The journeys began the way journeys had begun for thousands of years—with a horse or mule, a cart, a loaf of bread, a bundle made of all that was necessary and the little that was precious. And of course with the wild dream that everything would be changed, changed utterly, at the journey’s end. This much was familiar. But when the warmth of the last embrace faded, something cold and new closed over the travelers. People had migrated to strange lands since time began, but until the turn of the last century, they had never been processed. The endless shuffling lines; the sheaf of indispensable documents; the crowding and filth; the peering and prying at every body part; the bored official with the power over the fate, even the life, of families: it would all become numbingly routine in the tragic decades of war and slaughter that lay ahead. But for the millions of Europeans who set out for America in the great migration at the turn of the last century, this reduction of life to a number, a code, a stamp, a sum of money, was a shock to the system. No one had warned them that to get into the United States they first had to surrender their humanity.
The Affatato boys had descended the hill from their Calabrian village thousands of times in the daily water run. Three miles to the well and three miles back to the dry hilltop village with the enchanting name of Scala Coeli—the Stairs of Heaven. But this was different. This time when Epifanio and his brother Carmine reached the well, they did not turn back. It was just after Christmas of 1910 when the boys left for America. Epifanio, born on the day of the Feast of the Epiphany in 1895, was fifteen, Carmine twenty-three—unmistakable sons of Italy’s Mezzogiorno with their black hair and deep brown eyes. Epifanio, not yet five feet tall, was still growing, but he wouldn’t grow much more since he topped out at five foot two inches. Smooth olive skin, strong muscles, big heart, big dreams. Dreams most of all of New York City. Epifanio had never been outside Calabria, never been on a train or a boat, never been out of sight of Scala Coeli. But like all southern Italian kids of 1910, he’d heard so much about New York he could practically sell real estate. The money, the cars, the jobs, the beautiful women in their fur coats; Enrico Caruso singing at the Metropolitan Opera and, by the miracle of radio, booming out his arias right in your own kitchen. Everyone said that in New York you could do whatever you wanted; even a poor boy could become rich and live in a palace on Fifth Avenue—instead of leaving school at the age of ten and going to work on a road crew, as Epifanio had done, because his mother needed the extra money. Dreams so big they made his mouth water—but still, Epifanio had no idea what really awaited him in l’America. His father had gone before—every now and then a letter and some money arrived from a place called Brooklyn. At the end of 1910, Epifanio and his older brother left their mother behind in Scala Coeli and followed their father all the way to Brooklyn.
The long bumpy cart ride from Scala Coeli to the port of Reggio di Calabria would have been the pleasant part of the journey. From Reggio di Calabria at the toe of the peninsula’s boot they boarded a train to Naples, the first train ride of their lives. Grain fields, vineyards, olive groves, blinding views of the sea filled the gritty windows as they rattled north through the Mezzogiorno. Naples was teeming with immigrants in those years—“a continuous startling whirl,” in the words of the immigrant poet Pascal D’Angelo, who passed through on his way to New York as a teenager around the same time as the Affatato boys. The ancient city on the bay was beautiful, wrote Gay Talese, whose father emigrated from Italy around this time, but “boisterous, dirty, overcrowded. Nothing new was being built; nothing old was being renovated. Beggars were everywhere.”
The moment Epifanio and Carmine hit Naples, chaos and confusion overwhelmed them—and they were in constant fear of being robbed, a fear that would not subside until they were safe with their father in America. They disembarked from the train directly into a gamut of thieves and con artists and beggars. Back to the days of ancient Rome, literature is full of stories of wide-eyed country bumpkins getting royally bamboozled by shrewd city rats—and the schemes and cheats really hadn’t changed much over the centuries. Shills sent out by lousy flea-ridden hotels promised cheap lodging and plentiful food for immigrants waiting for boats or trains. Crooks offered to exchange their Italian lire for dollars, insisting falsely that it was better to change the money in Italy. All manner of street vendors shouted at them with something to sell—rosaries to beseech the Virgin’s blessing for a safe voyage; souvenirs and cheap postcard “views” of Italian scenes to bring to their relatives in l’America; citrus and bread at exorbitant prices.
In the narrow streets between train station and port, the boys passed all manner of makeshift enterprises specializing in emptying the pockets of unwitting immigrants—schools advertising instant proficiency in English, street dentists hawking last-minute extractions that they claimed were essential to passing the inspection at Ellis Island, scammers offering to stamp their steamer tickets “inspected by the American doctor” for a favorable price. No stamp, no entry into America, the con artists insisted. Many believed—and a few more precious coins were left behind. “What makes the emigrant so meek in the face of outrageous brutalities,” wrote Broughton Brandenburg, an American reporter who journeyed undercover from Naples to New York with his long-suffering wife in the steerage of an Italian immigrant ship, “so open to the wiles of sharpers, so thoroughly disconcerted and bewildered in the face of an examination, is his terrible dread of not being allowed to enter America. He would as soon think of cutting off a hand as doing anything that ‘would get him into trouble.’ ”
As the hour of embarkation approached, a kind of human vortex drained into the Neapolitan waterfront, sucking passengers by the hundreds toward the office of North German Lloyd, the company that owned and operated the König Albert on which the boys were booked. The ship was not one of the line’s more prepossessing vessels. With two funnels set rather close together in its middle and two ungainly masts at either end, the 10,643-ton König Albert was long (nearly 500 feet), squat, pinched and tapered like a submarine and rode low in the water. Epifanio and Carmine, of course, had never seen anything like it—though they saw precious little of it through the crowds of people and luggage that packed every available inch of harborside pavement. The ship had capacity for nearly eighteen hundred steerage passengers, and most of them converged outside the steamship broker’s offices, shouting at the top of their voices and waving documents in the air. The 346 first- and second-class passengers were nowhere to be seen: they were either ensconced in their cabins already or, if they were running late, they would board calmly once the pandemonium at the North German Lloyd office subsided.
Iron railings enclosed the worn paving stones of the processing station of the Naples port authority—the Capitaneria. As soon as the Affatato brothers made it through the gate, they were told to separate their hand luggage from the larger bags or trunks they intended to stow in the ship’s hold. The hold luggage had to be inspected by an agent of the American consul, inspected again by a port health department official, then registered by a North German Lloyd employee, who gave the boys a receipt for each bag they surrendered. Before any hand luggage could be carried on board, it had to be fumigated for noxious insects and then affixed with an official yellow label indicating it was safe. To accomplish this the boys had to board a creaky little boat and motor half a mile out to the fumigation station built on the harbor’s breakwater—all the while glancing anxiously at the bulk of the König Albert and praying fervently that the ship would not embark without them. There were the usual scam artists hawking counterfeit labels for a couple of lire a bag.
Next came the human processing. Back inside the precincts of the Capitaneria the boys waited until it was their turn to stand before an official of the steamship company and answer a slate of twenty-nine questions prescribed by U.S. immigration law: Were they married? Could they read and write? Where did they reside in Italy? What was the name and address of the person they were joining in the United States? Had they ever been in prison or an almshouse? Who paid for their passage? Were they polygamists or anarchists? Did they have at least $50 with them? Carmine told the official he was holding the money for the two of them—a total of $42. They would be joining their father in Brooklyn. Epifanio was measured at four feet, eleven inches, his complexion was rosy, his hair dark. He was neither a polygamist nor an anarchist.
Then they were vaccinated against smallpox and had their health tickets stamped. Still trembling from their first encounter with a hypodermic needle, with their arms beginning to swell and go sore, the brothers passed into the jammed holding pen to wait their turn for the medical inspection. Policemen peeled off those who had been churned to the head of the crowd and directed them to a panel of doctors from the U.S. Marine Corps Hospital, the port authority, and the ship’s staff. Epifanio stood rigid, his heart pounding, while a doctor folded back his eyelids to search for the redness and scarring caused by trachoma (an infectious bacterial eye disease that leads to blindness if not treated) and rubbed his head for signs of the crusted scabs of the chronic fungal disease favus. Trachoma and favus sufferers were sent back to their villages. Anyone with other obvious symptoms of illness was taken aside for further inspection. The brothers, fortunately, were robust. At last they were free to go on board.
A steep gangplank led from the paving stones of the Capitaneria to the deck of the König Albert. As the surging crowd carried the boys from solid land to the film of wood and iron suspended on salt water, they had no time to stop and reflect on the momentousness of the occasion. The last step on their native soil, the last breath of Italy’s air, the last time they would turn their faces into the Italian sun. From now on they were aliens. The passengers pressing around the boys were nearly all peasants from the Mezzogiorno, most of them dressed in their finest clothes, the women in black shawls, the men wearing their church jackets or carrying them carefully folded over the crook of their arms, all of them burdened with as many parcels and bags as they could possibly drag on board. Even children had their hands full with baskets of food.
As soon as they were on board, the Affatatos added their bodies to the mad crush of passengers piled up at the narrow steps behind the mast. Every immigrant was bent on securing one of the more desirable berths in the cavelike steerage section sandwiched between the lowest deck and the cargo hold. On the König Albert, as on most immigrant ships, steerage was subdivided into large gender-segregated compartments. Children stayed with the women. The compartment where the Affatato boys ended up was dark, rank, low-ceilinged, and crammed floor to ceiling with blocks of iron-frame bunk beds. They flung their parcels down on the first empty mattresses they came to—lumpy burlap-sheathed sacks of straw set on a lattice of iron slats. No pillows or sheets. Bedding was a single blanket made of a wool-cotton-jute blend and freshly scrubbed of whatever its previous user had spilled, shed, vomited, or secreted into it. The brothers were too young and too green to reflect on how much the place looked like a prison—or a barracks.
“For such quarters and accommodations . . . the emigrant pays half the sum that would buy a first-class passage,” remarked Brandenburg. “A comparison of the two classes shows where the steamship company makes the most money.” The North German Lloyd company laid out about 60 cents a day on food for each steerage passenger. Profits for a single voyage ran as high as $60,000.
As the König Albert finally left the pier and crawled out past the breakwater, Epifanio and Carmine went up on deck to stand with the other passengers. Everyone waved frantically to the people on shore frantically waving handkerchiefs. The blasted cone of Vesuvius, still an active volcano, seemed to loom larger as the city receded and its buildings shrank into pink and white toys capped with tile roofs and gold crosses. Immigrants were sometimes treated to the sight of smoke rising from the volcano’s crater. The vineyards and orange groves of Ischia and Capri glided by. After all the hours of preparation, delay, and chaos, it took only minutes for the ship to reach the open water of the fabled Bay of Naples, the filthy azure bay that had inspired so many fervid descriptions and so many pitched battles. Back to the time of the ancient Greeks, boys had died attacking and defending the cities around this bay—and they would die again. Musicians in the crowd—there were always a few—brought out guitars and tambourines. Italy receded to the wail of folk songs.
Had the Affatato boys remained in Scala Coeli, Carmine would have been drafted into the Italian army in five years, Epifanio in ten. But not in l’America. Everyone in the Mezzogiorno knew this for a fact. The steamship company circulars that got passed from hand to hand and village to village spread the word. There was always someone on hand in every village piazza to read to the illiterate the most important sentence in the text: in America, you went into the army only if you chose to.
And who would choose to be a soldier in a country where the streets were paved with gold?
Unlike most immigrants of the time, Meyer Epstein left the Pale of Settlement with money in his pockets. At the age of twenty-one, he had already put in ten years in Mr. Brevda’s junk business. Meyer was a good worker, honest, careful, trusted by those who knew him. Brevda, his boss and patron and in some ways his surrogate father, had treated Meyer well and never begrudged him the money he made. By the standards of Jewish Belarus, Meyer had prospered. But he was convinced he could do better in America. And besides, he wanted to see his father—his real father, Yehuda Epstein, who had emigrated to the United States so long ago that Meyer could no longer remember anything about him. In the autumn of 1913, Meyer Epstein left Brevda’s household and set out to seek his fortune and his father in America.
Before he started the journey, Meyer went to see his younger brother, Zender, the only immediate family he had left in Belarus. Meyer asked the boy to come to America with him. Why not? He had enough money to pay passage for both of them and then some. Zender may well have jumped at the offer—what sixteen-year-old wouldn’t?—but the aunt he had been living with ever since their mother died wouldn’t hear of it. “I raised him,” she told Meyer, “and no one is taking him.” So Meyer set out for America by himself, just as he had set out by himself on the Russian train that led him to Brevda’s house a decade earlier.
The route of his passage from Belarus to the British Isles is no longer known—but somehow Meyer ended up in Liverpool. It was here, in the shadow of the soaring twin clock towers of the new Royal Liver Building, that he walked across the granite-rimmed dock, mounted the gangplank over the Mersey River, and boarded the Lusitania. Meyer never got over the quirk of chance that put him on such a fabulous, fateful ship. In fact, even before the disaster of its demise, the Lusitania was one of the most famous ships in the world—celebrated for its size, its opulence, and most of all its speed. The Cunard Line built the Lusitania and its sister ship the Mauretania in the first decade of the twentieth century as part of a fierce naval competition with the Germans. Since the days of Lord Nelson, Britannia had ruled the waves with the fastest ships afloat—but British naval pride took a blow in 1897 when North German Lloyd’s Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse crossed the Atlantic in two hours shy of six days and set a new record for speed. It was the first time that the Blue Riband—the prize pennant awarded by commercial shipping companies to the fastest transatlantic steamer—flew from the topmast of a non-British vessel. The British could not let this stand. Not only was losing the Riband a blow to national prestige, it was also a matter of potential military significance, since in times of war commercial ships were commonly pressed into naval service. In 1903, Cunard chairman Lord Inverclyde secured a hefty loan from the Balfour administration to construct ships capable of retaking the Blue Riband, and four years later the sister ships Lusitania and Mauretania were christened and ready for service. The Lusitania won the Blue Riband back for Britain on its second commercial voyage in October 1907, crossing from Queenstown to Sandy Hook in four days, nineteen hours, at an average speed of 23.99 knots. Ruling the waves again gratified Britannia, and the government paid Cunard £150,000 a year to maintain the swift sister ships in a state of readiness for war. Just in case.
For those who were able to afford it, the Lusitania’s luxury was legendary. The 550 first-class passengers lived like kings in public rooms fashioned after the great courts and country houses of Europe. First-class cabins had up-to-the-minute amenities like hot and cold water and telephones. Sumptuous dinners of turtle soup and jellied ham, lobster and roast beef, brandy and cigars, lasted hours. Tycoons, opera singers, diplomats, and royalty preferred the “Greyhound of the Seas” because they knew they would encounter only their own kind in the tightly segregated first-class quarters.
Barely a whiff of this elegance crossed the barrier to third class, where Meyer Epstein and some eleven hundred other immigrants, most of them from the Russian Pale, rode out the voyage in the ship’s bow. The best that could be said for the Lusitania’s third-class accommodations was that passengers slept in cabins with up to six berths rather than in huge crowded dormitories, ate food prepared in the same galley that served the ship’s 850 crew members, and relieved themselves in flush toilets (a bit of a mixed blessing since the Cunard designers, working on the assumption that most steerage passengers would be unfamiliar with modern plumbing, installed toilets that flushed continuously as long as someone was sitting on them).
Meyer was lucky to have ended up on the world’s fastest ship. For most immigrants, the voyage across the Atlantic was a week or more of hell. Even those inured to the primitive, waterless huts of southern Italy or the muddy shtetls of the Pale were appalled by what they encountered belowdecks. In time, they would forget the nuances of their mother tongue, the geography of their native village, the stories of wars and wolves their grandparents told them on winter nights, the names and faces of beloved friends. But no immigrant ever forgot the crossing. “I remember everything,” remarked Samuel Goldberg, ninety-nine years after he sailed from Liverpool to New York on board the Campania, a Cunarder whose first-class luxury rivaled the Lusitania’s. It was December 1907 and Goldberg, a little blond-haired blue-eyed Jewish boy just three months shy of his eighth birthday, was traveling with his mother and three siblings. “We traveled steerage, naturally, and all of the kids slept in the same bed with our mother. The five of us in one bed. The smell of that steerage was something I could not get rid of for a long goddamn time. It took us seven days to cross the Atlantic—no bath, we kept the same clothes on the entire time. Before we left, my mother’s parents gave her a loaf of black bread and a few buttons of garlic. She would slice the bread and rub it with the garlic. You have no idea what it was like.”
The stench of the unventilated quarters was what immigrants found hardest to endure. Decades after he sailed from Italy with his family when he was nine, Angelo M. Pellegrini could still describe the smell of steerage in vivid, nauseating detail: “We were packed in filthy bunks like herring in a barrel. . . . [The stench] was something very palpable and substantial. We felt as if we could touch it, lean against it, move it from place to place; but we could not escape it. It originated in the galley: a heavy, warm, humid, sour odor of desecrated food. It fused with the smell of acid vomit. It gathered overtones from the exhalations of sour stomachs and of dirty sweat-drenched, peasant flesh. Then, whichever way we turned, it blew into our nostrils in thick, pulsating blasts.” Seasickness became epidemic as soon as the ships hit the open sea. “Hundreds of people had vomiting fits,” wrote a Russian Jew named Israel Kasovich of his voyage out of Liverpool, “throwing up even their mother’s milk. . . . The confusion of cries became unbearable, and a hundred persons vomited at one and the same time. I wanted to escape from that inferno, but no sooner had I thrust my head forward from the lower bunk I lay on than someone above me vomited straight upon my head. I wiped the vomit away, dragged myself onto the deck, leaned against the railing and vomited my share into the sea, then lay down half-dead upon the deck.” Sleep was often impossible for the cries and moans of the suffering.
Rare was the steerage that had a dining room. On most ships, third-class passengers ate their meals on their beds or standing at shelves that ran alongside the sleeping compartments or, when weather permitted, squatting or sitting on bundles on the cramped third-class decks (usually situated behind the smokestacks). One passenger noted that the Italian immigrants on board a German ship failed—or refused—to understand the instructions to toss the remains of their meals over the sides of the ship or into the scuppers. Instead they cleared their plates onto the deck, which, after the first dinner, became covered with “unctuous filth that made footing very uncertain.” Fights broke out when children climbed on strangers’ berths with their foul sticky shoes. An entire family received a single cup of fresh water a day to share for washing themselves. Broughton Brandenburg, the American journalist traveling incognito with a group of Italian peasants on board the Prinzessin Irene, quailed when he overheard first-class passengers disparaging the slovenliness of immigrant families: “What dirty little imps they are.” “Terrible to think of admitting such people wholesale to the United States.” “There ought to be a stop put it: they are a menace to our civilization.” “How,” demanded Brandenburg, “can a steerage passenger remember that he is a human being when he must first pick the worms from his food?”
And yet there were moments of calm, dreamy reverie, even euphoria. Some remembered sitting on deck in the sun when the weather was tranquil and talking endlessly of the marvels that awaited them in America. At night the haunting music of Russian or Ukrainian folk songs rose from huddled groups. As a Russian song faded, another would begin in Polish or Yiddish or Norwegian. The Scandinavians loved to dance. Jewish girls who had never touched a man before found themselves dancing wildly with grinning deckhands who didn’t speak a word of their language and didn’t need to.
As the end of the voyage neared, anxieties mounted. “Who can depict the feeling of desolation, homesickness, uncertainty, and anxiety with which an emigrant makes his first voyage across the ocean?” wrote one Jewish immigrant of the final hours of his crossing. “The thumping of the engines was drumming a ghastly accompaniment to the awesome whisper of the waves. I felt in the embrace of a vast, uncanny force. And echoing through it all were the heart-lashing words: ‘Are you crazy?’ ” Rumors circulated in multiple languages. Questions tormented the travelers. Was their English good enough to get past the inspectors at Ellis Island? What if relatives who had promised to meet them failed to show up? Little Samuel Goldberg had had trouble with his eyes. It wasn’t trachoma—but the child’s blue eyes were red and inflamed. Back in Poland, his mother Sarah had been putting in eyedrops every day—and she kept it up during the journey. What would happen when Samuel had to face the medical inspector on Ellis Island? What if he was detained—or deported? What then? What would Sarah do—and what about the other children? The Goldbergs talked about little else as the Campania neared New York.
Are you crazy? Meyer Epstein was coming to America with the hope of finding his father, but he had no idea where the man lived—or indeed if he was still alive. It had been so many years Meyer couldn’t even remember what he looked like. Folded into his bag was a slip of paper with the name of an aunt he’d never met and a house number on New York’s East Broadway. His plan was to go there and beg a room of her while he looked for his father.
Andreas Brattestø had an easy crossing compared to most. He was supposed to look after his sister-in-law and her kids on the voyage over, but since the sexes were segregated in steerage and children bunked with their mothers, there really wasn’t much for him to do. Seasickness wasn’t a problem, since he was accustomed to winter fishing on the rough waters of the North Sea. So Andreas spent the long empty hours at sea thinking about his sweetheart Juline back in Norway and wondering what it would be like to farm 640 acres of free land. Free American land.
At some point in the course of his journey, Andreas decided to change his name. Magnus Andreas Brattestø had boarded the ship in Stavanger; but Andrew Christofferson would disembark in the New World. When he finally reached the free open land everybody talked about, Andrew Christofferson was the name he intended to sign on his homestead papers.
Epifanio could not believe how cold New York was. A cold gray city rising from the cold gray water of an enormous bay, even dirtier than the Bay of Naples. No mountains, no leaves on the trees, no red tile roofs—just gray buildings and black chimneys spewing clouds of soot into the cold gray January sky. The great hulking ship he’d grown to hate seemed to be stuck—close to land but not going anywhere. Where was the great fabled city he’d been dreaming of? Epifanio didn’t know that he was gazing not at Manhattan but at Brooklyn and Staten Island: the König Albert was stopped temporarily in Lower Bay at the entrance to New York Harbor while doctors came on board to inspect the cabin passengers for contagious diseases. Small wooden and brick houses huddled close together—houses that looked flimsy and makeshift after the stone buildings of Calabria. This was not how Epifanio had pictured New York. But maybe it would look different once they finally got off the ship and set foot on dry land. The waiting, the endless freezing waiting, was driving both the brothers crazy.
Finally the ship’s engines rumbled to life again and the steamer began to creep through the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island past scores of other anchored ships awaiting quarantine clearance and on into Upper Bay. As the New Colossus came into view—La Statua della Libertà—passengers in their hundreds crowded the port side railing to gaze out in silence. She stood on her island robed like a saint, but a saint too cold and high and severe to hear their prayers. “No one spoke a word,” recalled one immigrant of the vision of Liberty, “for she was like a goddess.” Just a glimpse and then the goddess and her gilded torch and her stone-girt island were behind them and Ellis Island came into view and just as quickly disappeared. Smokestacks, grime-covered warehouses, enormous tawdry billboards with strange English words. The König Albert steamed past Jersey City and the tip of lower Manhattan and kept moving into the wide slate gray mouth of the Hudson River. An endless gaping rank of docks and piers hung from the western shore like a jaw full of rotten teeth. A tugboat eased the König Albert beside one of these piers and the engines subsided. They had arrived—not at New York—but at Hoboken.
The hours that followed were a blur of unclean bodies pressing too close, cavernous warehouses, chaotic piles of bags and trunks, crying babies, yelling parents, orders barked in strange languages, long snaking lines. Trunks and rope-bound suitcases and wicker baskets were unlocked or untied so customs officials could rifle through their contents. Vendors of apples and cakes worked the crowd. Men with sticks kept the lines moving and the exits guarded. Epifanio and Carmine shoved their way through the throng, dragged their bags through customs, shuffled step by step closer to the end of the pier. They were grateful when their turn came to be loaded onto the barge and shipped back down the river to Ellis Island.
By the time they disembarked at the Ellis Island pier, the brothers were dazed by exhaustion and hunger. It had been hours since they had had anything to eat or drink. The din of foreign languages was relentless. Somehow as they entered the portal of the gorgeous palace of red brick and white limestone and carved taloned eagles and towers capped with spiked hemispheres, they were made to understand that they must surrender all of their bags and stow them in the cavernous baggage room. The only thing they kept on hand were their landing tickets marked with their numbers on the ship’s manifest—Carmine was 8, Epifanio 9. Despite the sea light dazzling at the banks of high windows, it was dark inside the ground floor of the palace of immigrants—dark and unbelievably noisy. Shouts, cries, murmurs, wails, baby screams, barked commands, whined demands—everything but relaxed laughter—bounced off the tile floors and ceilings, collided, echoed, merged, amplified, and resonated in deafening waves.
After the baggage room they were herded to the back of another line, a long one that continued up steep flights of stairs and disappeared at the top. The doctors standing at the head of the stairs were surveying the flock for culls. Those too lame to mount the steps without help, those whose panting or sweating might be a sign of heart disease, anyone who seemed unduly bewildered or disoriented—all of the sick and halt had letters chalked on their shoulders. Through an interpreter, a doctor told Epifanio to hold still while he examined his face, neck, hands, and hair. Nothing wrong with him, nothing with Carmine. They continued.
The stairs were just the prologue—the real medical inspection was still to come. Seven-year-old Samuel Goldberg, his three siblings, and his mother Sarah were ushered into a kind of corridor delineated by metal pipes and bars. Doctors worked the crowd in teams. Sarah was asked to remove her hat so the doctor could see if scabs or sores lurked at the roots of her long blond hair. The children had to stop while the doctor examined each of their dirty hands and faces in turn. At the end of the corridor, another doctor performed the dreaded eye exam. Sarah held her breath while the doctor took a long hooked stick—a buttonhook of the kind that was once used for lacing up boots—and peeled back Sam’s eyelids. She was frantic at the idea that the boy might be detained, sent to the hospital, and then sent back to Poland. But no. It was all over in two minutes. The family had gotten through. On to the next stage.
Trachoma, conjunctivitis, hernia, goiter, venereal disease, leprosy, ringworm, favus, dysentery, tuberculosis, mental retardation, insanity, drunkenness, impudence, surliness, obvious stupidity: any of these was grounds for detaining an immigrant for further examination and possible deportation. Several thousand were treated every year at the Ellis Island Marine Hospital, the largest percentage by far suffering from trachoma. Despite the rumors and horror stories that circulated through steerage, despite the fear and trembling with which new arrivals faced the examiners, deportation on medical grounds was rare. Some 98 percent of those who passed through Ellis Island were ultimately admitted.
The final verdict was delivered upstairs in the celestial Registry Room. Rust-colored tiles on the floor, tan tiles covering the vaulted ceiling, immense arched windows set high above an encircling balcony—it was like the nave of a church, even more crowded than Easter Sunday, vibrating with a chorus of five thousand voices, practically bursting with the convective energy of prayer. Wooden benches filled the center of the space; dusty semicircles of light slanted down from the clerestory windows. Inspectors and interpreters stationed in rows at the far end of the room called out names and the chosen would rise and rush to the altar. Immigrants knew that they would be asked to corroborate the information that had already been recorded on the ships’ manifests—their final destination in the United States, how much money they had, name and address of the relative they were joining, whether they were anarchists or polygamists—but still the fear of failing to clear this last hurdle knotted their stomachs. In fact, the great rustling ceremony in the Registry Room cathedral was more or less a formality. Unless you were a criminal, a contract laborer, clearly immoral or unable to support yourself and your family, you were in. Ellis Island was a form of purgatory—but for most it was a swift, transient purgatory. For all the dread, the average time of processing was just five hours. It had to be swift—in these years an average of five thousand immigrants arrived at Ellis Island each day, and on busy days it could be twice that. The high-water mark was reached on April 17, 1907, when 11,747 newcomers passed through Ellis Island in one day.
The end went fast. Dazed or delirious, stamped papers in hand, the arrivals passed through an arch at the far end of the Registry Room and descended back to ground level on three sets of steep staircases—the Stairs of Separation. At the bottom, the river of bodies divided into three streams. “New York Outsides” turned left and exited through a door marked Push, To New York that opened to the landing dock for the ferry to lower Manhattan; the “New York Detaineds” continued straight ahead to a crowded room where they sat killing time until they were met by a husband, father, cousin, friend, or some other kind soul from the Old Country willing to help them get established in New York; those stamped “Railroads” went to the right to a rail ticket office and baggage check area at the rear of the building, where agents booked their passage on one of twelve railroads or three steamship companies.
There was no time to say good-bye. Nobody told them anything. They turned right or left and disappeared forever into the vastness of America.
Where was I to go? What was I to do?” a twenty-year-old Italian immigrant named Bartolomeo Vanzetti wondered as he finally set foot on the pavement of New York City in 1908. “Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer. The automobiles and trolley sped by, heedless of me.”
Sam Goldberg, still glowing with joy at having passed the eye exam, was eating soup and bread in the “New York Detained” area with his mother and siblings when the announcement came that Mrs. Goldberg’s husband was waiting for them. “They didn’t even let us finish the soup,” recalled Sam decades later. “For that son of a bitch.” It was December 21, 1907, the shortest day of the year, when the seven-year-old Polish-Jewish boy was reunited with the father he had always hated. Sam started his life in America with a half-eaten bowl of soup and a gnawing ache in the pit of his stomach.
Domenico Affatato was there at Ellis Island to meet his sons Epifanio and Carmine just as he said he’d be. January 27, 1911. They embraced and kissed and the boys shared the family news from Italy. Then they went out to the ferry landing to catch a boat to lower Manhattan, where they would get on a train for Brooklyn. Domenico could not understand how his wife could have sent Epifanio from Scala Coeli to America in the middle of winter without an overcoat. The boy shivered all the way to Brooklyn.
The newly renamed Andrew Christofferson shepherded his sister-in-law and her children to the railroad ticket office and counted out the money for their fares to Nebraska. Andrew’s brother, waiting for them in Nebraska, had told him exactly what to say and how much the tickets should cost. The clerk gave Andrew a tag with big square letters on it—abbreviations of the names of stations where they would be changing trains en route to Nebraska. Andrew had no idea that in 1911 he was already a generation too late to claim a Nebraska homestead. The good farmland on the prairie was long gone. The wide open spaces of the heartland were not as wide or as empty as they once were.
Tony Pierro and his cousin trudged through Ellis Island in the company of hundreds of other southern Italians who had come over on the Italian liner Stampalia in August 1913. They found out fast that August in New York was almost as bad as the malaria-ridden Mezzogiorno. But Tony and the cousin were not staying in New York long enough to care. In Swampscott, where they were bound, there would be sea breezes and big white hotels facing the blue-gray water. And there would be jobs. Lots of jobs for young immigrants from Italy. When they emerged at the bottom of the Stairs of Separation, Tony and the cousin headed for the railroad ticket office and bought two one-way tickets to Boston.
The arrival of the Lusitania in New York was always an occasion, even when it failed to break another speed record, and so it was on October 10, 1913, when the noble ship delivered the sixty-four-year-old painter William Merritt Chase, celebrated for the rich flattering color of his portraits and the flamboyant style of his dress, to the Cunard dock. Chase went on shore in a small stately procession of first-class families—Blackstone, Dempsey, Williams, and Barrows. The steerage passengers, most of them from the Russian Pale, with a few families from Belgium and Germany mixed in, followed. Meyer Epstein disembarked from the Lusitania with a thousand other immigrants. While William Merritt Chase made his way back to his Manhattan town house, Meyer Epstein, his pockets lined with his modest savings and the address of his aunt, joined the procession of Jews that had been flowing for decades now from Ellis Island to the Lower East Side.
From Belfast to Liverpool, from Liverpool to New York, from New York to Butte, Montana. In the first weeks of 1914, eighteen-year-old Peter Thompson traveled halfway around the world so he could quit working in a linen mill and start working in a copper mine. Peter was the kind of boy people used to call “likely”—quick-witted, beguiling, magnetic, confident, eager. Though small and slight for a laborer, he had the wavy glossy dark hair, fair complexion, and arresting blue eyes of a matinee idol. Being handsome doesn’t count for much in a copper mine, but it would help Peter in every other part of his life.
The date was February 22, 1914, not quite the dead of winter but close to it, when Peter and a buddy disembarked at Ellis Island and boarded the train for Butte. The great tough back of North America was frozen solid under the wheels of the train. Butte was awash in labor disputes, but that didn’t stop immigrants from converging there. They came for the jobs, and as long as the bosses were hiring, they’d keep coming.
Generals in Germany already knew that war was inevitable. Had he stayed behind in Belfast, Peter would have been in the trenches in France or Belgium by the following winter, another Northern Irish lad fighting for the English King. But not in America. In America he’d be burrowed deep in the richest hill in the world doing his bit to supply armies and industry with copper wire. And who knows—maybe one day he too would strike it rich.