Warm Arctic Nights

Warm Arctic Nights is a fictive memoir, the form Tarnawsky used to set a boy's idyllic pre-war Polish childhood against his nightmarish wartime Ukrainian adolescence. Presenting the book the year it appeared, he described it as tracing the fate of Ukrainians across pre-WWII Poland, the German-occupation years in Ukraine, and the migration West, all through a child's eyes, and called it probably the only literary work to cover that span. The two halves sit in one book unreconciled, which is the point.

The material is close to Tarnawsky's own. He fled western Ukraine as a child and reached the United States by way of a displaced-persons camp in Germany; the wartime adolescence in the book is built directly out of that arc, without flattening into autobiography.

Reviewers reached for Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Stash Luczkiw, in The Collidescope, called it a slide into hell hard to let go of once you commit. Alain Arias-Misson praised the intensity and purity of its poetic language. It is the late novel where the autobiographical pressure runs most direct, companion to The Iguanas of Heat.