Contacts: The Pull of the Homeland

The publication "Contacts: The Power of Attraction of the Homeland" is a unique collection of testimonies about the relations between the Belarusian emigration and the metropolis. Dedicated to the 90th anniversary of Janka Zaprudnik, the book presents documents from his personal archive and materials from the collections of BINIM and BDAMLHM. The reader will find here both official letters from Minsk and heartfelt messages from villages, records from the newspaper "Belarus", testimonies about human rights activities, and searches for roots. This book is about the invisible threads that connected Belarusians on both sides of the ocean.

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The book "Contacts: The Power of Attraction of the Homeland" - the 30th in the "Homeland Library" series - is dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the Belarusian activist in the USA, historian and journalist Janka Zaprudnik. The publication is based on the jubilee's archives, stored in BINIM (USA) and BDAMLHM (Belarus), as well as collections of the "Belarus" newspaper. It provides a cross-section, distinct levels, at which contacts between the diaspora and the metropolis occurred: from human rights activities to the search for relatives, from official letters from the leadership of the Republic of Belarus to a handwritten sheet from a small village in the east of the country. The collected materials reflect what Belarus lived for, how it changed over time, and how attitudes towards emigration changed.