War Boys – Jason Prokowiew
Jason Prokowiew’s project for the 2025 Jack Straw Writers Program is a braided memoir about his Russian father’s adoption by the Nazis who murdered his family at the start of World War II, and the trauma he carried into parenthood. In his conversation with curator Kathleen Alcalá, they talk through the reason his father had four different names throughout his life, his experience using the Belarusian national archives, and how his father felt about him sharing his stories. “He liked that these stories were now in my hands. . . . And towards the end of the interviews, he understood that I was turning it into a work of art, that I was transforming it into something that people could read. He just was very into it. . . . He just wanted to see what it would become, and I just felt like I had his support from that point.”
Music by Greg Kramer, produced in part through the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
