They experience good fortune in the war, as the snipers are too valuable to use in the trenches, until they are sent to the Italian border to find a sniper that has for six months been picking off the soldiers on the Austrian border. They are early on recognized for their skill and assigned to an elite sharpshooting unit. War comes to Eastern Europe and the boys sign up together. They love their life and their father, but the idyll can’t last.

He teaches them to respect their prey and the land. Ondrej teaches the boys the ways of a hunter: patience, stillness, observance. She is down on her luck and unable to care for her son anymore, so Ondrej and Jozef make Zlee their own. Marian, or Zlee as they come to call him, is the son of a cousin of Ondrej. One spring when they are down in the village they add a new member to their family. It is a small existence, and quiet, but Josef learns English and history and becomes a very good shot.

There his father runs into trouble with the local citizenry and, fleeing the law, takes his young son back to the old country.ĭuring a time when Austria-Hungary was still an empire filled with a variety of ethnicities and local identities, Jozef and his father Ondrej live the life of the shepherd, spending half the year perched in the Carpathian Mountains. Early in his life he loses his mother in a train accident and his father takes him east to Pennsylvania. Jozef Vinich is an American-born young man born to Slovak parents, living in the turn of the 20th century. 'The Sojourn' by Andrew Krivak is a novel depicting the journey of a young man from anonymity to the horror of war, and back again to a life of peace and productivity.

The sojourn by andrew krivak