My wife and I took our daughters, 4 and 9, and my mother to Ellis Island last week.
My wife and I had been there, separately, before, but it was a first trip for Mom. There are some places where the story is really important, and the story can only be fully communicated by visiting the place. Normandy and Dachau had a similar "place explains a really important narrative" feeling for me.
I think that Ellis Island is one of those places. The story matters to all of us. I think that we accomplished something genuinely useful with the trip.
My mother's paternal grandfather immigrated to Brooklyn through Ellis Island. Mom knew him, but he never spoke to her of the hardship of his passage to the new world.
She had never really connected to the immigrant narrative aspects of his life. She only knew him when he was old, established, and relatively prosperous and secure, surrounded by 8 of his 9 sons. Worse still, she was nine when he died. So, she never had a chance to ask any real questions about his life. I know more about him from official records than he ever told her.
Ellis Island managed to communicate to her exactly how difficult and frightening an experience it was. When we were at the registration desk, my wife worked through a sample ship's passenger manifest with the girls. Then I pulled my phone out of my pocket, pulled up the manifest for Pasquale (RMS Republic, January 6, 1906), handed it to my daughter and mother, and said, "Read line 7." Pasquale could neither read nor write. He had $10 in his pocket. And he was in a country where he did not speak the dominant language. At that point, it suddenly turned personal for them.
And my mother suddenly comprehended the difficulty and privation inherent in the experience (e.g., 14 days from Naples, I suspect throwing up for much of it in the North Atlantic in winter). Then there was the process of getting through immigration. I think that Mom was expecting immigration processing at Ellis Island to be like stepping off of a plane at an international airport. The idea of being put through a medical examination or a psychological examination somewhat terrified her, especially because she suffers from one or more of the conditions of possible medical exclusion.
And then there was New York. We were staying down in Alphabet City. I tried to explain to my Mom that, in Pasquale's time, our apartment was probably a very different place with a dozen people living in it and probably no bathroom, on a dirty street (choked in filth and smoke and horse **** and mud). Rampant disease. And he was a kid from the countryside.
I suspect that Pasquale never mentioned it to her, because it was merely that this aspect of life was hard, and life had always been hard, and it had somehow gotten better during the 1910s-20s and the1940s.
We've lost something as a people when we lose track of the great difficulties that our ancestors faced in getting here. At the least, we have lost the capacity for meaningful compassion and sympathy toward the people experiencing those difficulties now.
My Mom needed to go to that place to be inculcated into that narrative. I needed to go there, myself, I think, to be renewed in that compassion.
I am interested to know what places you have visited that say to you, "Yeah, this narrative is important, and you can only internalize it by seeing the place where it happened."
My wife and I had been there, separately, before, but it was a first trip for Mom. There are some places where the story is really important, and the story can only be fully communicated by visiting the place. Normandy and Dachau had a similar "place explains a really important narrative" feeling for me.
I think that Ellis Island is one of those places. The story matters to all of us. I think that we accomplished something genuinely useful with the trip.
My mother's paternal grandfather immigrated to Brooklyn through Ellis Island. Mom knew him, but he never spoke to her of the hardship of his passage to the new world.
She had never really connected to the immigrant narrative aspects of his life. She only knew him when he was old, established, and relatively prosperous and secure, surrounded by 8 of his 9 sons. Worse still, she was nine when he died. So, she never had a chance to ask any real questions about his life. I know more about him from official records than he ever told her.
Ellis Island managed to communicate to her exactly how difficult and frightening an experience it was. When we were at the registration desk, my wife worked through a sample ship's passenger manifest with the girls. Then I pulled my phone out of my pocket, pulled up the manifest for Pasquale (RMS Republic, January 6, 1906), handed it to my daughter and mother, and said, "Read line 7." Pasquale could neither read nor write. He had $10 in his pocket. And he was in a country where he did not speak the dominant language. At that point, it suddenly turned personal for them.
And my mother suddenly comprehended the difficulty and privation inherent in the experience (e.g., 14 days from Naples, I suspect throwing up for much of it in the North Atlantic in winter). Then there was the process of getting through immigration. I think that Mom was expecting immigration processing at Ellis Island to be like stepping off of a plane at an international airport. The idea of being put through a medical examination or a psychological examination somewhat terrified her, especially because she suffers from one or more of the conditions of possible medical exclusion.
And then there was New York. We were staying down in Alphabet City. I tried to explain to my Mom that, in Pasquale's time, our apartment was probably a very different place with a dozen people living in it and probably no bathroom, on a dirty street (choked in filth and smoke and horse **** and mud). Rampant disease. And he was a kid from the countryside.
I suspect that Pasquale never mentioned it to her, because it was merely that this aspect of life was hard, and life had always been hard, and it had somehow gotten better during the 1910s-20s and the1940s.
We've lost something as a people when we lose track of the great difficulties that our ancestors faced in getting here. At the least, we have lost the capacity for meaningful compassion and sympathy toward the people experiencing those difficulties now.
My Mom needed to go to that place to be inculcated into that narrative. I needed to go there, myself, I think, to be renewed in that compassion.
I am interested to know what places you have visited that say to you, "Yeah, this narrative is important, and you can only internalize it by seeing the place where it happened."
