ELLIS ISLAND

A Polish journalist chronicles the history of America’s famed immigration station through the stories of individuals who worked there or passed through on their way to a new life.

In an afterword, Szejnert notes that she wrote this account after discovering that there were no books about Ellis Island available in Polish, but her people-centered narrative fills an English-language gap as well. Making extensive use of primary documents, including letters written by immigrants to family in the old country, the author captures the mingled hope and fear experienced as people entered the massive main building, equipped with modern accoutrements few had seen in their ancestral villages, and faced numerous bureaucratic barriers. Quotes from John Weber, the first Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York, and his successors make palpable the massive logistical effort required to process all these people—more than 1 million in the peak year 1907—and the officials’ commendable determination to do it fairly, efficiently, and humanely. Szejnert does not scant the fear of “degraded, backward” people “unfit to join into American life” that culminated in the 1924 law that basically slammed the door on Italian and Jewish immigration. But her emphasis is on the immigrants’ fortitude and resilience and the empathetic assistance of Ellis Island personnel—many themselves immigrants, such as interpreter Francesco Martoccia and social worker Cecilia Greenstone, one of several redoubtable matrons charged with protecting female immigrants from human trafficking. Szejnert reveals countless intriguing historical tidbits: the luggage room with space for 12,000 passengers’ bags, sick immigrants required to wash who “had never seen a bathtub and…were afraid to get in the water.” The author also evokes the island’s ghostly atmosphere after it was abandoned in 1954 and the determined efforts that led to its triumphant 1990 reopening as a museum, visited by 2 million people each year.

Warmly human and extremely moving—a welcome addition to the Ellis Island literature.