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Print: $22.09 Worlds Apart is a novel about survival and a search for identity through memory. It looks at the choices forced on us and those we avoid making. It begins and ends with a fairy story told to the young David Wilenski by his mother in a refugee camp in England. The adult David looks back at life in that camp, realising its taboos hide a story and pose a question over identities and the past. The protagonists are his parents: Jadwiga, transported to the Soviet Gulag under Stalin, and Wladek, taken as a slave labourer to Hitler’s Reich. Dogged by guilt, through archives and accounts prised from his reluctant parents, David reassembles the shattered smithereens of their lives. A remarkable picture emerges of ordinary people struggling through war, love, and growing up, one in the “Jerusalem of the North” – riven by antagonistic nations – the other on an idyllic rural stage that is a military colony. These are the borderlands of 20th century Eastern Europe and a refugee camp in the borderlands of the UK.
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Henry Pavlovich's Blog
2008 Jan 05 Another reader, this time a retired military officer, has described the book as 'excellent, amazing and horrendous', I assume because of the experiences of the protagonists depicted.
2007 Sep 18 M.B. Dunlop from Oxford, England, says on Amazon: "The names are changed but these are the real recollections of the parents of a real person (David in the book). He extracted the information slowly from his 'displaced person' family, and penned this stunning and brilliant story covering the lives of 2 families in the 1930s and 1940s, mainly in East Poland, Vilnius, Berlin and Siberia. David's father and mother survived slave labour for the Nazis in Germany and slave labour for the Soviets in Siberia, then at the end of the war, had nowhere to go, their home areas having changed hands. Mr Pavlovich weaves their memories into a riveting narrative."
2007 Jul 14 Another reader has just telephoned me to say that he's finished my book and considers it "brilliant". He suggested I put that here! And he added that googling various names mentioned in the book had produced interesting information. I'm not surprised about that since the book was originally a biographical memoir and therefore based on real events and real people.
2007 Jun 14 Friends and colleagues who have read the book have suggested that I set up a website to provide more background and context. It's up and running at www.henrypavlovich.com2007 Apr 21 The Editor of the Chartered Institute of Linguists magazine has kindly published a review of my book and has described it as "fascinating". Thanks, Miranda! And best wishes with your first baby - a much greater feat than mine! Friends are telling me to ignore blushes and publish some reader feedback. OK, I have been called "gifted" (it's hard to say that after a lifetime's inculcation in modesty!). Another reader has said that he was reluctant to put the book down after getting into the story. Other epithets include "amazing" and "well written". I think that's enough for now!
2007 Feb 26 An American who lives in the same village here in the UK has told me that my book is a good example of the genre "faction" and that this subject is now even taught at some universities. (In other words, it's what once would have been classified as biography but, having been "novelised", where factual information is presented through dialogue, it now belongs under "literary fiction" or "faction"). I didn't know there were university courses on faction!
2007 Feb 16 2007 Feb 16 Starting to send out marketing information by email and letter - this is a full-time job!
Thought I'd better explain something in my Press Release: "Henry Pavlovich, son of war refugees, explores identity and memory issues through his novel, Worlds Apart, based on first-hand accounts of labour camps in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and on his own life in a UK refugee camp." Otherwise people might think it's fiction.
Also, should I add that it started out as a memoir and was "novelised" on the advice of a publishing agent?
Strange having to write about yourself in the third person: "Friends and work colleagues have heard me relate these accounts and have said they deserve a wider audience," says Henry Pavlovich. "They are also relevant today. When I was young I often heard ‘Go back to your own country!’ – or a pithier local equivalent – directed at those who ‘spoke foreign’, who looked different or who ate ‘funny food’. Children of immigrants are often keen to find out more about their exotic backgrounds, and their suspicions are aroused if parents prevaricate or hide family photographs. It is such circumstances that drive the character in my novel, David, to investigate..."
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