Theodore OdrachTheodore Odrach was born Theodore Sholomitsky in 1912 outside of Pinsk, Belarus. At the age of nine, he was arrested for a petty crime by the authorities. Without his parents' knowledge, he was sent to a reform school in Vilnius, Lithuania (then unde Polish rule). Released at the age of 18, he entered what is now Vilnius University, studying philosophy and ancient history. With the Soviet invasion in 1939, he fled Vilnius and returned to his native Pinsk, where he secured a job as headmaster of a village school. As with all teachers of the time, his main duties were to transform the school system into a Soviet one and usher in complete russification. Within a year, he fell under suspicion by the Soviet regime and became imprisoned on some trumped-up charge. He managed to escape and flee south to Ukraine (then under German occupation), where he edited underground war-time newspapers. Toward the end of the war, with the return of the Bolshevik regime, he fled over the Carpathian Mountains to the West. Traveling through Europe, in Germany he met and married Klara Nagorski. After living in England for five years, in 1953 he and his wife immigrated to Canada. It was in his home in Toronto that Odrach did most of his writing. He died of a stroke in 1964. Read More Read Less