He plunged into a loud tumult. Women in bright peasant dress held their bags close; men in uniform shouted instructions in several languages. The crowd was directionless, helpless. He didn’t know what to do either. A man put his false teeth in. Around them the stench of sweat and vomit. He found a bathroom. Here there was pushing and shoving, eventually he started shoving back. He shaved, spit blood. His gums hurt. He drank a sip of water; here too it tasted salty.

“No, this way!” They sent him up a staircase. Talk of what this staircase meant had gotten back to Europe. Upstairs, behind a window, stood doctors who looked you over to see if you were fit to be an American. If you breathed heavily, then no. He sprinted upstairs and stood in a giant hall with wooden benches, chandeliers swaying overhead. He seemed to have passed the test. He took a seat, and as he sat he could feel the rocking motion of the ship in his body for a long time.

He tried to read the faces of the inspectors, looking for what they liked to see. He saw how the young women laughed at jokes, summoned all their charm. He saw a woman get a chalk mark on her shoulder and burst into tears.

“You’re next!”

He jumped up immediately. A man who didn’t look like a doctor told him to show him his hands and stick out his tongue. He sent him on to an inspector: name, age, date of birth. Every time he answered, the inspector checked the answer against his papers. Finally Josef was handed an open Bible. He was supposed to read a passage out loud, in English. He read, without understanding, and nodded, again without understanding, whenever the inspector said something. He was lucky. An officer waved him on, more friendly than before: “Your landing card, mister.” They pinned a piece of paper to his lapel. He walked through a kind of fairground: food stalls, a mail kiosk, booths where you could exchange currency, train tickets to California, bulletin boards with ads for English-language courses and offers for migrant workers. He exchanged his money, Reichsmarks to dollars at a rate of 4.2 billion to 1. He received one hundred eighty-one dollars in return.

He had his luggage sent to the Engelking family, 32 Mott Street, Lower East Side. He tried to remember how they were related. Years ago the Engelkings had sent them a photo: the father in a suit with a round black hat—it was called a bowler hat, Carl said. Later they saw this hat on Charlie Chaplin in the movie house on Königsallee. Engelking looked distinguished; he wrote that he had started a business in New York.

A feeling of happiness rippled through his body as they cast off in the dim afternoon light and steered once more toward the southern tip of Manhattan.