Jason Prokowiew wasn’t trained to use his voice.

As a self-described fat and queer kid born in 1976 in Sudbury, Mass., the budding writer endured abuse that no one named. “Body positivity” didn’t exist yet. Ellen wasn’t out. So it was no surprise, really, when the school bully sat behind him in class, waiting for an opportune moment to snap an elastic against the back of his ear. Crack! He swallowed the searing feeling, braced for another attack.

The author of “War Boys: A Father and Son Memoir” had learned from his family to be stealthily silent. His father Volodya, a Belarusian man who survived World War II by stealing food, assuming a German identity, and mastering the language of his enemies, was a practiced observer, an outsider. The man who made it to MIT, married his American dance partner and provided for 13 children was also an alcoholic. 

For Jason — child number 13 — his dad was the terror beyond his bedroom door, whose rages kept him trapped in his room, unable to use the bathroom because it was too big a risk.

Later, the storyteller in Jason would “want to know the roots” of his father’s violence — and make sense of the message behind it: Keep quiet, even if it hurts. 

It was a painful narrative, particularly after Volodya’s unexpected sobriety. When Jason was 10, his father was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and was told he could never drink again. Now the family, particularly his mother, who had never acknowledged her husband’s alcoholism, was mum about the dry drunk whose hints of wrath — a hardness in his voice, a glaze over his eyes — could be more frightening than an outright meltdown. Who was he now?

And who was his son? 

The first time Jason tested his voice, it was barely a whisper.

Somehow, as he describes in his memoir, the school choir director heard the 16-year-old’s hushed singing as he practiced for an upcoming audition:

“‘Louder,’ she said. I sang louder.

‘Louder!’ she hollered over the noise, but the noise was my voice.

I found louder.

‘Do you hear yourself? You can really sing!’ she shouted from 15 feet away, from the top of the choir risers.

Something happened to my skin. It tingled as Ms. Smith told me something positive about myself. It was unfamiliar, and it was as if my body wanted more. My voice reverberated in my limbs.”

The Wales-based author, who won the 2025 Aurora Polaris Award in Creative Nonfiction for “War Boys,” tells this inspiring anecdote in an episode of PBS’s “Stories from the Stage.” He will read from the memoir at Straw Dog Writers Guild’s Writers Night Out on Tuesday, Oct. 6 at 6 p.m. at Forbes Library. 

Jason flexed his voice again when he was 21, while enrolled in a Russian language and politics course at Oberlin College. The language that was new on his tongue spoke to something pulsing through his blood, enduring across time. His professor encouraged him to interview his dad about his wartime experiences. 

For the next four years, Jason logged 50 hours of interviews with Volodya. He was there to make space for his father’s narrative. But asking him questions — and, oftentimes, probing for more — was a new way of relating to the world. The alcoholic he’d orbited became a subject, something to study, and his dad was no longer the sun, but a fellow human being in an ever-growing galaxy.

Then he died, and at 25, Jason spent the next two decades, through an MFA program and a year-long “memoir incubator” at Grub Street, honing his voice on the page.

While he was initially going to write exclusively about Volodya’s life story, he decided to braid it with his own, using the interviews as a device to link the two timelines. That way, Jason and Volodya could be conducting an interview in the early 2000s, then jump back to the 1940s, or to the 1980s, always returning to their adult dialogue about two harrowing childhoods. 

“Instead of making the storylines compete, I could see we were speaking to each other, informing each other,” he explained.

They drew each other out. At the beginning of the book, Jason asks Volodya to describe what it felt like to go hungry during the war. 

“My father described an all-consuming ache in his belly … It was the foremost consideration of every moment and the work of every single day,” he writes.

After shutting off the recorder that day, his dad began to cry.

“I think after that moment it felt like that smaller, younger version was always present with us, and we allowed that version of him to speak and tell his stories from a place that was scary, that was dangerous,” said Jason, who later appreciated the emergence of his own inner child. “I’m very thankful to the little-boy versions of Volodya and Jason who kind of cracked through” their longstanding narratives.

There are joyous moments in the book, too, when the two share a love of Russian music, and admire their mutual “inner fire” — that spark that kept them alive until they were finally able to listen to each other.

“War Boys” (Trio House Press, 306 pages, $24.99) can be purchased at warboysbook.com. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.