Tomorrow is Yesterday: A Novel of Wartime Belarus (1968)

Late one spring morning Mary Karaway arrives in Toronto full of hope. She means to find work, settle in, and then hunt down the murderer of her mother and her children. Twelve hours later she is standing at a police desk, with no idea which law of her new country she has broken.

Mary knows only a few dozen words of English. Where the house of her uncle's friend should be, the one link that was to help her start a new life, new apartments have been built. All afternoon and into the evening she walks the crowded streets asking whether anyone speaks Belarusian, and finds no one. When she sits down on a park bench to rest her sore feet, two drunks settle beside her, and a policeman in a black uniform takes her for a streetwalker. Locked in a cell with two women who seem quite at home there, she shrinks from their chatter. Some six thousand miles from a home the war has turned to ashes, she finds herself once again face to face with the authorities, and remembers the police state that wrecked her life.

Glossary and notes:
Belarusian: the novel's 1968 spelling of Belarusian, the people and language of Belarus
The novel opens in Toronto, after the war; from the next chapter Mary's story goes back to her home village in wartime Belarus.

The complete novel is available in print and ebook at grunwald.ca:
https://grunwald.ca/products/tomorrow-is-yesterday-kastus-akula?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=audio&utm_campaign=tomorrow_is_yesterday&utm_content=tiy-e01

Published by Grunwald Publishing.