The Last Days of Ellis Island

September 15, 2020
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.

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September 28, 2020
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. The novel is structured as diary entries by fictional Ellis Island commissioner John Mitchell, who muses on his history as a gatekeeper, declaring, “I am the captain of a phantom ship that has been abandoned to its ghosts.” Two of these ghosts are the women who most affected his life. Mitchell’s wife, Liz, was a nurse on the island until her death in 1920 of typhus, brought in with immigrants on the ship Germania. Three years later, Mitchell falls deliriously in love with Nella Casarini, who arrives on the Cincinnati with her mentally disabled brother, Paolo, and then, days later, disappears from Mitchell’s life after Paolo commits suicide. Mitchell also recalls others who passed through the port, and remembers Augustus Sherman, a fellow official and amateur photographer, and one of only a few historical figures in the story. Lehrer’s translation is both limpid and lyrical, as Mitchell sees himself being put out to pasture. (“He must leave the pack, like an old animal moving away to die, while the herd continues on without him.”) Josse’s powerful work finds the human heart within a career bureaucrat.