Our November 2026 Open Secrets Book Club pick is War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir by Jason Prokowiew, published by Trio House Press, which you can follow on Substack. You can get a taste of the book by reading Jason’s essay, “Who, Exactly, Are You, Dad?” which is excerpted from War Boys.
Join us in the Open Secrets Magazine chat to discuss the book and related topics, and for a Q&A with Jason on Thursday, November 12 at 8 p.m. ET on Substack Live, which you can watch in the Substack app or on desktop. Click here for a reminder; Open Secrets subscribers will be notified when we go live. Please bring your own questions for Jason, which we will ask as time permits. The discussion will be recorded and posted for anyone who can’t attend live.
Below you’ll find a personal note from Jason Prokowiew and purchase links for the book, which you can also check out or request at your local library.
A Note from Jason Prokowiew
I started writing War Boys in 1999, when I was 21 years old. At first, I focused on interviewing my father about his World War II experiences, believing that’s where the work of writing a book about war would start and end—with the person who’d survived the global conflict.
I took the interviews into my MFA program from 2003 to 2006, crafting the story of how a little Russian boy, away at summer camp in 1941, lost everything when the Nazis invaded that summer: his home, his family, his future as he and his family likely imagined it.
In 2010 I was still writing that narrative when I got an immovable case of writer’s block. I did what so many writers before me did when faced with writer’s block: I went to law school. Sure, that makes sense. I put War Boys away, but my husband will tell you, even while running my own practice for thirteen years, I lit up brightest when I talked about War Boys. In 2018 I said to myself, “I think it’s time to finish War Boys.”
As I returned to the work, it became clear that I also wanted to tell the story of how my father’s wartime trauma bled into my family. I was the youngest of thirteen children, but the violence that permeated our home thrived decades before me. As I began to write my own story of how the horrors my father experienced at the hands of the Nazis echoed into our lives, I wove an invisible thread between our abuse and neglect and the world war that forged my father.
Lastly, I had fifty hours of interviews with my father, interviews that fundamentally changed how I felt about him, as I saw the stoic man before me become the scared little boy he once was. The interviews softened my father toward me, as our recording time became a safe place for him to reveal just how terrified he’d been, living and working with the Nazis. Our interviews, and how they changed us, became the third thread of my braided memoir War Boys.
With this book I invite readers to explore war’s long reach, at a time when conflicts rage across the globe. I wanted War Boys to be my anti-war sentiment, my attempt to protest the never-ending creation of war boys and war girls happening every day still.
I invite readers to consider the power of listening to our family’s stories, and how that might shift things for teller and listener. I welcome whatever reactions War Boys stirs in its readers and can’t wait for this conversation.
Where to buy War Boys
Ebook
About War Boys
War Boys is an extraordinary exploration of a family experiencing intergenerational trauma: an adult son seeking to understand his terrifying and abusive father, interwoven with a biography of his father, who experienced unimaginable horrors as a child during World War II.
As a child, Jason Prokowiew lived in fear of his father, an abusive alcoholic. Lonely and full of shame and guilt, Prokowiew recounts a lonely childhood, colored by struggles with weight, self-image, and his emerging identity as a gay man.
Impelled to confront the trauma of his childhood, Prokowiew documents the stories of his father’s own trauma that began when Nazis murdered his family at the start of the war. In War Boys, Prokowiew retraces his father’s harrowing journey to understand how he survived the war and why he became the terrifying father Jason knew. In an era where generational estrangement is common, War Boys inspires with its account of this father and son, both battle-scarred survivors, and how they heal their relationship through the power of claiming and telling their own stories - and listening to one another.
What is it like to be a child under attack?
At ten, a plane tries to kill you, then you’re alone. Even when someone is kind-perhaps a woman who runs a sick house who pulls you into her orbit-they eventually set you out into the fiery world again. The world treats you as a man but you’re a child, and you see too much. An enemy employs you, demands maturity from you, and whips you when you’re not perfect.
I said to my father, “you were good at surviving, but not thriving.”
“What a privilege, to want to thrive,” he said scornfully, annoyed as I tried to name the connective tissue between our childhoods, between what each of us lost.
About Jason Prokowiew
Jason Prokowiew won the 2023 PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, a Fulbright Scholar Award, and the Aurora Polaris Prize for Nonfiction for War Boys, his braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by Nazis during World War II and the trauma his father carried into parenthood. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, Under the Sun, The Guardian, Salon, Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, “The Audacity,” WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Brevity, Business Insider, and on PBS/WORLD Channel’s Stories from the Stage. His Stories from the Stage piece, “Sing,” has over 2.6 million views on Facebook and is the most viewed in the show’s history. His essay “The Demulcent of Shame,” originally published by Roxane Gay, won the 2023 Lascaux Prize for Creative Nonfiction. He’s received additional support from Bread Loaf, Ucross, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. A recovering disability attorney, he lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.
Find out more at warboysbook.com
