It began with a touristy ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty (125 years old last month!) and Ellis Island. As I prepared to move back to the Bay Area a little over a year ago, both historical monuments were high on my list of “Things I Need to See Before I Leave New York.”
I bought tickets with a family friend one sweltering September afternoon, and we perched up top as the ferry cut through the water, laughing at ourselves for bringing sunblock, water and granola bars (“How proud would our mothers be?!”). We were surrounded by tourists from Japan, France, Germany, you name it. The stop at the Statue of Liberty was short, simple. She seemed much greener up close.
It was at the museum on Ellis Island that I started getting overwhelmed. I couldn’t help but picture my plucky, now fearless grandma walking through the place in 1922 as a terrified 6-year-old, fresh from Kiev, where her family had faced increasingly violent religious persecution.
Though the Levines were among the lucky ones — no one was turned back, and they were “processed” and allowed into New York fairly quickly — I still couldn’t (or didn’t want to) imagine them there: the musty rooms with metal bunk beds, where placards indicate sick immigrants sometimes spent months waiting for medication; the audio recordings of what appeared to be 800 different languages spoken during the immigration center’s peak years, all seemingly frantic and desperate; the barbaric-looking measuring tools and medical equipment used by the facility’s doctors; the grainy photographs of solemn children, pale with dark hair and eyes, looking like they could be my cousins.
My friend and I wordlessly agreed to ignore the pacing outlined by our audio tours and slipped into a wing of the building that didn’t seem to be part of the official historical tour. There, as it has so many times, pop culture saved me — adding color and dimension to the black-and-white textbook rendition of Ellis Island.
There were sprawling posters advertising glamorous shipping companies and trips to “exotic” locales, photos of early celebrities, and toys and comic books left behind by those dark-haired children (so they must have smiled at some point, right?).
The music artifacts were my favorite: a whole section of playbills and postcards and remainders of what, 100 years ago, represented the coolest parties and people around. In a row of sheet music for turn-of-the-century musicals (many written and composed by Jews), the delicate transition from “outsider” to American leapt off the pages. “Yonkle, the Cow-Boy Jew” sticks with me — advertised as the “Yiddish Comic Cow-Boy Song Novelty.” According to the ad, the part of Yonkle was “sung with great success by ‘that Yiddish loafer’ Glenn Burt.”
(Cursory Internet research has determined that the play is indeed about a Jewish cowboy — if the borderline-racist drawing adorning the sleeve didn’t tip me off — but one of these days I’d love to actually track down a recording.)
It was almost closing time when we walked out of that room, in a bit of a daze, and made a dash for the back exit. At the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, a spiraling metal commemorative wall behind the museum, I snapped a cellphone photo. Among the millions of names of people who had passed through this place, there was my grandma, Eda Levine, right where she was supposed to be (along with a dozen or so other Levines). I texted the picture to my mom in California.
“Wow,” she wrote back, promising to forward the photo to other members of the family, scattered across the country. I received her message after we were on the ferry; the evening air was cool as we approached the city, and the boatload of tourists seemed quieter on the way back.
It’s cheesy, yes, but that was when I started feeling ready to leave New York. My family history will always be there. But if I’m going to take any cues from that 6-year-old immigrant version of my grandma — now a fiercely independent 95-year-old who lives happily and actively by herself in the heart of Toronto — there’s a lot to be said for moving forward, hopeful about what’s around the bend.
Emma Silvers lives in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].