when he returned to America. Did he find a kinder or a harsher life? Did he meet an adult mentor who nurtured his faith and his intelligence, or did he face more brutality as an unskilled laborer? In an interview on line, author Andrew Krivak indicated that he too had some curiosity about what happened later in Jozef’s life. Since some of the fictive events are based on actual family stories and perhaps secrets, it is my conjecture that Krivak will have many possibilities open if he provides us with a prequel and/or a sequel. I have an incurable hunger for more stories about appealing characters. Is such an alienated adult capable of finding or creating community with other men and women? Or is he a person who occasionally appears in the back of a church during Mass, vanishing almost before the main body of the congregation becomes aware of his existence? Will Jozef’s profound bond with his father, a religious skeptic, influence his search for meaning in life? It seems that his father felt that Jozef survived as the result of God’s judgment on him as a husband who failed to protect Jozef’s mother,. He wanted his son to return to America in hopes that he’d find potential for a family and wider community of love). So in the 1920's did Jozef flourish in a state of grace or regret? An interim of fifty years elapsed between Jozef's return and the time of his story about his youth in Europe.I am looking forward to reading Krivak’s memoir about his sojourn in a Jesuit novitiate in southeastern New York state.

[banjo123 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is about WWI, from the perspective of a young Slavic, sharpshooter. It's a short, very well-written book. An interesting perspective on the war, but definitely sad and hard to read about so much senseless death.

[schmerguls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is jewel of a work, telling in limpid prose of a boy born in the USA who lives with his shepherd-father in what is now Slovakia, goes to fight for Austria-Hungary on the Italian front, and after the war has a touching encounter with a pregnant Gypsy girl. This is a straight-forward story appealing in all its aspects. Well worth the couple hours it takes to read it.

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hey, I really liked this book. Its a more humane Cormac McCarthy's The Road. IT is beautifully written and kind of a throwback to 19th century literature. The bulk of the book takes place in the period of WW1 in eastern Europe. The characters are beautifully drawn and multi- dimensional. The book is the author's first and he was a National Book Award finalist so he has a great future in the business. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor with this guy.

[ozzer_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This coming-of-age novel focuses on the randomness of sudden death. “One never knows from where the blow will fall and that, always, in the midst of life we are in death.” A mother trapped in the path of a train throws her baby into a river to save him. A young boy falls on a mountain trail dropping his rifle and accidentally kills a hunting companion. And, especially, two young men spend much of their war as snipers. "We were trained to make head shots and aimed for the teeth.” “We might kill them, one at a time, with a silence that terrified them more than anything because it held nothing of the glory they imagined they’d find in battle."Jozef Vinich, the narrator of Andrew Krivak’s excellent war novel, THE SOJOURN, tells of a childhood in a Colorado mining town, a return to a shepherd’s life on the far edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and exploits as a sniper in WWI. Despite a calm and matter-of-fact narrative voice, death and the brutalities of war are never far away in this story.Bored with life in his isolated village, Jozef longs for wartime glory and the chance to see the world. He and his friend Zlee volunteer for the army and are assigned as snipers because of the sharpshooting skills they honed while tending sheep in the Carpathians. This provides an escape from the gruesomeness of the trenches and an illusion that death is a game, but comes at great cost for both boys. They are instructed to kill by a grizzled veteran “from the top down in order to leave an army leaderless and demoralized.” Krivak conveys the shear horror of what these young men will do in the words of their mentor—“You must find the soldier of rank, and find in yourselves the will to remain calm, silent, and alert. Then kill as though it were your only chance to live.”Jozef and Zlee trek across the Italian Alps to hunt down an enemy sniper whose skillset may surpass theirs. This mission has unfortunate consequences for both of them and results in Jozef’s ultimate capture. He is sent to a POW camp in Sardinia where he ends the war as a disillusioned and broken man. After a long trek he finds his way to a home that never really was one.Krivak depicts abundant violence and death with a simple and direct tone. He is especially good at conveying the ethnic and national divisions that led to the war and the place that America held as a refuge for Europeans. The brotherhood that exists between Jozef and Zlee, as well as the tension between Jozef and his father are also well realized. This slim novel deals with the contradictions of the human spirit but offers no answers.