Hybrid Event: War Boys, Jason Prokowiew

Date and Time

• Thursday, Aug 20, 2026  7pm - 8pm

Location

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Details

East City Bookshop welcomes Jason Prokowiew to discuss his book, War Boys, in conversation with Stevie Billow

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT WAR BOYS

War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir by Jason Prokowiew (July 1, 2026, Trio House Press), winner of the 2025 Aurora Polaris Award for Creative nonfiction, tells two parallel stories of survival. Jason’s father, Volodya, was a 10-year-old enjoying summer camp in the countryside of Belarus when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Planes flew overhead, shooting at the campers, and life as Volodya knew it ended. He spent two weeks walking back home to Minsk with other campers and counselors hoping to find family, only to discover a bombed-out city and apartment. Volodya never saw his mother or sister again. Survival became his only goal.

War Boys shares Volodya’s remarkable will to survive, showing how a gnawing hunger fueled him to leave the city and find work and shelter, whatever it took. He was adopted by a Nazi family and became Wolfgang, a pre-teen taken in by the very people who engineered his abandonment. He immigrated to America when he was 18, and there he learned to be Walter. He had survived the war, but he was not unscathed. Walter attended MIT and became an engineer. He married and had 13 children, but he carried the trauma of his youth into adulthood and became an abusive, alcoholic father.

In War Boys Jason weaves how his own childhood, growing up in fear of his father while navigating loneliness, shame and his emerging identity as a queer man, was impacted by his father’s imposing presence in their house.

Compelled to understand the root of his father’s rage, Prokowiew spent over 50 hours interviewing him and his mother, retracing his Russian father’s harrowing path from a desperate war orphan to the man who would shape Jason’s suburban American life. Before his death in 2002, Jason's father was able to share his story in full, allowing both men to find understanding and healing in their final years together. During one of the interviews Jason told his father, "You were good at surviving, but not thriving." His father's scornful reply, "What a privilege, to want to thrive," captures the painful disconnect between their childhoods and what each lost.

War Boys offers a powerful testament to reconciliation. This is the story of two battle-scarred survivors, father and son, who heal their fractured relationship through the transformative power of claiming and telling their own stories and learning to truly listen to one another.

Jason Prokowiew received the PEN America/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and a Fulbright Scholar Award for War Boys. His writing has appeared in The North American Review, The Guardian, Salon, WBUR's Cognoscenti, Roxane Gay's "The Audacity," and on WORLD Channel's Stories from the Stage, where his piece "Sing" is the most watched in the show's history. He's received support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Ragdale, and the Mass Cultural Council. He lives on a lake in Massachusetts with his husband Dave and their greyhound Champ.

Stevie Billow is a writer and editor living in Washington DC. Their work has been supported by GrubStreet, Seventh Wave, Shenandoah literary magazine, and the Key West Literary Seminar among others. Most recently, Stevie received research support from the John and Helen Timo Foundation for their writing on Rusyn identity and culture. By day, Stevie is a bookseller and dog photographer at East City Bookshop.