The Last Days of Ellis Island

by Gaëlle Josse, Natasha Lehrer (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature

“Josse powerfully evokes the spirit of the ‘huddled masses’ who landed on America’s shores while creating a memorable portrait of a man torn between his commitment to his difficult job and the longings of his heart. Duty and desire clash in the melancholy reminiscences of a former Ellis Island immigration officer.” —Kirkus, *Starred Review*

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 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.

“French novelist Josse’s melancholy English-language debut looks at the last few days in 1954 before Ellis Island was officially shuttered as a port of entry into the U.S. (…) Josse’s powerful work finds the human heart within a career bureaucrat.” —Publishers Weekly

“Gripping…The Last Days of Ellis Island is an absorbing novel in which beloved dreams are fast to shatter.” —Foreword Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642860719
Publisher:	World Editions
Publication date:	11/24/2020
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gaëlle Josse holds degrees in law, journalism, and clinical psychology. Formerly 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 Paris, 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 Paris, France. She writes features and book reviews for a variety of newspapers including The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, 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.

Read an Excerpt

Ellis Island, November 3, 1954, 10 o’clock this 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.

Editorial Reviews

Josse powerfully evokes the spirit of the ‘huddled masses’ who landed on America’s shores while creating a memorable portrait of a man torn between his commitment to his difficult job and the longings of his heart. Duty and desire clash in the melancholy reminiscences of a former Ellis Island immigration officer.” —Kirkus Reviews, *Starred Review*

“French novelist Josse’s melancholy English-language debut looks at the last few days in 1954 before Ellis Island was officially shuttered as a port of entry into the U.S. (…) Josse’s powerful work finds the human heart within a career bureaucrat.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hushed and haunted…Natasha Lehrer's translation, from the French, captures both a tragic poetry and the bureaucrat diarist's commitment to formality…Josse's portrait is pained and unsparing but always empathetic, both to the immigrants who suffered such horrors and to the merely human officials given power over them.” —Shelf Awareness

“In The Last Days of Ellis Island, Josse masterfully creates a detailed world from what has been excluded. ‘Insider’ and ‘outsider’ are reversed, and the mainland of America is distant, unknown…This writing, in the vein of unadulterated confession, is charged with urgency from its opening lines, questioning what truly makes a home—ultimately it is people, names, and relationships that crowd John’s memories. His—and Josse’s—stories of Ellis Island are complex and conflicted, beautifully capable of capturing simultaneously the varied spectrums of courage, suffering, and hope.” —Asymptote

“Gripping…The Last Days of Ellis Island is an absorbing novel in which beloved dreams are fast to shatter.” —Foreword Reviews

“A novel that resonates powerfully with the tragic fates of today’s migrants.” —France-Amérique

“Engaging…wistful and, at times, disturbing.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Josse’s portrait of a conflicted man weighing up his life’s joys and regrets is poignant and affecting, and a stark beauty shines out from its melancholy, sombre prose.” —The Herald Scotland

“There is a lot packed into this slim book…the language is lyrical and the translation never jars, though the lack of variation in sentence structure is a minor irritant. The courage of the migrants is brought alive through all the noise, dirt, fear and melancholy.” —Irish Independent

“I devoured this gem of a novel, which manages to perfectly capture both a singular moment in time and an entire universe of hope, longing and heartbreak. Brilliantly constructed and beautifully told, The Last Days of Ellis Island is a timeless—and timely—exploration of compassion and regret.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest

“Intimate, alluring and at times haunting, The Last Days of Ellis Island imagines the closing hours of Ellis Island’s existence as a gateway for the hopeful through the eyes of its last caretaker. Josse examines with care how life, no matter where you spend it, is a weave of wonderful moments and sad ones; moments we are insanely grateful for and moments we wish with everything within that we could take back. Eloquently and skillfully rendered.” —Susan Meissner, bestselling author of A Fall of Marigolds

“The Last Days of Ellis Island is a tragic story of a man who spends forty-five years working as an immigration official on Ellis island. Josse masterfully weaves this moving story of love and loss around the larger historical context of the massive wave of immigration arriving in the U.S. in the early 1900s. Beautifully written, The Last Days of Ellis Island is compelling historical fiction with a dash of magical realism added in.” —Vincent J. Cannato, author of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island

“The story is both historically and emotionally rich” —World Translations Review

“A novel that explores the nostalgia, loneliness, guilt, and conflicted patriotism of the (fictitious) last American who worked at the facility.” —New York Journal of Books

“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

“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 breathtakingly beautifully written, melancholy novel―a real gem.” —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

From the Publisher

★ 2020-09-02
A man looks back on his long tenure at America’s former entry point.

Already the winner of the European Union Prize for Literature after its publication in France, Josse’s slim novel contains the somber reflections, in diary form, of one man’s 45 years of service as a gatekeeper at what once was the door into the United States for millions of immigrants. John Mitchell, who began working for the Federal Immigration Service at Ellis Island as an immigration inspector and eventually rises to the position of commissioner, finds himself the only remaining employee at the deserted complex, but the ghosts of its many temporary inhabitants and his former colleagues remain intensely real. Nine days before its closure on Nov. 12, 1954, he sits down to record his memories—mostly painful and deeply regretful—of his long tenure. In spare, but at times poetic, prose, Mitchell describes his brief, almost impossibly happy marriage to his late wife, Liz, a nurse who also worked on the island. Mitchell is a man of orderly habits and obvious rectitude, but he’s haunted as he recalls the stories of several immigrants, all of them cases in which he’s guilty of serious, but totally human, lapses in judgment. The most troubling involves Nella, a beautiful young woman from Sardinia, who arrives with her younger brother, Paolo. After Paolo is marked for exclusion because of a mental deficiency, Mitchell allows his emotions to overcome his professional obligations in his relationship with Nella. When he permits, against his better judgment, another Italian immigrant with an anarchist past into the country, Mitchell overcompensates during the Red Scare of the 1920s by excluding a couple from Hungary with vaguely communist leanings. In the tale of this fictional bureaucrat, Josse powerfully evokes the spirit of the “huddled masses” who landed on America’s shores while creating a memorable portrait of a man torn between his commitment to his difficult job and the longings of his heart.

Duty and desire clash in the melancholy reminiscences of a former Ellis Island immigration officer.

Kirkus Reviews