The Last Days of Ellis Island Read online

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  Winner of the European Prize for Literature

  New York, November 3, 1954. In a few days, the immigration inspection station on Ellis Island will close its doors forever. John Mitchell, an officer of the Bureau of Immigration, is the guardian and last resident of the island. As Mitchell looks back over forty-five years as gatekeeper to America and its promise of a better life, he recalls his brief marriage to his beloved wife Liz, and is haunted by memories of a transgression involving Nella, an immigrant from Sardinia. Told in a series of poignant diary entries, this is a story of responsibility, love, fidelity, and remorse.

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  Praise for The Last Days of Ellis Island

  “Combining real and fictional events, Gaëlle Josse has written a text as visceral as it is melancholy and vibrant.”

  Livres Hebdo

  “With precise and barbed language, Gaëlle Josse allows us to experience a slice of American history through the movements of a soul preyed upon by its demons. Masterly and urgent!”

  Librairie Pages après pages

  “Gaëlle Josse visits Ellis Island and constructs an intimate, collective geography, the story of one man intertwined with those of thousands of others. She rejects exaggeration and pathos, instead embracing the joy of invention and facing the crudeness of what happened head-on.”

  Transfuge

  “It’s always somewhat pointless to attempt categorization, especially in the impalpable and subjective domain of artistic creation. However, can’t we call The Last Days of Ellis Island the most beautiful text Gaëlle Josse has ever written, one in which the alchemy of the preceding ones reaches, on a completely different subject, a kind of completion?”

  La Croix

  “This is the story of the last day of the last guardian of Ellis Island, a place that has for long been the one entryway to the American Dream for thousands of impoverished immigrants. Don’t miss this beautiful novel—full of emotion, memory, and vigor.”

  Femme Actuelle

  “You let yourself be swept along by a narrative that gently oscillates between the supernatural and the unnerving. This literary season’s little jewel.”

  La Vie

  “A very beautiful novel … about those whom one forgets to thank, those who, because they have been invisible, no longer know how to take back their existence.”

  L’Alsace

  “What is Gaëlle Josse’s secret? Every time, we are delighted by her work, and yet this novel has nothing in common with her previous books … The author, in a consistently exquisite style, gives us a work that is not only well-researched and passionate, but also melancholic, and of incomparable power.”

  Version Femina

  “Allows Gaëlle Josse to blend invented emotions and historical truth in a beautiful manner.”

  Hommes & migrations

  “Magnificent. Poignant.”

  Cosmopolitan

  “It’s hard not to become John Mitchell during the reading. Gaëlle Josse writes his diary for the last nine working days on Ellis Island with a strong sense of presence and credibility.”

  Arbetarbladet

  “A highly meaningful effort to give voice to people whose destiny has long been forgotten.”

  Norran

  “A novel to be read by anyone who has ever thought about leaving.”

  Vecernji List

  “A fluid and gentle story that can be read in one breath.”

  Bestbooks.com

  “The Last Days of Ellis Island is one of those stories that quietly sneaks in and then shifts something inside us.”

  Modern Times Info

  “A breathtaking, beautifully written, melancholy novel—a real gem. The author has brought American society with immigrants from Europe to life, a subject that has lost none of its topicality.”

  Literair Nederland

  “The Last Days of Ellis Island has historical worth and humanitarian appeal.”

  Tzum

  “A story about remorse, exile, passionate love, and a man who faces a terrible choice.”

  Hebban

  “In the melancholy The Last Days of Ellis Island, Gaëlle Josse evokes a past era through a single life story.”

  VPRO Books

  “The Last Days of Ellis Island stands out due to its stylistic power and beautiful metaphors.”

  Chicklit.nl

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  GAËLLE JOSSE holds degrees in law, journalism, and clinical psychology. Formally a poet, she published her first novel, Les heures silencieuses (‘The Quiet Hours’), in 2011. Josse went on to win several awards, including the Alain Fournier Award in 2013 for Nos vies désaccordées (‘Our Out-Of-Tune Lives’). After spending a few years in New Caledonia, she returned to the Paris area, where she now works and lives. Josse received the European Union Prize for Literature for The Last Days of Ellis Island, along with the Grand Livre du Mois Literary Prize.

  NATASHA LEHRER is a writer and literary translator based in France. She writes features and book reviews for a variety of newspapers including The Guardian, The Times, and The Observer. Some of her recent translations are A Call for Revolution by the Dalai Lama, Chinese Spies by Roger Faligot, Victor Segalen’s Journey to the Land of the Real, and Memories of Low Tide by Chantal Thomas. Lehrer won a Rockower Award for Journalism in 2016, and in 2017 was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize for her co-translation of Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger.

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  AUTHOR

  “Writing is always about feeling the world, experiencing the world; and it is always about trying to write the world. I am interested in the characters, and I want to explore and accompany them as far as possible, to their inner moments of truth. I don’t think we invent anything entirely. That would lead to a lack of curiosity and sincerity. So I ascribe to these characters questions and emotions of my own. I think these characters have something to teach me: about myself, my own humanity.”

  TRANSLATOR

  “Translating this beautiful, haunting book was a fascinating and enriching experience. I had to find the voice of a man born over a century ago in the United States, while at the same time striving to capture Gaëlle Josse’s compelling and unique voice in French. It was a reminder that translation is often as much about reaching across time as it is through space.”

  PUBLISHER

  “Before turning to novels, Gaëlle Josse wrote poetry, and one can sense in the pages her gift for language, especially for its rhythm and musicality. This text flows like the Hudson river, hypnotizing and intense, carrying the devastating stories of immigrants who left everything behind in the hope of a better life in the United States of America. This book is a little gem of a novel on immigration, love, and remorse: musing, melancholic, and tender.”

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  GAËLLE JOSSE

  THE LAST DAYS OF ELLIS ISLAND

  Translated from the French

  by Natasha Lehrer

  WORLD EDITIONS

  New York, London, Amsterdam

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  Published in the USA in 2020 by World Editions LLC, New York

  Published in the UK in 2020 by World Editions Ltd., London

  World Editions

  New York / London / Amsterdam

  Copyright © Les Editions Noir sur Blanc, 2014

  English translation copyright © Natasha Lehrer, 2020

  Cover image © Photography Collection, The New York Public Library

  Author portrait © Héloïse Jouanard

  This book is a work of ficti
on. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The opinions expressed therein are those of the characters and should not be confused with those of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available

  ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-071-9

  ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-079-5

  First published as Le dernier gardien d’Ellis Island in France in 2014 by Les Editions Noir sur Blanc, Paris

  This book was published with the support of the CNL

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Twitter: @WorldEdBooks

  Facebook: @WorldEditionsInternationalPublishing

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  www.worldeditions.org

  Book Club Discussion Guides are available on our website.

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  What is this life but the sound of an appalling love?

  Louise Erdrich

  The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  We still always paint people against a gold background, like the Italian Primitives. People stand before something indefinite—sometimes gold, sometimes gray. Sometimes they stand in the light, and often with an unfathomable darkness behind them.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Notes on the Melody of Things

  (translated by Damion Searls)

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  ELLIS ISLAND, NOVEMBER 3, 1954, 10 O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

  Everything that follows took place at sea. On the sea, on two ships, which docked here once upon a time. For me it was as though they never left again, it was the flesh of my flesh and of my soul that they rammed with their anchors and their grapple hooks. Everything I believed to be solid burned to ash. In a few days, I’ll be done with this island that has consumed my life. Done with this island of which I am the last guardian and the last prisoner. Done with this island, though I know almost nothing of the world outside. I’ll be taking no more than a couple of suitcases and one or two pieces of furniture with me. A few boxes filled with memories. My life.

  I have just nine days left before the men from the Federal Immigration Service arrive to officially shut down the Ellis Island immigration station. I have been told that they’ll be arriving early, first thing next Friday morning, November 12. We’ll do one last tour of the island together and complete the inventory; I’ll hand over the keys to all the doors, gates, warehouses, sheds, desks, and together we’ll leave for Manhattan.

  Then it’ll be time for me to go through the final formalities inside one of those glass and steel buildings whose windows look, from afar, like the countless cells of a beehive, a gray vertical beehive, in a place where I’ve set foot no more than a dozen times over all these years, and at last I’ll be free. At least that’s what they’ll say to me, with that mixture of pity and envy you might feel for a colleague who, one day at a fixed time, is informed that he is no longer part of the group, is no longer an element of what has become over the years a kind of collective existence, made up of more or less shared concerns and objectives. He must leave the pack, like an old animal moving away to die, while the herd continues on without him. Often this rite of passage is marked by a depressing ceremony. Hackneyed speeches, reminiscences about some shared success, beer, whiskey, a few slaps on the back, and promises of future celebrations that everyone feels obliged to make and forgets at once, and then the person being feted weaves his way home, clutching a new fishing line or tool belt. I’ll be happy to avoid all that. I have a small apartment waiting for me in Williamsburg in Brooklyn that I inherited from my parents. Three rooms still filled with all their furniture, which I haven’t touched; their entire lives embedded between the walls—pictures, ornaments, dishes. Truth be told, I am dreading going back there, I’ve enough of my own memories without having to deal with theirs, but that’s where I was born and I have no other place to go, and I figure it doesn’t matter much now.

  Nine more days wandering the empty corridors, the disused upper stories and the deserted stairwells, the kitchens, the infirmary, and the Great Hall, where for a long time only my steps have echoed.

  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.

  I’m surrounded here by gray: water, concrete, and brick. I’ve never known any other landscape than that of the Hudson, with its line of skyscrapers that I’ve watched grow up over the years, climbing, meshing together, stacking up to create the rigid and ever-changing jungle we know today, at its feet the movement of boats and ferries in the bay, and Our Lady of Liberty, or Lady Liberty, as immigrants arriving from Europe sometimes called her when they first caught sight of her on her stone pedestal, majestic in her copper-green robe, face impassive, arm aloft over the water.

  Whatever the season, the river is always gray, as if the sun has never been able to illuminate its depths, as if some kind of opaque material beneath the surface prevents it from dipping down into the water to alter its reflection. Only the sky changes. I know all its nuances, from the most intense blue to the softest violet, and all the different shapes of the clouds, wispy, puffy, dappled, each endowing its own character to the new day.

  Now all I have authority over is the walls. Grasses and plants have grown wild, taken seed, borne by the wind and the birds. It wouldn’t take much for a meadow to grow up here, untamed, along the water’s edge, watched over from a distance by a triumphant Liberty tethered securely to her rock. 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.

  I have an inexplicable urge to delve into a past I hoped I would be able to forget, but which it seems I cannot. In a few days I shall be one of those anonymous, modestly dressed retirees, living in an ordinary street in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in an apartment the same as a thousand others, taking the bus, greeting my neighbors, feeding my cat, shopping at the grocery store. I know that will be how I appear on the outside, and I know that it will be a complete sham. I have no children, no parents, no family. Nothing but memories, deeply troubling ones. They are so disturbing it’s as if all the ghosts in my life awakened as soon as they realized I was leaving, and they will only find peace again once their stories have been told.

  5 O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON.

  My mind is filled with so many images I feel dizzy. Perhaps if I manage to pour my story out onto these pages, embossed with the emblem of the Federal Immigration Service, I will finally be rid of the past. Ellis Island Station. Commissioner. It’s all absurd. I’m only trying to keep at bay the shadows that have settled at the foot of my bed and are doggedly insisting on staying put. Nine days. Nine nights. Is that enough time to tell it all?

  So. Everything that follows took place at sea, on ships loaded with the poor and the destitute, packed like
cattle in steerage, from where they would emerge, dazed, numb, reeling, peering out in the direction of all their hopes and dreams. I can picture them now. Every language was spoken here. It was like a new tower of Babel, but instead of rising up to the sky, the building was low, tethered to the ground. The tower of Babel after it had been destroyed by the God of Genesis. The Babel of desperation and dispersal, the place where everyone was returned to their native language.

  Eventually I was able to distinguish between the sounds of all these different languages. I no longer confused them, and I came to recognize characteristics common to those from the same country, even the same region. They didn’t all show fear in the same way, and their apprehension was as often translated into silence as into words.

  Their faces were clouded with fear and expectation, the dread of saying something wrong, or making some gesture that would mean being forever banned from entering paradise, and yet they had no idea what was expected of them. Many had put on their best clothes for disembarking, ready for the examination that awaited them. Spotless white shirts for the men—it was astonishing they were still in this state after two or three weeks at sea in the filthiest of conditions—and long skirts, fitted jackets, and embroidered bodices for the women. These were their most elaborate outfits, yet they only served to draw attention to the gulf between their world and ours. Men in wide-belted tunics, waistcoats, fur hats, long black kaftans, tweed caps; women, their hair wrapped in headscarves, draped in cascades of necklaces made of colored glass beads or coral. All worlds collided here, and America was the only word they had in common.

  Their first examination took place without their knowledge, even though it was the most decisive moment, an ordeal that they had no idea they were undergoing, the final stop on a long and difficult road at the end of which they would either be saved or lost. A long staircase, two flights of stairs they had to climb after depositing their luggage. How many exhausted women did I hear whimper when they saw this staircase rising up in front of them? Prego, aspetti, signore, ein Moment, bitte … Men carrying small children in their arms, the child often asleep with a cheek squashed against the father’s shoulder, the mother following behind, out of breath, lifting her skirt so as not to stumble.