Friday, April 20, 2007
"Ellis Island is a symbol of America’s immigrant heritage. From 1892 to 1954, this immigrant depot processed the greatest tide of incoming humanity in the nation’s history. Nearly twelve million landed here in their search of freedom of speech and religion, and for economic opportunity." ~ www.ellisisland.org
These images were shot with the pictures of my father and his family, as well as my mother and her family floating through my mind's eye as I walked through this very historic space on Ellis Island today. I mused over those nagging questions of why we seem unable to embrace each other, respecting all those varied differences while we rejoice in all that brings us together in our similarities...
My father's journey to America was a circuitous one as a Holocaust survivor and although he didn't enter New York via Ellis Island, it was New York Harbor that greeted him, after he made the often-difficult passage to America from Poland to Italy and then through Havana, finally to Miami. My mother's parents left the Bay of Naples during one of the earlier waves of immigration in search of the "new opportunity" in that place called America, in search of a place to call "home."
There will be many more images added in due time, with scanned images of my own family who once upon a time passed through those halls of Ellis Island and New York Harbor.
"Remember, remember always,
that all of us, and you and I especially,
are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt, before the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1936
"Once I thought to write a history
of the immigrants in America.
Then I discovered that
the immigrants were America."
~ Oscar Handlin, Professor Emeritus of American History, Harvard University
"For I was a stranger and you welcomed me."
~ Matthew 25:35
"First they came for the socialists,
and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me."
~ Pastor Martin Niemoller, Nazi Germany, circa 1945.
"Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations."
~ Walt Whitman
"The United States should be
'an asylum for the persecuted lovers of
civil and religious liberty.' "
~ Thomas Paine
“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?"”
~ Grace Murray Hopper
"The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."
~ James Baldwin (1924-1987) African-American writer
"What, then, is this new man, the American?
They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen."
~ J. Hector St. Josh de Crevecoeur
"Where do I go? Follow the river
Where do I go? Follow the gulls
Where is the something, where is the someone
That tells me why I live and die..."
~ James Rado, "Hair"
“The whole value of solitude depends upon one's self;
it may be a sanctuary or a prison,
a haven of repose or a place of punishment,
a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.”
~ John Lubbock
