Jason Prokowiew presents War Boys in conversation with Naomi Cohn

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 K*ll 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.

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.

Naomi Cohn is a writer and teaching artist whose work explores adaptation. Her recent book, , won the Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize, Foreword Indies Silver for Autobiography and Memoir, and the IPY Gold Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her work’s also appeared in Baltimore Review, LitHub, Hippocampus, Ninth Letter, Terrain, and Poetry, among other places. Raised in Chicago, she now lives on unceded Dakota territory in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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