A bittersweet tale of war, survival, and the movies

With great wit and warmth, Alexander Voloshin’s Sidetracked provides unique insight into one of the major human dramas of the twentieth century: the escape of some two million refugees from the collapsing Russian Empire in the wake of the revolutions of 1917. A former officer in the White Army, Voloshin spent the late 1920s and 1930s struggling to make a living in Hollywood as an extra. His lively yet poignant poem follows his countrymen as they resist the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, suffer crushing defeat, and take flight—first to Europe, then to New York, and, eventually, to Los Angeles. The chapters devoted to the lives of émigrés in Hollywood, which Voloshin knew so well, are a priceless document of the town’s Golden Age, as viewed from the bottom up.