March 26, 2025: John Smolens, "The Immigrants’ Samovar: My Russian Novel (Abridged)"

The Immigrants’ Samovar: My Russian Novel (Abridged)

by: John Smolens

L. and his wife left Smolensk in 18--, taking with them nothing more than the clothes on their back
and maybe one small valise. Most everything else had been sold or confiscated by the Czar’s
soldiers. I wonder what happened to the samovar. They left with just enough rubles to buy their
way out of Russia, crossing the Dnieper River and traveling west until they reached a port, let’s say
Gdansk, where they boarded a ship. Its deck was packed with immigrants—we’ve all seen the
photographs—and it was a hard voyage across the ocean to Ellis Island, where they all waited in
line, and waited and waited, until they stood before a uniformed clerk with waxed moustaches.
More than a century later, I have stood in that great hall, where the clerk’s incomprehensible English
reeked of flask whiskey, saying Welcome to America. The light in that hall angles through large semi-
circular windows high above the tile floor, which is now populated by tourists wearing earbuds.
When L. and his wife stood there the day was overcast and their woolen overcoats were heavy with
saltwater. She may have been pregnant with my grandfather Nathaniel, I’m not sure, but I would
like to think that’s why I have an affinity for the ocean. Nathaniel might have been conceived in
Smolensk, on a night when soldiers pounded on doors in the Jewish quarter, but what kind of love is
that, in the face of pending expulsion? Or was it a moment of respite once they crossed the border,
paying a farmer to let them sleep in the hayloft while the storm passes. But most likely it was on
board ship on an evening when the seas calmed and they found a dark, quiet place behind a life
boat, and beneath the stars L. and his wife found their way through the layers of all the clothing they
owned so that Nathaniel and my father and I could come to know how the stars look above the
ocean on just such a night. So when the clerk inspected the cards pinned to their lapels, his hand
reached for my great-grandmother’s breast, causing her to take a step back in horror, and L.’s hand
grabbed the clerk’s wrist, for after the Czar’s men he had lost all fear. Seeing that the clerk was
affronted by the touch of his filthy hand, L. pulled his card away from his coat, offering it to him,
tilting it to the light so that he might see better, and the clerk, who would not live another three
years, his heart bursting one evening as he crossed the harbor on the ferry, glanced quickly at the
card and on his form he wrote Smolens instead of L., not caring whether it was this man’s name or
the place he came from (and why he dropped the k nobody will ever know), because he just wanted
to get on to the next one, there were so many, millions and millions, waiting in the line in that great
hall, day after day after year after decade, streaming across the Atlantic, filling up the city streets with
their accents and their cooking and the reek of their clothes, despite the fact that my great-
grandmother did laundry almost every day of her life in the place called Brooklyn. So while we were
born here with the name that isn’t even the correct spelling of the city in Russia from which L. and
his young wife were driven by the Czar’s men, their samovar remained behind, and over the decades,
through the generations—during the Revolution, and the rise of the Soviet Union, and the demise
of the USSR, until there is once again a frightening and frightened Russia—the samovar has
survived, given first as a gift from a soldier to his fiancé (never saying exactly how he had obtained
it), who cherished it, polished it, and passed it down through generations of daughters, who didn’t
always cherish it or polish it, making its way to where?—Moscow, St. Petersburg, or perhaps Kiev,
but no, it’s certainly still in Smolensk, sitting in the cupboard, used only when the older relatives
visit. While drinking glasses of tea, they gaze at their distorted reflections in the silver (polished for
the occasion), and because they really haven’t much to say, no births, no deaths, no worthwhile
gossip, they wonder how long the samovar has been in the family, because they have no more
knowledge of L. and his wife than I do. Yet the finely etched spigot and handles remind them of
the fact that, though everything has changed, there is nothing quite as beautiful as a good Russian

samovar.

John Smolens has published thirteen works of fiction, twelve novels and a collection of short stories.  He was educated at Boston College, the University of New Hampshire, and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has taught at Michigan State University, Western Michigan University, and is professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University, where he taught in the English Department and served as the director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. In 2010, he was the recipient of the Michigan Author of the Year Award from the Michigan Library Association. He lives in Marquette, Michigan.  John is a Yooper.