Bober, when he learned that parts of Ellis Island had opened to the public in 1976, wanted to retrace his great-grandfather’s failed voyage and also interview Jewish subjects who had made it through the Golden Door and found a home in New York City. In Georges Perec: A Life in Words, David Bellos recounts that Bober, when inviting Perec to collaborate on the film, had to approach him multiple times. Perec was not drawn to nostalgia, or to the prospect of delving into Jewish themes. The buildings on Ellis Island, however, had sat abandoned for decades and their ruins did pique his interest.

Although annexed by Lyndon B. Johnson to the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, Ellis Island was never restored or developed. Its buildings remained vacant and prey to looters for another decade. A 1968 New York Times article described it as a “seedy ghost town,” its buildings full of what Perec and Bober found there a decade later: “old bedframes and mattresses stacked in disuse. Tables, benches, and chairs lie about haphazardly. The floors of side rooms are strewn with broken ceiling plaster. . . .” Except for vandals, no one visited but “pigeons and insects and sometimes Mr. Pingree Crawford,” the national park ranger assigned to it.

“It was the idea of making a film about dereliction that finally swayed Perec’s mind,” Bellos writes. In June of 1978, only a few weeks after finishing his mammoth, 500-page Oulipian masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual, Perec traveled to New York City with Bober “to inspect the island and track down people who had entered America by way of Ellis Island.” Narrated by Perec, whose mellifluous cadences turn the lists of nationalities, of departure ports, and of ships’ names into entrancing litanies, the film bears witness to the Times report that the ferry that once took immigrants to Manhattan had become “a crumbling shell” floating next to a “concrete dock that is collapsing in places.” Debris had been cleared from the visitors’ paths of the park rangers’ tours, but the buildings wouldn’t be renovated until much later: the Registry Room; the medical examination area; and the halls where the Special Inquiry boards deliberated on the fates of those arrivals whose answers to the inspectors’ twenty-nine standard questions sowed doubts about their political affiliations or employability.

Prior to the trip, and in typical fashion, as Bellos points out, Perec worked the project he was about to begin into the novel that he was finishing. In the epilogue to Life: A User’s Manual, we learn that Cinoc, one of the elderly characters inhabiting the building on 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, “overcoming his fear of flying and of US Immigration, which he thought still happened on Ellis Island, had finally responded to the invitations he had been getting for years from two distant cousins.” You might have hesitated when reading Cinoc’s name, just as his neighbors did when he moved into the building. A list in the novel provides twenty alternative pronunciations, as well as an explanation for its gradual mutation from Kleinhof to Cinoc, all to do with the national origin of the authorities in charge of renewing his ancestors’ passports. Despite his ignorance of the station’s closure, it seems reasonable that Cinoc would be afraid of the island’s immigration officials. As lore had it, they seemed to translate last names almost homophonically, subjecting them to distortions that rendered them unrecognizable, another aspect of starting anew in the New World.