Leave and Never Return

Ordinariness and tragedy, peace and war, life and death, the South and the North… A theme that still worries not only the Korean community, but the entire world.

“Don’t go back” are moving stories about the postwar period in 1950s Korea by writer Lee Ho-chhhol, who personally lived through the war and reflected his experiences through short tales. Each story tells about the lives of people enduring the difficult postwar time: here everyday life intertwines with tragedy, domestic life with war, death with life, superstition with pragmatism. People forced to live in a new country divided along the 38th parallel live through it in their own way, finding comfort in memories, superstitions, and everyday routines. Each story in the collection presents the story of one or several human destinies. Through them, with everyday sincerity, the writer conveys the sense of a new reality of an entire people—split in two by the will of war. There is the painful waiting for relatives from the front, and love for a brother, and caring for the neighbor, and fear of the unknown, and loneliness, and guilt. But each person will surely find their path in this new reality—their own comfort and their own hope for peace.