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Listing Ship
by Anxo Angueira
Translated from the Galician by Kathleen March

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 This makes his life and personality reclusive and withdrawn from the outer world and he decides to spend most of his time within the confines and hubbub of the island.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

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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

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Gaia, Queen of Ants
by Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega