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A writer tours Ellis Island and imagines her grandmother arriving from Poland in 1921 as a poor, anxious 16-year-old. She can still hear her voice . . .
By ELLEN PERLMAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 2, 2003
As the boat draws near, the building looms larger and increasingly formidable.
Even on a gray fall day on a boat filled with cocoa-sipping day-trippers from New Jersey, it's a daunting structure. What must it have looked like to my grandmother, who approached this immigration station on Ellis Island in 1921 as a 16-year-old, on a ship filled with desperate foreigners?
Then she was Ida Shustek, and home had been Siedlce, Poland, where Bolshevik soldiers periodically ransacked her family's home. Siedlce, where a younger sister had starved to death.
After a miserable three-week journey from Danzig -- complete with a contagious disease that swept through steerage and a 10-day forced quarantine -- here finally was the gateway to the America she had dreamed of for so long.
But only if her family passed muster. The passengers had heard stories of families turned away, of those who then committed suicide rather than return to a life of poverty or oppression.
"We saw the Statue of Liberty, and we were screaming and hollering, "America! America!' " my grandmother says in her Yiddish-tinged accent.
She died in 1986, but I can still hear her voice. So can you: She is one of the recorded narrators of the Ellis Island experience whom modern visitors can hear as they tour the restored immigration halls.
For her, and for millions of other arriving Americans, those nervous steps up these brick paths were the first steps of a new life.
I had heard the family stories. Now I was on my approach to Ellis Island, watching as the French Renaissance building loomed larger. I felt a shiver, not only because I was imagining my grandmother's experience but also because I was afraid of what I would find inside.
I had been to the island once before in the late '70s, when the building was decrepit and hosted few visitors. Out of the dirt and grime and peeling paint came authentic echoes of the past, as my family walked through with a park ranger.
Now I was loathe to step into what I imagined would be a gussied-up, Disneyfied version of history, following a major renovation and reopening in 1990.
I shouldn't have worried. Black-and-white photos, voice recordings of immigrants and exhibits of their belongings, from suitcases to feather beds to drinking glasses, shed light on a fascinating piece of this country's past: the story of the peak immigration years from 1892 to 1924, when more than 12-million people came through this port of entry.
Today, visitors take a ferry from New York or New Jersey. I left from Liberty State Park in Jersey City, where parking is plentiful and lines are usually short. Parts of the 27-acre Ellis Island fall within New Jersey's border, so says a 1998 Supreme Court ruling. The museum is considered to be in New York State.
In the old days, the boats docked and families checked their baggage while they were being processed. They did not have much to check.
"I had a pair of stockings, that's all, and one dress my grandmother made me," my grandmother says on one of the tapes visitors now can hear. Her voice comes through a telephone located near a stack of suitcases and trunks from the early 20th century.
"What we had?" she asks in the dialect still with her more than 60 years after arriving in America. "You shouldn't know what we had."
I rented an audio tour and, with Tom Brokaw's voice in my ear, walked up a set of stairs to the registry room. It is a beautiful space with high ceilings, its windows facing New York City on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. I imagined immigrants looking longingly at both.
As new arrivals ascended those stairs, medical officers on the second floor looked over the rail, watching for signs of ill health. The inspectors then chalked the poor souls' clothing: A "C" for conjunctivitis, "L" for lameness, "S" for senility -- a whole alphabet soup of condemnation.
I felt rage rising at the indignity of that. This grandmother, whom I loved so much, the one who cooked chicken soup and baked cookies for us in her comfortable East Village apartment in New York, was, here at Ellis Island, a name on a list, an alien inspected like a suspicious package. A nobody who had to prove herself to these officials.
To add further insult, first-class and second-class passengers arriving on ships such as hers were dropped off directly in Manhattan. Only steerage passengers went through the Ellis Island ordeal.
But I heard charming stories, too, at the new museum. People who had come from small villages were thrown in with others from so many different places. They saw skin colors and features they had never seen before.
One woman speaking on the audio tour describes her wonder at seeing a woman in stylish pointy-toed shoes. "What kind of place is this?" this speaker recalls wondering. "Some people have pointy feet."
During the hours they spent at Ellis Island, my grandmother's family was given some food, much of it unfamiliar. "They gave us a banana," my grandmother's voice says on the recording. "I never saw a banana in my whole life. I tried to eat the banana with the skin (on), and everybody looked at me like (I was) crazy."
Today, the registry room's tile floors shine in the light streaming through the windows. Back then, the room was packed with people shuffling along in lines, waiting to get to the inspection desks, where officials asked questions and compared their answers with the ship's paperwork to see if each newcomer was eligible to enter America.
The inspectors asked my grandmother's reticent little brother, whose belly was distended from hunger, what was wrong with him. Finally, my grandmother recalls, he blurted, "I got a big belly," and the inspectors passed him.
"They wanted to know if he knows how to talk, that's all," says my grandmother on her recording.
Her family made it through. Waiting for them was her father, who had left Poland eight years earlier to find work, when she was just 8 years old.
When World War I broke out, he could not make it back as originally planned. Now, having sent them money for passage, he was ready to take his family to his Bronx home -- in a taxi, no less.
Not only had my grandmother never seen a taxi, she had never seen a car.
I, too, left New Jersey by car. I had bought it with some of the money my once-poor grandmother left each of her seven grandchildren when she died.
She would have given her life for this country, where she found such opportunity, she says on the tape.
One recent night, I talked to my grandmother's kid sister on the telephone, my 96-year-old great-aunt Frieda. Her voice sounds like my grandmother's.
And at the end of our conversation, she said the same thing my grandmother said on that tape, recorded 16 years ago:
"God bless America."
-- Ellen Perlman is a reporter for "Governing" magazine in Washington, D.C.
GETTING THERE: Ferries to Ellis Island National Monument operate from Liberty State Park near Jersey City (Exit 14B from the New Jersey Turnpike) and from Battery Park in Manhattan. The ferries rom 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.
The round-trip fare, which includes admission to Ellis Island and a stop at the Statue of Liberty, is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and $4 for children (3 and younger are free).
For the ferry schedule and information, call (212) 269-5755; the Web site is www.circlelineferry.com.
Ellis Island is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Be sure to leave time in your schedule for ferry transportation and security screening.
STAYING THERE: In Jersey City, the Hyatt Regency, (201) 469-1234, which opened last summer, and the Doubletree Club Suites Jersey City (201) 499-2400) are minutes from Liberty State Park and have rooms facing New York City and the Statue of Liberty.
The Pillars of Plainfield, in Plainfield, N.J., is a B&B about 30 minutes away (call toll-free 1-888-745-5277). It features a home-cooked breakfast, sherry and snacks at night and Mac, the cairn terrier (think Toto).
EATING THERE: There is a food court within the Ellis Island museum, or you can picnic in warmer weather.
On the mainland, Hoboken's Washington Street has a small-city feel but a large variety of ethnic restaurants. Try the hole-in-the-wall La Isla (104 Washington St.) for grilled sweet plantains, yuca frita and other Cuban specialties.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Ellis Island National Monument, (212) 363-3200, www.nps.gov/elis.