The Journey to America

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The Journey to America

• What was it like for immigrants once they decided
  to leave their homeland and travel to a new
  country?

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Step one The voyage
steerage
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"Many immigrants had brought on board balls of
yarn, leaving one end of the line with someone on
land. As the ship slowly cleared the dock, the
balls unwound amid the farewell shouts of women,
and the fluttering of the handkerchiefs, and the
infants held high. After the yarn ran out, the
long strips remained airborne, sustained by the
wind, long after those on land and those at sea
had lost sight of each other. -Luciano De
Crescenzo, "The Ball of Yarn"
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"Oh God, I was sick. Everybody was sick. I don't
even want to remember anything about that old
boat. One night I prayed to God that it would go
down because the waves were washing over it. I
was that sick, I didn't care if it went down or
not. And everybody else was the same way."-Bertha
Devlin, an Irish immigrant in 1923
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The New Colossus Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The
wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send
these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me. I lift
my lamp beside the golden door.
Step Two Seeing the Statue of Liberty
1886
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Step Three New YorkEllis IslandGateway to
America
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Angel Island San Francisco Harbor The Ellis
Island of the West
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Detainment for two to three days
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"At Ellis Island there was nothing to do. You
just had to sit around. You could walk up and
down among the crowds and wait for the man to
come with chewing gum or an apple, but you
couldn' go anyplace. Even prisoners go out into
the yard. But we were kept in a place that was
all
enclosed. I could walk up and down, back
and forth, and up and down, and back and forth.
That was the extent of my exercise."
Ettie
Glaser, English, at Ellis Island in 1923, age 18
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"They asked us questions. 'How much is two and
one? How much is two and two?' But the next young
girl, also from our city, went and they asked
her, 'How do you wash stairs, from the top or
from the bottom?' She says, 'I don't come to
America to wash stairs.' -Pauline Notkoff, a
Polish Jewish immigrant in1917
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"The doctors and everybody else that were
supposed to interrogate us were dressed in

uniforms. That had terrible effect on me. We were
scared of uniforms. I took us back to the

Russian uniforms that we were running away

from."
-Katherine Beychok, a Russian Jewish
immigrant in 1910
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"My sister developed warts on the back of her
hand so they put a chalk 'X' on the back of her
coat. The Xs were put aside to see whether they
had to be reexamined or deported. If they
deported my sister we couldn't let her go. Where
would she go if they deported her? Some kind man,
I don't know who he was, told my sister to turn
her coat around. She had a nice plush coat with a
silk lining, and they turned her coat
around. -Victoria Saifatti Fernández immigrant
in 1916
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No one left Ellis Island if they were sick!
(unless they were being deported back home)
"The nurses were there. 'Ladies in White' we used
to call them. They were very nice. I mean, they
talked to the children. They stroked their hair.
And they touched their cheeks and held our hands.
When they gave us milk, sometimes,maybe if there
was a pretty child, some nurses would kiss the
child on the cheek. They were really very nice.
-Elizabeth Martin, a Hungarian immigrant in 1920
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Deportation Will these guys get to stay?
"So when I came to Ellis Island, my gosh, there
was something I'll never forget. The first
impression - all kinds of nationalities. And the
first meal we got - fish and milk, big pitchers
of milk and white bread, the first time I saw
white bread and butter. There was so much milk,
and I drank it because we didn't have enough milk
in my country. And I said, 'My God, we're going
to have a good time here. We're going to have
plenty to eat.'" -Marta Forman, Czechoslovakian,
at Ellis Island in 1922
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Step Four Ferry to NY
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"I saw this man coming forward and he was
beautiful. I didn't know he was my father. Later
on I realized why he looked so familiar to me. He

looked exactly like I did. But that's when I
met him for the first time. And I fell in love
with him and he with me."
Katherine Beychok,
a Russian Jewish immigrant in 1910
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Step Five Getting started with your new life
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Why are we back at the beginning?