The Émigré Engineer
The Red Army, early 20th century. Great spread of headwear...
A touch on his arm startled Witold. One of the commissar's men stood there. He held a Nagant revolver out to Witold, and pointed. "Centre of the room," he clarified.
The man was thin but wiry, feral-looking. His teeth were strangely white and even. Witold couldn’t place his accent. He wondered if he was from the east, or the north, or the south. He had already seen White Russians and Tatars, or their heads, at least. The Revolution truly was bringing the peoples of Mother Russia together.
“When you’re ready,” the man said, and added, “it’s loaded.”
The man held an identical revolver in his own hands. He had a tamping rod out, and was going through a rather laborious process of ejecting spent cartridges. Witold idly counted the men on the floor. Seven of them. The man’s words didn’t seep in till he felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was only metal, he knew, a series of pipes and chambers, a spring, friction, percussion.
Witold took two strides, raised the gun to the guard’s temple, and pulled the trigger. The bang faded to a ringing note. It scared him. A puff of smoke stung his nose. Fighting the urge to sneeze, Witold saw that he had missed the man’s temple. That was the adjustment made by his glasses, he supposed, and the trembling of his hand. He had shot the man in the eye, instead. A fountain of blood, more than Witold had ever seen outside a farm, was gushing over Witold’s shoulder and onto the floor. Witold watched the arc dumbly, and stepped out of his daze and smartly to one side as it diminished, made a path on the floor then ran down the man’s face, into his bared teeth, and down his front. More alarmingly, almost, the guard was still standing upright. Witold looked closely and fearfully from the remaining eye to the outstretched hand.
My novella The Émigré Engineer has been published by American chapbook publisher Emerson College's Ploughshares. It looks at the fractured, sometimes violent journey of a young man who fled from the Russian Revolution as it spread through the countries caught in the orbit of the Soviet Union. He passes time among the émigrés and refugees in the teeming Paris of the 1920s to finally ‘become’ an American, but has to deal with one last piece of bloody business in Prohibition America before he can finally breathe easily.
I’ve written a lot about Witold and his family, the Galitzkis, over the years, but only ever had parts of the story published. The Émigré Engineer will be the biggest chunk of it to see proper daylight, so I’m pleased and excited to see it out there.
It's available from Amazon right here, as a download for the strange price of £1.46 - probably less than a cup of fancy coffee. It's a $1.99 download from Ploughshares here.
All the Ploughshares stories are available in a printed version in the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus edition, available here for a very reasonable $14.
I'm in very good company with a lot of talented writers, and that's a lot of literature for the price of a few fancy cappuccinos!
The man was thin but wiry, feral-looking. His teeth were strangely white and even. Witold couldn’t place his accent. He wondered if he was from the east, or the north, or the south. He had already seen White Russians and Tatars, or their heads, at least. The Revolution truly was bringing the peoples of Mother Russia together.
“When you’re ready,” the man said, and added, “it’s loaded.”
The man held an identical revolver in his own hands. He had a tamping rod out, and was going through a rather laborious process of ejecting spent cartridges. Witold idly counted the men on the floor. Seven of them. The man’s words didn’t seep in till he felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was only metal, he knew, a series of pipes and chambers, a spring, friction, percussion.
Witold took two strides, raised the gun to the guard’s temple, and pulled the trigger. The bang faded to a ringing note. It scared him. A puff of smoke stung his nose. Fighting the urge to sneeze, Witold saw that he had missed the man’s temple. That was the adjustment made by his glasses, he supposed, and the trembling of his hand. He had shot the man in the eye, instead. A fountain of blood, more than Witold had ever seen outside a farm, was gushing over Witold’s shoulder and onto the floor. Witold watched the arc dumbly, and stepped out of his daze and smartly to one side as it diminished, made a path on the floor then ran down the man’s face, into his bared teeth, and down his front. More alarmingly, almost, the guard was still standing upright. Witold looked closely and fearfully from the remaining eye to the outstretched hand.
My novella The Émigré Engineer has been published by American chapbook publisher Emerson College's Ploughshares. It looks at the fractured, sometimes violent journey of a young man who fled from the Russian Revolution as it spread through the countries caught in the orbit of the Soviet Union. He passes time among the émigrés and refugees in the teeming Paris of the 1920s to finally ‘become’ an American, but has to deal with one last piece of bloody business in Prohibition America before he can finally breathe easily.
I’ve written a lot about Witold and his family, the Galitzkis, over the years, but only ever had parts of the story published. The Émigré Engineer will be the biggest chunk of it to see proper daylight, so I’m pleased and excited to see it out there.
It's available from Amazon right here, as a download for the strange price of £1.46 - probably less than a cup of fancy coffee. It's a $1.99 download from Ploughshares here.
All the Ploughshares stories are available in a printed version in the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus edition, available here for a very reasonable $14.
I'm in very good company with a lot of talented writers, and that's a lot of literature for the price of a few fancy cappuccinos!
Reviews
I've had a few reviews for the book now.
This one from McLintic Sphere on Amazon:
This tale begins as the Russian Revolution has made its way to Galicia, a once-kingdom that has been batted back and forth among Poland, Ukraine, the Austrian empire…a history I do not know well, but a well-contested area for a long time. Witold Galitzki is a young man who escapes the commissar and make his way to Paris, stealing bicycles where he can, walking where he cannot…a venture on a train leaves four dead, by the time he leaves Paris and crosses the ocean to a town in Delaware, more deaths have occurred. It is a time when brutal deaths are the price of survival. Still, Witold has a valuable cargo that has made the journey deep within him. Pelted with tomatoes, he is mistaken for the Devil by Catholic immigrants... the milieu he is in is more old-world than new. More evil follows, but love as well and of course revenge…
Told in very short chapters, the story has a fable-like feel. It reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski at times, harrowing and clear in its portrayal of the behavior and morals of the time.
A great read from a writer whose tales at the edges of troubled Europe have the ring of truth.
This one from Edward D Ward:
Twenty years after the turn of the century, we find a chaotic world. Emigrants are flooding over borders, and interrogation cum body searches are conducted at every legal crossing. The needy consider any wealth ill-gotten; capitalists are costumed as devils if they have not made devils of themselves. Prejudice is common as wariness of cultural difference. A plague rages. Eastern Europe wobbles under the threat of a Russian rampage, and wars erupt like brush fires. Justice has devolved into a matter of personal ethics- or an ethical void.
You might think this litany of horrors is too ordinary to be newsworthy. It's not news, but history retold in fiction. This is the mirror that Nick Sweeney holds up for our reflection in "The Emigré Engineer." Let's "game" the dialog and insert accusations that satisfy our sensibilities:
-"You're a [insert an authoritative title]?" the [insert the media editorialist of your choice] checked.
- "No, sir," Witold answered and then was asked his name. He gave it.
- "Hmmm." The answer seemed to satisfy the man in some way. " A [insert an environmental slur] then," he commented neutrally. Then he demanded, " A [member of a political party]?"
Under the promise of new Russian egalitarianism, a lover of life, another regular Uncle Joe (this one mustachioed), offered better times after the end of horrible old Vlad Ilyich.
New ethics invented or discovered by Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin escaped the old imperialism, traveling by bicycle across Europe and the Atlantic until they found a new imperialism. Across the sea, the understudy Bolsheviks are tomato-toting union organizers, and wealth redistribution enacts through insurance fraud. "Justice" once administered via a tsarist Nagant, now has different targets but the same deadly results. Justice becomes more facile with each execution. A compromised social welfare system becomes the benefice of extortionist priests.
The characters and the plot of "The Emigré Engineer" may remind you of Roddy Doyle's series of novels about Henry Smart. I hope that Witold Galitzki has an extended literary life too. I would like to know more about Witold's evolution (or devolution depending upon how you filled in the blanks) into Dirty Harry (or Capt. Wm. Lynch). I'd also like to read more about morally flexible Fr. Ignatz Vishnevski and the Widow Charleroi. There is much more story to be doled out from the 65 episodes of this story. Each is like a diamond from Galitzki's canvas cache.
One here from Lawrence Burton, who has kindly reviewed me before:
Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.
This one from McLintic Sphere on Amazon:
This tale begins as the Russian Revolution has made its way to Galicia, a once-kingdom that has been batted back and forth among Poland, Ukraine, the Austrian empire…a history I do not know well, but a well-contested area for a long time. Witold Galitzki is a young man who escapes the commissar and make his way to Paris, stealing bicycles where he can, walking where he cannot…a venture on a train leaves four dead, by the time he leaves Paris and crosses the ocean to a town in Delaware, more deaths have occurred. It is a time when brutal deaths are the price of survival. Still, Witold has a valuable cargo that has made the journey deep within him. Pelted with tomatoes, he is mistaken for the Devil by Catholic immigrants... the milieu he is in is more old-world than new. More evil follows, but love as well and of course revenge…
Told in very short chapters, the story has a fable-like feel. It reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski at times, harrowing and clear in its portrayal of the behavior and morals of the time.
A great read from a writer whose tales at the edges of troubled Europe have the ring of truth.
This one from Edward D Ward:
Twenty years after the turn of the century, we find a chaotic world. Emigrants are flooding over borders, and interrogation cum body searches are conducted at every legal crossing. The needy consider any wealth ill-gotten; capitalists are costumed as devils if they have not made devils of themselves. Prejudice is common as wariness of cultural difference. A plague rages. Eastern Europe wobbles under the threat of a Russian rampage, and wars erupt like brush fires. Justice has devolved into a matter of personal ethics- or an ethical void.
You might think this litany of horrors is too ordinary to be newsworthy. It's not news, but history retold in fiction. This is the mirror that Nick Sweeney holds up for our reflection in "The Emigré Engineer." Let's "game" the dialog and insert accusations that satisfy our sensibilities:
-"You're a [insert an authoritative title]?" the [insert the media editorialist of your choice] checked.
- "No, sir," Witold answered and then was asked his name. He gave it.
- "Hmmm." The answer seemed to satisfy the man in some way. " A [insert an environmental slur] then," he commented neutrally. Then he demanded, " A [member of a political party]?"
Under the promise of new Russian egalitarianism, a lover of life, another regular Uncle Joe (this one mustachioed), offered better times after the end of horrible old Vlad Ilyich.
New ethics invented or discovered by Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin escaped the old imperialism, traveling by bicycle across Europe and the Atlantic until they found a new imperialism. Across the sea, the understudy Bolsheviks are tomato-toting union organizers, and wealth redistribution enacts through insurance fraud. "Justice" once administered via a tsarist Nagant, now has different targets but the same deadly results. Justice becomes more facile with each execution. A compromised social welfare system becomes the benefice of extortionist priests.
The characters and the plot of "The Emigré Engineer" may remind you of Roddy Doyle's series of novels about Henry Smart. I hope that Witold Galitzki has an extended literary life too. I would like to know more about Witold's evolution (or devolution depending upon how you filled in the blanks) into Dirty Harry (or Capt. Wm. Lynch). I'd also like to read more about morally flexible Fr. Ignatz Vishnevski and the Widow Charleroi. There is much more story to be doled out from the 65 episodes of this story. Each is like a diamond from Galitzki's canvas cache.
One here from Lawrence Burton, who has kindly reviewed me before:
Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.
Illustration by Michael Foreman, for a 2011 excerpt from the story in Ambit Magazine