Product Description

A passionate story of friendship, family, and the other side of the American dream.

One Sunday morning, Nick Blud, a successful Boston physician, is home in bed when he receives a phone call from Adriana Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. The beautiful Adriana, who once vacationed at her family's luxurious summer home on the Black Sea, now lives in a run-down apartment in New Jersey. Abandoned by her husband and estranged from her sons, she summons Nick back to his old neighborhood, where something unspeakable has happened--exactly what, no one is willing to say.

Ambassador of the Dead is a harrowing tale of ambitions gone awry, and an unflinching meditation on exile and assimilation and the cost of love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #913779 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This tale of Ukrainian immigrants' attempts at adjustment to life in America has a dreamy affect, but its undercurrent of emotional honesty gives it bite. Nick, a Boston doctor, is drawn back to his hometown of Elizabeth, N.J., by the news that his childhood friend Alex is in trouble although he does not yet know what kind of trouble. He finds first that Alex's mother, Ada, once vibrant and attractive, is now embittered, lonely and nearly blind. Nick reminisces about his past, focusing on memories of his friend for most of the book. As a child, Alex was mischievous, but eventually became more and more wild, due in part to his father's abuse and subsequent abandonment. Throughout the novel he is agitated by society and by his own psyche, gradually losing his sanity. Melnyczuk (What Is Told) writes exceedingly well-controlled miniature narratives that begin as soft-focus reveries and develop into darker tales that confidently clinch the attention and release it just as smoothly. One of Alex's mother's early lovers seems gentle during their initial courtship, then expresses sadomasochistic desires; she pursues another failed romance with an ‚migr‚ poet. Even the story of the narrator's marriage is laced with strife: his wife confesses that she had rejected his earliest advances because he was Ukrainian and she was Jewish. The book drifts in a Proustian fashion, vividly portraying the difficulties of cultural assimilation until the jarring conclusion. Recollections that might have fizzled in another author's hands here grow luminous and haunting.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This ambitious, harrowing novel by AGNI editor Melnyczuk (What Is Told) tells of Ada Kruk, an innocent Ukrainian girl victimized by cruelty and violence during World War II. During the occupation of her homeland, Ada is brutally raped by a soldier one winter night on her way home from skating at a local pond. Soon after, her father is arrested and murdered by the occupying Nazis. The memories of these and other atrocities haunt Ada for the rest of her life long after the war ends and long after she immigrates to the United States and begins a family of her own. Battered and confused, Ada is a deeply tragic figure, and Melnyczuk tells her story with great sympathy and insight. As Ada's narrative unfolds, Melnyczuk also explores profound questions related to violence, the weight of the past, and the kind of pain from which it is impossible to recover. A very powerful and disturbing novel; recommended for all libraries. Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Nick Blud returns to his old New Jersey neighborhood at the request of Ada Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. Not ready to explain why she invited him, Ada stalls by recounting stories of the past. At Ada's insistence, Nick chronicles what he knows of the Kruk family history. After the family emigrated from the Ukraine, Ada and her sons found themselves abandoned by her husband. She took solace in the company of men and in speaking to the ghosts of her dead relatives. She was adamant regarding teaching her sons about the country they left behind, and mourned the life she could have had and the choices she should have made. But the history of the Kruk family isn't finished until Ada tells the final chapter, revealing the tragic reason she called on Nick. Through the story of the Kruks, Melnyczuk intelligently explores the problems of assimilation, the pain of war, and the fear of leaving the past behind, and he poignantly captures the disillusionment and disappointment when the American dream never materializes. Carolyn Kubisz
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Ambassador to humanity
In a compelling story, told poetically, Melnyczuk, takes us on a gripping journey. Along the way, he illuminates the path of Ukrainian families, post WWII, coming to America to begin again. The minefields of history, stuggles with being "other", ghosts of those who never made the trip and rigid standards enforced within a community of immigrants will be familiar to many from other places, other devasations who attempted to start new lives in the USA.
Beautifully told, this is the tale of a young man coming to terms with a tragedy worthy of the Greeks, playied out in a run down New Jersey apartment that is his best friend's home. While suffering to find a place for himself in the New World, the narrator, Ned Blud, must make sense of the lives intertwined with his own-lives both complex and mundane but etched in the chaos of loss.
We are asked to pomder the place of the past in forging a future, the obligation of children to the grief of parents, the sacrificess, as well as, the benefits of assimilation and the strength of the individual within and without community. Finally, however, the question that Melyyczuk demands we answer is what role memory plays in being human.

PROCESSING THE SINS AND PAIN OF THE PAST
We are each a storehouse of the accumulative pain that we have experienced, handed down to us by our parents and other significants -- how we recognize, view and process that pain draws the boundaries of the way in which we live our lives. Some people have a tougher time dealing with their past than others -- and when, as in the case of Nick Blud, the narrator of Askold Melnyczuk's dark, rich and extremely moving novel, that pain is multiplied by the suffering endured by his parents and grandparents, it's an almost insurmountable task. To make matters even more difficult for him, his parents -- Ukranian immigrants who have made a new life in America -- are reluctant to give many details about what they experienced in WWII in their homeland. This novel chronicles Nick's journey inward and backward to fill in the gaps in his family's past and come to terms with them. There are several characters in the novel who are making this journey -- and, indeed, aren't we all, to varying degrees? Each of them has their own discoveries to make, their own ghosts to exorcize, their own truths to define. Some of them are up to the challenge -- and some of them fail in devastating ways.

The mood of Melnyczuk's novel is dark -- but the writing is very rich, expressing the desperation and hope, the pain and joy, the terror and exultation in which his characters are awash. The emotions here run strong and deep, and they are honestly -- at times brutally so -- portrayed. A premise is expressed toward the end of the novel -- and this isn't a spoiling revelation, don't worry -- about the nature of darkness and light in our lives: 'Death, a writer once observed, is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything'. We need one in order to know and appreciate the other.

I found the novel to be modrately compelling for the first 100 pages -- then it picked up steam and held me unrelentingly in its grip for the duration of the story. The characterizations are full, developed vivdly, and memorable. This is one of the more unusual tales I've come across in the last year or so -- very entertaining on one level, and very instructive on another. I'll have to check out the author's earlier novel, WHAT IS TOLD -- I'm extremely impressed with the skills and style he has shown in this book.

Puzzling
I read this book several weeks ago but have not tried to comment until now. The book is well written, however the story is grim, it is like listening to one musical note that does not change. The theme is a familiar story of once wealthy people who upon emigrating find themselves living a life that is less satisfying than they could have imagined. One individual, who did break out and move onward and upward, is drawn back by a vague summons regarding some crisis, and this is what the body of the book explores.

The summons that returns Dr. Blud to his boyhood haunts in New Jersey must be vague to bring him back. There is nothing that justifies why this man would ever return to this neighborhood, so a mystery is needed to spark his curiosity and the return. The summons comes from Adriana the mother of his best childhood friend. Upon his arrival the past is explored and it is unremittingly grim, sometimes tragic, often brutally intentioned. And this is where I lost the thread. The immigrant tale of misery has been written about so many times and so well, that entering the genre takes more than desire. Much of the book is a distraction, which is contrived by Adriana to allow time to make a claim.

When the book reaches its close the author has used a somewhat clever device that explains why the reader has been forced, together with the Dr., by Adriana to endure the recitation of so much history. For this reader it was somewhat of a consolation for an otherwise bland read. It did not suddenly make clear and necessary all that the reader was put through, however it did provide some interest.

Perhaps I missed something with this work. I would suggest the book to others who have a gap in their reading time they need to fill; I would not make reading the book a priority.