Of Wandering and Hope: George Perec’s Ode to Ellis Island

attempting to give palpable form
to what those sixteen million individual stories
were, the sixteen million stories, identical and
distinct,
of the men, women, and children driven
from their native land by famine or poverty,
or by political, racial, or religious
oppression,
leaving everything behind—village, family, friends
—taking months and years to set aside
the money needed for the trip,
finding themselves here, in a hall so vast that they
never would have dared imagine that there could
anywhere exist so big a place,
lined up by fours,
waiting their turn

the point is not to have pity, but understanding

four emigrants out of five
spent no more than a few hours on Ellis Island

it was really nothing more than an innocuous formality,
the time needed to change an emigrant into an
immigrant, someone who had left into someone who
had arrived,

but to every one of those
who marched past the doctors and immigration
officers, what was at stake was vital:

they had given up their past and their history,
they had given up everything for the sake of coming
here to try and live a life they were forbidden to live
in their native land:
and now they were face to face with an inexorable finality

what we see today is a chaotic assemblage of
things, the remnants of alterations, demolitions,
and restorations

objects piled helter-skelter, stacks of
gratings, sections of scaffolding, junked
spotlights

tables, desks, rusted lockers, and
filing cabinets, bedsteads, bits of wood,
benches, rolls of tarpaper,
everything and anything:
a large saucepan, a sieve,
a mobile fire pump, a coffee pot, an adding
machine, an electric fan, glass jars, cafeteria trays,
lead piping, a wheelbarrow, the remains of a hand truck,
unfilled forms, a hymnal,
paper cups, some kind of board game.

Ellis Island was
ravaged not only by time,
dampness, and salt air
but by plunder:
for almost twenty years, the little island, no longer in
use and left virtually unguarded, was systematically
ransacked by dealers in scrap metal, who came looking
for materials that were growing more valuable with
every passing year: brass from faucets and doorknobs,
zinc from the roofing,
lead from the plumbing,
wrought iron from banisters,
bronze from lamp stands and overhead lights,
they took everything they could pile onto their
boats, leaving to rot where they lay the masses of
furniture, the piles of mattresses and rusty
bedsprings,
the mounds of burst pillows

why are we telling these
stories? what did we come
here to find? what did we

come here to ask?
removed from us in space and in time, this
place belongs to a memory potentially
our own,
to a probable autobiography.
our parents or grandparents might have been here
it was mainly chance that decided whether they would stay
or would not stay in Poland, whether they would stop
on the way, in Germany
or Austria or England or France.

to each of us, this shared fate has
appeared in a different light:

what I, Georges Perec, have come here to
examine is dispersion, wandering, diaspora.
To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile, that
is, the place where place is absent, the non-place,
the nowhere.
it is in light of this that these pictures concern
and fascinate and involve me,
as if the search for my own identity
depended on my incorporating this dumping-ground
where frazzled bureaucrats baptized
Americans in droves.
what I find present here
are in no way landmarks or roots or
relics
but their opposite: something shapeless, on the outer edge of
what is sayable,
something that might be called closure, or
cleavage, or severance,
and that in my mind is linked
in a most intimate and confused way
with the very fact of being a Jew

I don’t know exactly what it
is to be a Jew,
or what effect being a Jew has on me

there’s something obvious about it, I suppose,
but it’s a worthless obviousness
that doesn’t connect me with anything,
it isn’t a sign of belonging,
it doesn’t have to do with belief, or religion, or a
code of behavior, a way of life, or a language;
it seems more like a silence, a deficiency, a
question, a questioning, a dubiousness, an
uneasiness:
an uneasy certainty,
and looming behind that, another certainty,
abstract, oppressive, and intolerable:
that of having been labeled a
Jew, Jew therefore victim,
and so beholden for being alive to exile and luck

like near and distant cousins of mine
I might have been born
in Haifa, Baltimore, or Vancouver
I might have been Argentinean, Australian, English or
Swedish,
but in the almost unlimited range of
possibilities,
one thing was specifically denied me:
I could not be born in the country of my ancestors,
in Lubartow or Warsaw,
or grow up there, in the continuity of tradition,
language, and community.

In some way I’m
estranged from myself;
in some way I’m “different,” not different from
others but from “my own people”:
I don’t speak the language my parents spoke,
I share none of the memories they may have had,
something that was theirs and made them what they were
—their story, their culture, their hope—
was not handed down to me.

I don’t have the feeling that I’ve forgotten
but that I was never allowed to learn;
this is how my approach
differs from Robert Bober’s:
to him, being Jewish means continuing to reaffirm one’s
place in a tradition, a language, a culture, and
a community that neither centuries of diaspora
nor the systematic genocide of the “final
solution” succeeded in definitively crushing;

to him, being Jewish means inheriting and then passing on
an entire body of customs,
ways of eating, dancing, and singing, of
words, tastes, and habits,

and above all it’s the sense of sharing
these acts and rites with others, regardless of boundaries and
nationalities, and these shared things become roots,
it’s obvious how essential and fragile they
are. threatened as always by time and by
man.

fragments of memory and forgetfulness, gestures that are
rediscovered without ever having been learned, words that come
back, memories of lullabies,

photographs lovingly kept:
signs of belonging where he sinks
his roots in history, that enable him to fashion
his identity; that is, what makes him
both himself and identical with others.

It was to test the permanence of his traditions,
their durability, their tenacity, their resilience,
that Robert Bober came to Ellis Island,

as well as to retrieve, from traces left by the people
who passed through here and from the testimony we planned
to gather from them, the image of his mother’s grandfather,
who in 1900 left his village in Poland
to go to America but caught trachoma on the crossing
and was shipped back.

Perhaps the Jews, a people without a country,
condemned almost from their origins to exodus and
survival among cultures different from their own,
may have been more aware than others
of what was at stake for them;

but Ellis Island was never a place restricted to Jews

it belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty
have driven and still drive from the land where
they grew up

at a time when boat people still keep going from one island to
the next in search of ever more unlikely havens,
it might seem ludicrous or pointless
or sentimentally self-indulgent to want to recall these tales
from an already distant past

but in doing so, we were sure of having resoundingly evoked
the two words that lie at the very heart of this long venture:
two intangible, precarious, weak, fugitive words that keep
endlessly refracting each other’s wavering light and whose
names
are wandering and hope.

__________________________________

From Ellis Island by Georges Perec, translated by Harry Mathews with an afterword by Mónica de la Torre. Used with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 2021 by Georges Perec.