by Anxo Angueira
Translated from the Galician by Kathleen March
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
The Island of Hope and Tears
The Last Days of Ellis Island is
written as a series of diary entries by the protagonist John Mitchell, the
commissioner of the Ellis Island, who has spent most of his active life on the
island, and is about to leave1 the island finally in a few days. In
his entries, he ruminates on his life and time spent on the island and his
memories, suffused with multitude of experience from all those years when he
saw millions of immigrants – some of whom have left indelible marks in his life
– passing by the island seeking new life in the US.
1. Nine
days and nine nights until I am to be sent back to the mainland, to the life of
men. To a void, as far as I am concerned. What do I know of people’s lives
today? My own life is already hard enough to fathom, like a book you thought
you knew, that you pick up one day and find written in another language. All I
have left now is this surprisingly urgent need to write down my story, I don’t
even know who for, as I sit here in my office that has no purpose anymore,
surrounded by so many binders, pencils, rulers, rubber stamps. It’s a story
that for a few decades has largely been much the same as that of Ellis Island,
but it’s some events specific to me that I wish to tell here, however difficult
it may be. For the rest, I’ll leave it up to the historians… At times it feels
as if the entire world has shrunk to the borders of this island. The island of
hope and tears. The site of the miracle that destroyed and redeemed, that
stripped the Irish peasant, the Calabrian shepherd, the German worker, the
Polish rabbi, the Hungarian pencil pusher, of their original nationalities and
transformed them into American citizens. Here they are still, a crowd of ghosts
floating around me.
Particularly, the arrival of two
ships has changed Mitchell’s personal life. He loses his wife Liz after she
gets a contagion from the immigrants brought by one of the ships. This makes
his life and personality reclusive and withdrawn from the outer world and he decides
to spend most of his time within the confines and hubbub of the island. However,
when an Italian immigrant named Nella Casarini comes to the island among many
and with the same purpose of getting acceptance into the US, she catches his
attention and he feels a little hope taking shape for his sullen life without
love, but she too departs from the island after a tragic episode that happens
with her brother. Mitchell doesn’t get the chance to establish his intention
and motive, and this throws Mitchell again in the gloom of remorse and
reminiscence. In the years that follows, as per his diary entries, he tries to
understand as much about Nella as possible from various sources and
reconstructs her story, which serves as a representative of millions of stories
that pushed the immigrants to take a harsh voyage to take a chance to begin a
new life in the US. Mitchell’s experience is also shaped by his encounter with
the members of the staff at the Ellis Island and with the immigrants for whom
he felt affinity and who’ve left him with questions he’s still trying to answer
and understand at this final hour of leaving.
The novel depicts the struggle of
the immigrants during those decades of the World and American history and thus
has brought back the forgotten faces and stories2 of the
immigrants from the vaults of the past. The story revolves around death, loss,
departure and solitude, and the character of John Mitchell is characterized
with remorse and renunciation for the love he couldn’t attain and the life he
couldn’t accept wholeheartedly except for his duties at the Ellis Island. The
story transports us to the setting of the Ellis Island where the immigrants disembarked
from the barge, hurried on the stairs, waited in the Great Hall their turn to
be inspected and were screened, cross-marked with a chalk, questioned,
disinfected, lodged, fed, admitted to the infirmary… and everything comes to
life such that we feel the anguish, anxiety, hope and doubt of the immigrants,
many of whom were give entry to the US and some were denied. However, the
general atmosphere is filled with the fear of being denied and deported after
the arduous trip they took, mostly on the steerage of the steamships from
faraway lands.
2. For forty-five
years—I’ve had plenty of time to count them—I observed the arrival of all those
men, women, and children, dignified and disoriented, in their best clothes and
bathed in perspiration, exhaustion, and bewilderment, struggling to make sense
of a language of which they knew not a single word. They carried all their
dreams inside their luggage, packed inside the trunks, canteens, baskets, suitcases,
bags, carpets, and blankets that contained everything they had brought with
them from their previous life; and then there was everything they had sealed up
deep inside their hearts to try to keep themselves from caving in to the
anguish of separation, the pain of calling up faces they would never see again.
They had to move on, adapt to another life, another language, different signs
and customs, unfamiliar foods, a new climate. Learn, learn fast and never look
back. I have no idea how many of them fulfilled their dreams, how many found
themselves brutally cast into a daily life that was barely any improvement on
the one they had escaped. It was too late to think about it, theirs was an
exile without return.
From 1892-1954, the Ellis Island
served as the gateway to the US, which saw the arrival of more than twelve
million immigrants. And, John acts as a center and witness to the influx of
immigrants as well as to their experience of crossing, much like the Ellis
Island but gives it the human dimensions. Through his eyes we experience the
struggle of the period and the people. His thoughts and analogies on the
immigrants give voice to the unspeakable tragedy of the dispossessed and exiles
in the light of American history and its social transformation. In this regard,
the story is both historically and emotionally rich, and the sketch of John,
who was touched briefly but for long by the passing ships and immigrants is
left with the burden of memories, can be seen as the man who saw and felt it
all.
Author: Gaëlle
Josse
Translator: Natasha
Lehrer
Publisher:
World Editions
Author's
Photo Source: https://www.worldeditions.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/JOSSE-Gaelle-2-Heloise-Jouanard.jpg
Immigrant Woman Photo Source:
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/e7/e0/b6/e7e0b61b5be94cf2e35680bf128defea--albanian-culture-lewis-hine.jpg
Ellis Island (The Great Hall) Photo Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/archaeologyandhistory/2019/11/ellis-island-reference/ellis-island-reference-01.adapt.1900.1.jpg
Immigrant
Family Photo Source: https://i0.wp.com/marinamaral.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/51073-123.jpg?ssl=1
Review Copy
Courtesy: World Editions
Coming Soon...
The Girl with the Golden Parasol
by Uday Prakash
Translated from the Hindi by Jason Grunebaum
Lifting the Family Shroud
The unnamed narrator retreats to
a coffee house every day to escape from the unsettling atmosphere of crisis at
home. In the Coffee House, the serving waiter Vincent seems to the narrator, a
wise being who knows secrets of his internal chaos and can put them into a
calming virtue of words. The novel opens in one such day, when the narrator
finds himself in the coffee house again, only this time he hasn't returned to
his home for more than thirty hours, where his wife is expected to return but
hasn't. He broods over his failed relationship with a girl at the coffee with
whom he had suddenly cut off his ties, but more than that he's there to tell
all about his family.
In the following chapters he
takes us into the roots of his family, its members and their characters. His
family consists of his parents, Chikkappa (Uncle), Malati (Sister) and Anita
(Wife). They now own a business, and are well enough, such that the narrator
doesn't have to work at all if he wishes to, only that because of his wife he
completes the formality of going to work, where he does almost nothing. Chikkappa
runs the business, suffers the toil and brings the wealth home to everyone's
delight. They weren't always like this; they once had been a family with meager
income, and lived in a poor lower-middle-class quarter in an ant1
infested house, and they'd moved to the present luxury only after new wealth
entered their family.
1. We
had two types of ants at home. One was a small brisk-moving black variety that
appeared only occasionally. But when it did, it came in an army numbering
thousands. These ants wandered everywhere in apparent confusion, always bumping
heads and pausing before realizing something and rushing off in random
directions. They had no discernible purpose in life other than trying our
patience. It didn’t seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have
the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they’d quickly haul in
particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try
scuttling them with a broom, but they’d get into a mad frenzy and climb up the
broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they’d be all over you, even
under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and
then one day you’d wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they
came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window
sill in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a
mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns.
But not once did I see the tail of a column, an ant that had no other ants
behind it.
After the marriage, Anita senses
the fault in the family ties and foundation, and therefore there is always a
constant tension between the three women of the house. Now, the nouveau riche
family is concerned about the comfort of Chikkappa, as he is the sole
breadwinner of the family. The narrator himself fears losing his inheritance
from his father, and doesn't want to get apart from the riches2 and
prosperity his uncle has brought in the house, without him doing almost nothing.
A dissent to the family virtues and well-being, Anita uses subtle verbal
insults, undermines, pokes, challenges their way of life or make fun of whomever
she wants and things which she doesn't find agreeable, and as if to rescue the
family the narrator's mother and sister too join the verbal row; this is what
the narrator escapes from often.
2. It’s
true what they say – it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that
controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it
becomes brash and has its way with us.
The narrator candidly talks about
his thoughts, intentions, dark motives and personal failures, as if he accepts
it all, but is still at loss. It seems the family has accepted the way things
are and doesn't want to change in any way. Meanwhile, Anita resents the family
ways and how things are: an uncle who works day and night to maintain the
family business; a mother who is limited to the kitchen and can become ruthless
if it comes to saving the family values; a father who has less and less say
about anything in the family and whose jokes aren't appreciated by anyone; a
sister who has left her husband, come to live with her parents and has her own
private world, and a husband who is freeloading to the family fortune and
virtually does nothing. Ghachar Gochar, a word created by Anita and her brother
during their childhood, which means entanglement of things, has become a
reality to the narrator, who finds himself in the middle of a war of words ever
present in the household between the three women, family values, fear of losing3
the riches and expectation from his wife for him to be independent. It seems
that not only their freedom, but their fate and shame too are rooted in the
family ties. As if the family has learned to live in harmony amid the
dependence, tension and chaos.
3. A
man in our society is supposed to fulfil his wife’s financial needs, true, but
who knew he was expected to earn the money through his own toil?
In Ghachar Ghochar, we witness
the family and personal secrets being laid bare. We also closely observe the
changes in their way of life, of a family as they leap onto the higher social
status with a bond and understanding – that is reluctant to change – to such an
extent that the whole members are in a sort of symbiosis or have become
parasitic. In doing so, their own personal choices have been defined or are
limited by those unspoken virtues. The story is a dramatic view of a nouveau
riche family, but is not limited to this. It also unveils the dark motives that
run in a family. Here, it is a fear of losing the prosperity – which also has
deformed the personalities of few. To some extent, we can extrapolate the story
to those women who stand against violence and traditional ways, and are under
threat from their own families and sinister ways. Ghachar Gochar takes us into
the core of a family and its crisis that we often know about but we do not
speak of.
Author: Vivek Shanbhag
Translator: Srinath Perur
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers (India)
Author's Photo Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2136315/vivek-shanbhag
Review Copy Courtesy: Personal Copy
Coming Soon...
Gaia, Queen of Ants
by Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
by Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega