to him, being Jewish means inheriting and then passing on
an entire body of customs,
ways of eating, dancing, and singing, of words,
tastes, and habits,

and above all it’s the sense of sharing
these acts and rites with others, regardless of boundaries and
nationalities, and these shared things become roots,
it’s obvious how essential and fragile they are.
threatened as always by time and by man.

fragments of memory and forgetfulness, gestures that are
rediscovered without ever having been learned, words that come
back, memories of lullabies,

photographs lovingly kept:
signs of belonging where he sinks
his roots in history, that enable him to fashion
his identity; that is, what makes him
both himself and identical with others.

It was to test the permanence of his traditions,
their durability, their tenacity, their resilience,
that Robert Bober came to Ellis Island,

as well as to retrieve, from traces left by the people
who passed through here and from the testimony we planned
to gather from them, the image of his mother’s grandfather, who
in 1900 left his village in Poland
to go to America but caught trachoma on the crossing
and was shipped back.

Perhaps the Jews, a people without a country,
condemned almost from their origins to exodus and survival
among cultures different from their own,
may have been more aware than others
of what was at stake for them;

but Ellis Island was never a place restricted to Jews

it belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty
have driven and still drive from the land where
they grew up

at a time when boat people still keep going from one island to the
next in search of ever more unlikely havens,
it might seem ludicrous or pointless
or sentimentally self-indulgent to want to recall these tales
from an already distant past

but in doing so, we were sure of having resoundingly evoked the
two words that lie at the very heart of this long venture: two
intangible, precarious, weak, fugitive words that keep endlessly
refracting each other’s wavering light and whose names
are wandering and hope.

from Amerika by Franz Kafka

As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen . . . stood on the liner slowly entering the harbor of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

being an emigrant may have meant
exactly that: seeing a sword
where the sculptor had, in all good faith, designed
a torch —
and not being altogether mistaken

on the base of the Statue of Liberty are engraved
the famous lines of Emma Lazarus

Give me your tired, your poor;

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,

I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door!