The rent was seventy-five dollars a month, the painters would come right in, and Mrs. Keeley was very glad to have Nice People living there. Which was very interesting, because the last time Silberman had entered the house (Peter Touey, who used to live upstairs, had said, “Come on over after school; I got a book with war pictures in it”) Mrs. Keeley had barred the way: “You don’t live here,” said she. Well. Times had changed. Had times changed? Something had certainly changed.

Another story about immigrants and culture, and a story about society’s relationship to technology. Where ‘Mother Tongues’ takes a personal view of what migrants give up—and why—even after immigrating, ‘The Slovo Stove’ takes a societal view. Fred Silberman’s quest to find an example of the eponymous stove, a thermodynamically impossible appliance brought to the United States by Eastern European immigrants, is unsuccessful, for frustrating, pitiable reasons. I love Davidson’s voice, and an easy half-dozen of his stories would make it into any real anthology I may compile, but this disheartening portrayal of unappreciated glory is my favorite.

First published in Universe 15 in 1985. Collected in The Avram Davidson Treasury, Tor, 1988