World Translations Review: 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 This makes his life and personality reclusive and withdrawn from the outer world and he decides to spend most of his time within the confines and hubbub of the island.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.