Ellis Island

Georges Perec

Contents ( 5)

Ellis Island

Originally published as Récits d’Ellis Island: histoires d’errance et d’espoir
by P.O.L. Éditeur, Paris. Published by arrangement with P.O.L.
and the estate of Harry Mathews

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper,
magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the Publisher

Published as New Directions Paperbook 1491 in 2021

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Perec, Georges, 1936–1982 author. | Mathews, Harry, 1930–2017 translator.

Title: Ellis Island / Translated by Harry Mathews ;
with an afterword by Mónica de la Torre.

Other titles: Récits d’Ellis Island. English

Description: First New Directions edition. |
New York : New Directions Publishing, [2021] | Translated from French.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020042650 | ISBN 9780811229548 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780811229555 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ellis Island Immigration Station (N.Y. and N.J.)—History. |
United States—Emigration and immigration—History. |
United States—Emigration and immigration—Biography.

Classification: LCC JV6450 .P4713 2021 | DDC 304.8/73—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042650

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Ellis Island

The Isle of Tears

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a tremendous hope galvanized Europe. For peoples that were crushed, oppressed, downtrodden, enslaved, or butchered, for classes that were exploited, starved, afflicted by epidemics, or decimated by years of scarcity and famine, a promised land came into existence: America, a virgin land open to all, a land of freedom and generosity where the castoffs of the Old World could become the pioneers of the New and build a society free of injustice and prejudice. For Irish peasants whose harvests had been mined, for the persecuted German liberals of 1848, for the battered Polish nationalists of 1830, for Armenians, Greeks, and Turks, for all the Jews of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for southern Italians dying from cholera and poverty by the hundreds of thousands, America became the symbol of a new life, of long-awaited luck; and it was by the tens of millions, by entire families and villages that, from Hamburg or Bremen, from Le Havre, from Naples or Liverpool, immigrants embarked on a voyage of no return.

For several decades the terminal point of this exodus without precedent in human history, the end of a crossing almost invariably accomplished in appalling conditions, was a tiny spot of land called Ellis Island, where the services of the Federal Bureau of Immigration had established their reception center. And so it came about that on this narrow sandbank in the mouth of the Hudson, a few cable lengths away from the brand-new Statue of Liberty, there gathered together for a time all those who were destined to create the American nation.