A chapter we wrote
for the Vasilyev family.

The Winter She Found Them

Eleonora Vasilyeva arrived in Riga on the evening train of November the third, nineteen twenty-three¹, with a wooden trunk, a brass samovar, and the names of seven cousins on a folded slip of paper. The trunk was her mother's; the samovar had been her grandmother's before that. The slip of paper, in her own hand², would survive — folded and unfolded — for the next fifty years, and surface in 1973 in a drawer beneath a stack of unopened letters.

By the end of December, she had found four of them. Two had been turned by the city's long winter into respectable Latvian citizens with respectable Latvian names; one³ had become a printer's apprentice in the old quarter, and would later teach Eleonora's eldest son to read. The fourth, a distant cousin she had only ever heard about, was a midwife in Pārdaugava who delivered her daughter eight months⁴ after her arrival.

The other three she would not find for another forty-one years, and only then with the help of a state archivist in Kostroma who had, by then, become a friend. When she finally received the photograph of all three together — taken in 1928, before the famine — she is reported to have wept at the kitchen table and refused to speak for the rest of the afternoon. Her granddaughter, then six⁵, remembers this.

What follows in this chapter is the working winter of 1923. The four meetings. The parish records that confirm them. Two children⁶ whose names appear in the household register that February. And the small, contested question of how Eleonora was able to support herself in those first months — a question we believe we have answered, but which the family is welcome to dispute.