Return from Siberia

John Shallman

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781510763401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

In the lead-up to theBolshevik Revolution, one young revolutionary is condemned to exile in Siberia; a hundred years later, his ancestors discover his story and learn just how much history has repeated itself. In the midst of running a long-shot political campaign, Democratic political consultant John Simon discovers a 100-year-old manuscript written by his grandfather Joseph—a brilliant young revolutionary whose exile to Siberia by the last czar of Russia is just the beginning of an extraordinary tale of survival, romance, and revolution. Return From Siberia chronicles not only the Simon family's relationship to each other and the past, but also the remarkable story of a young man who sacrificed everything for his political ideals. As Joseph's manuscript is translated, chapter-by-chapter, the Simon family is pulled deep into their ancestor's story— in particular, the bitter rivalry between two brothers, whose competing visions of the American Dream are played out on the campaign trail and in their lives. Return from Siberia is a timely appraisal of modern politics and society juxtaposed with an inside look into the machinations of a young political mind 100 years ago. The true story documents an extraordinary time of political upheaval in Russia and Europe just prior to World War I while also drawing parallels to current day American politics and the current philosophical and ideological debates about immigration, Democratic Socialism, and Capitalism. Beyond the deep social, political, and philosophical themes, there is romance, adventure, betrayal, suspense, and the struggles of families today and in yesteryear. Return from Siberia illustrates how one modern family's connection to the past helps them resolve their future.

PART I

THE EAST

Chapter 1

Ancestors

She threw the line out like a fisherman: “Each one of us came from somewhere else.” Quickly, but with stealth. Testing the waters. Hoping for a bite. None was forthcoming.

John Simon bit his lip, worried this might happen. He surveyed the crowd like a litigator reading a jury. Was anyone on their side?

“It’s what all of us have in common,” the woman continued, holding the podium with both hands as if trying to steer it in the right direction. “We’re all strangers to this land.”

Migrants! John winced. Migrants to this land was the line he wrote. Rookie politicians never stick to the script. Number one job hazard. This particular transgression was not that big a deal. But sometimes a client goes rogue on a single word and suddenly it becomes a demeaning meme on social media. Then everyone blames the communications guy.

John prided himself on being very good at his job—a policy wonk, with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things political. But he had trouble sometimes being taken seriously—due to the fact that, despite his forty-plus years, John could still pass for a teenager were it not for his red Van Dyke beard. Accepting with chagrin that he’d likely be carded at liquor stores for life, John knew many folks would die to have his genes, which made him grudgingly thankful. He also felt gratitude about being able to make a living doing something he loved—politics, particularly in the throes of a long-odds race like this one. In moments like these, John felt like a defensive coordinator for the underdog team at the Super Bowl. It was all about staying focused and calling the right plays.

John scanned his phone to see if people were live-tweeting the speech—unlikely, given the underwhelming crowd. But one never knew. There were sixty-five in attendance—few enough to count by hand. Not that he had. He knew the number within seconds of their arrival. In his two decades as a political consultant, John had developed the ability to guess the size of a crowd with uncanny accuracy. He could also read their political leanings, predict laughs, applause lines, and standing ovations. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. People were standing. But clapping? No.

“Our parents came from somewhere else,” said the Latina at the microphone. “Or our grandparents, or our great-grandparents.” She paused, noticing a cluster of Native Americans eyeing her with reserve from one corner of the grassy field. John had spotted them, too. Karankawa, he suspected, or Comanche. Clearly outliers in this predominantly Hispanic crowd, along with the five bikers and two dozen rednecks, curious but unlikely to be swayed. John swiveled back to the stage, wondering why his client had stopped speaking. She’s flustered by the Comanche, he guessed. Don’t do it, he pleaded mentally—stick to the script.

She couldn’t help herself. “Even indigenous people moved from time to time, when food was scarce. And this beautiful land—Mother Earth welcomed them.”

Mother Earth? John frowned. Don’t go New Age. You’ll lose everybody.

“That’s what happened to me in my time of need. This great country opened her arms and took me in, which is why I can proudly say to you today that my name is Patricia Alvarado and I am running for Congress.”

Polite applause. It was better than boos. You gotta start somewhere.

The crowd dispersed, and a cute schoolgirl—in plaited hair and a pleated skirt—approached the platform. “Can I get a picture with you, Ms. Alvarado?”

“Call me Patti,” said the candidate, flashing her contagious smile.

“Stand by the statue,” John intervened, positioning them near the memorial for the singer Selena, a local landmark he’d carefully curated for its symbolic resonance. Selena, the Queen of Tejano music, was adored by the Hispanic community for having busted through barriers in the male-dominated Tex-Mex music scene. Patti had brought white roses, Selena’s favorite, to the monument overlooking Corpus Christi Bay. And now she retrieved one of those flowers as a gift to her schoolgirl fan before taking the selfie. The girl beamed. Patti worked her pearly whites, framed by that perfect shade of lipstick.

Camera sure loves her, thought John. Patti had passion in spades, along with undeniable charisma. She was attractive and young, just shy of forty. Magnetic, a go-getter. Everything you needed in a candidate. While her experience in politics was slim—hence her reliance on John—having a blank slate was often better than having a bad record. And no one’s record was nearly as atrocious as that of her opponent, Ralph Trent, the eight-term incumbent in Texas’ 27th District.

Trent was, without exaggeration, to the right of Attila the Hun. John found his politics repugnant. Trent had called for LGBTQ internment camps, so that “those folks could do their business out of public view.” Yep—Ralph Trent proudly went on the record with that one. His A+ rating from the NRA sat in a spit-shined frame on Trent’s mahogany desk, alongside hero shots of Barry Goldwater, David Duke, and George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. Ralph Trent was rabidly anti-immigrant. He once made incendiary remarks calling for federally sanctioned lynchings of illegal aliens along the border as a way to dissuade new asylum seekers, just as Ancient Romans used to line their city walls with Jews on crucifixes.

Provocation was Trent’s modus operandi—the more extreme, the more the media attacked him, and the more his base rallied around him. That was the Ralph Trent playbook. He’d been at it long before the Trump era. And it worked. Trent had been a shoe-in in his district for almost two decades—in fact, his colleagues in Congress called it the “Ralph Trent Seat.”

When John Simon happened upon a local news story in early 2018 about an unknown Latina announcing her intention to unseat Ralph Trent, he caught the next plane to Texas. It was his kind of fight: the classic underdog. Her picture grabbed him right away: a determined gaze that jumped off the page. There was wisdom in that face. Nothing forced, just a natural appeal.

When John met Patti, along with her husband, Enrique, at the Corpus Christi airport, they had him at Hola. They were warm, friendly, and impossible not to like. Enrique was comfortable with allowing his wife to shine and greeted John like an old friend. Patti brought homemade tamales their daughter prepared from an old family recipe. Enrique grabbed John’s bag, so he could have a bite of tamale on the way to the car. People were starting to recognize Patti from her picture in the paper, coming up to shake her hand. Men were slapping Enrique on the back. And John had an epiphany.

This might just work.

Then again, woe to the man who thinks he knows the electorate. How many times in recent years had John had that feeling—this might just work—and faced humiliation on Election Day? There was the Senate race in Nevada, where John was polishing their victory speech after the local news had called it, only to have the Republican-heavy absentee ballots come in late and pull the rug out from under them. And that affordable housing measure in California where developers had outspent them by a hundred to one and they still came within striking distance—a real heartbreak, though most of his colleagues thought he should have seen it coming.

John had developed a reputation as the Don Quixote of political consultants—or worse, the Broadway Danny Rose, putting on a brave face and working behind the scenes for laughing-stock candidates who didn’t have a prayer. And yet, he couldn’t help himself.

John had a soft spot for taking on the most daunting challenges, the longest of longshots—and this 2018 House race for Texas’s 27th Congressional Seat was exactly that. A long shot. The district—which had been redrawn and gerrymandered so drastically that it looked (befitting, for Texas) like a T-bone steak—stretching along the Gulf Coast from Corpus Christi to Lake Jackson, and then inland to San Marcos. While squarely Republican, it had a significant Latino population, which had been largely marginalized as a voting bloc. That’s where John saw the opportunity for Patti Alvarado—pitting a fiery female from Mexico against a right-wing white male who was zealously anti-immigrant. But it’s not just that Patti was Mexican, it’s that she had crossed the border illegally fourteen years prior and only established her US citizenship recently by marrying Enrique, a naturalized Mexican-American. This was unprecedented—a former undocumented immigrant running for Congress, which is what made the proposition so enticing for John: the ultimate David and Goliath fight, one that the press should find irresistible. But talk about a Hail Mary.

John’s wife, Lani, mother of his four children and a pragmatist if there ever was one, had been hesitant about the idea. Another high-profile loss could potentially jeopardize his reputation—and Lani was fiercely protective of all her loved ones’ reputations, especially her husband’s. But a win—as far-fetched as it seemed—could cement the reputation that John had had at the start of his career—as a political visionary. And that was ultimately enough to convince her.

After the speech in front of the Mirador de la Flor memorial for Selena, Patti and Enrique invited John back to their home, where they were having a special family gathering before the quinceañera of Patti’s daughter, Alexa, scheduled for the following day. John was touched and honored to be included—it was also deeply illuminating.

While Alexa was Patti’s daughter from a previous marriage, she had been completely embraced by four generations of Enrique’s family. There were at least forty relatives in attendance, filling every nook and cranny of the ranch home, which Enrique, who worked in construction, had proudly built himself. He took John around from room to room, introducing him to cousins, aunts, and grandparents, while pointing out details of the craftsmanship, such as the traditional earthen floor—a mixture of clay, sand, and fiber, compacted and cured with linseed oil, which, along with the adobe walls, kept the house relatively cool in the summer. While John was impressed by the house, it was the atmosphere that really warmed his heart.

There was music and laughter in every room. Multicolored light strands soared over the yard, where the food was plentiful and increasing by the minute. In the kitchen, Alexa and her three aunts were making their traditional tamales in a joyous production line, while Uncle Jaime played a Mexican accordion to one side. Patti handed John a margarita and took him by the hand to meet the family matriarch—Enrique’s abuelita Maria, still going strong in her nineties, with an infectious, toothless grin.

“Isn’t she precious?” Patti whispered in John’s ear. “Take a selfie,” said John. “For Twitter.”

“Don’t have my phone,” she deflected. “Use mine,” he insisted.

“No phones. It’s family time.”

“You sound like my wife,” John smirked. “Your wife sounds wise.”

He nodded.

“Are your grandparents still with us?” Patti asked him. John shook his head. All but one died before he was born.

“Too bad,” she gazed at him with empathy. “Where we come from is important. It’s our history.”

A slight melancholy came over John, as he gazed across the yard at the vibrant Alvarado clan. Patti asked if he could stay one more day—to be part of Alexa’s quinceañera. John told her he had to get back to Los Angeles. Patti nodded—family comes first.

Family had everything to do with John’s career in politics. John grew up in a liberal, secular Jewish home, the second youngest of five, in Rock Island, Illinois—population: 38,000, about 150 miles west of Chicago. His grandmother, Rose, who’d emigrated from Russia, was also part of the household. And the women in his life had a major influence on his world-view. His mother, having named him after JFK, instilled the values of service and giving back—particularly to one’s community. So it was only natural for John to aspire to public service. It began his junior year of high school, when John was elected to serve as the student member of the school board of Rock Island-Milan School District #41. He was sixteen, barely out of braces when he showed up in a suit and tie for his first board meeting. With his keen intellect and good ideas, John held his own in the school board meetings, where the adult members, the youngest of which had two decades on him, must have wondered—has he even started shaving? The answer was: yes. In fact, over the summer John could grow sufficient hair on his face to vaguely resemble a beard and age him just enough to purchase beer from Lenny, a stoner at Lee’s liquor store, who gave him “a pass for growing a ‘stache.” This way, he didn’t have to keep pulling out of his Velcro wallet his older brother’s expired driver’s license every time his friends wanted a six-pack. But Mr. Allison, his football coach and a former Marine, made sure his players were clean-shaven, with crew cuts before the first day of practice. And so that dreadful day at the barbershop on 18th Avenue came, sending John back in time, revealing his prepubescent baby face that was on full display at the board meeting. He looked more like a nervous Bar Mitzvah boy than a member of the board of education.

John always arrived fifteen minutes early for the school board meetings with a clean shirt and a fresh pad of paper, values drilled into him by his father, who worked for the Department of Defense. “Always show up like you mean business,” his dad would say. “And if you’re on time, you’re late.”

The other board members warmed up to John eventually. But then came … the showdown. The debate over the 1990 budget, which had just been slashed by the legislature, leaving them little choice: either increase clas...