In the current issue of READ, we have excerpted a few Ellis Island interviews. This week we have posted the full text of these interviews. Enjoy this finale. And God Bless America.
IRELAND
Emanuel “Manny” Steen
Born June 23, 1906
Emigrated 1925, Age 19
Passage on the Caronia, Cunard Line
Born in Dublin, one of eight children, he came to America with a twenty-dollar bill tucked in his shoe. His story is a classic. He became a successful manager of electronic stores in Manhattan during the advent of the radio. He is still married to Mary, his wife of sixty-nine years. They married in 1928. Proud parents and grandparents, they live in River Edge, New Jersey, “very grateful for what they have.”
My parents were married in Glasgow. They weren’t Scottish people, but they were married in Scotland in 1894, and they lived there. My father came to Glasgow from London. And before London he came from Turkey. He had escaped from the Cossacks in 1891 during a pogrom in the Ukraine, in a village near Odessa. His parents and most of his family were massacred. My father and his kid brother escaped. They hid out and they took a ferryboat to Constantinople. They worked there for a short while, got a job aboard a merchant vessel as seamen, jumped ship in London, which was typical of the time. A few years later, they got to Glasgow. My father was about nineteen, twenty. His kid brother was about fifteen, sixteen, and they got work in Glasgow. My father lived in a boardinghouse. That’s where my father met my mother and fell in love with her. I wasn’t around yet. But three of the children were born there.
My mother had a separate adventure. She and her parents were from a village near Warsaw, Poland. In the 1880s, refugees from Poland and from eastern Europe walked across Europe to the port of Hamburg and immigrated to, they hoped, America. What did happen was there were sea captains with boats totally unseaworthy. They promised to take the refugees, supposedly for twenty dollars, to America. You had to provide your own food and bedding. They supplied water and toilet facilities. So they crowded these horrible little vessels in the port of Hamburg and set sail for, ostensibly, the United States. Once they got out in the harbor everybody got seasick. They couldn’t care less where they were. These captains of these illegitimate boats dumped a load of refugees on the east coast of Scotland during the night in a little seaport. They just dumped them and they said, “This is America,” and they took off. The people didn’t know any different. They couldn’t speak any English, and here were these peculiar-looking men in kilts. They had never seen anything like it. I mean, men wearing skirts. They thought they were in America.
The Scottish government was very nice. They permitted these people to stay. My mother’s family was one of the families that were dumped there, and the Scottish government agreed to permit them to stay, provided they did not become an economic burden to the government. They agreed to be self-supporting. There’s a big Jewish settlement in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and finally, they made their way to Glasgow, which was an industrialized city. And they rented a huge apartment, and her family lived in two rooms and rented out the others. This was typical there. But also in the United States, in New York, down on the Lower East Side. That’s the way they made a living. When my father and his kid brother went to Glasgow, they went to the Jewish section. They got a room to stay in and there my father met my mother.
After a few years, after three children were born, a depression set in Glasgow, which was a big shipbuilding port. So my father took a ferry from Glasgow to Dublin. And as soon as he saved a few dollars, he got an apartment and he brought the family over, and the other five children were born in Dublin.
In those days you took a job at anything, as I did when I came to America. I mean, I worked for twenty-five cents an hour when I came to America. Anything. It didn’t make any difference. I have my father’s marriage application and he was twenty-four at the time and it said his occupation was “aerated bottle washer.” He cleaned seltzer bottles. My mother is listed as twenty-one and a seamstress, whatever that meant.
From that apartment in Dublin, we moved to a house when I was about six, which is what I remember. All the children then were born by midwives at home. The midwives wore a shawl and a bonnet and carried a black bag. Children were not born in hospitals. That was only for very wealthy people. We were five boys and three girls, and I remember waking up one morning and all the boys were chased out of the house, and my mother was screaming and crying, and here I’m on the sidewalk in front of the house. It was a residential, working-class neighborhood in the south part of Dublin, called South Circular Road. And I was terrified. I mean, my mother never cried. But she was in childbirth and I didn’t know that. And then my sister’s shouted, “Come on in and see your baby brother.”
The house was part of a row of narrow, adjoining red-brick cottages. In front was a small garden and fence. The house was one floor with two front rooms, a parlor, and a dining room. Then the kitchen and four bedrooms. There was a long, narrow backyard, and behind that backyard, and alley lane, where everything was delivered, such as coal for the winter. The coal would be brought up the lane and dumped in our backyard.
But remember, we were eight kids. My father and mother was ten. My bachelor uncle was eleven and my grandmother, my mother’s mother from Glasgow lived with us. Twelve people! My grandfather died in Glasgow. I never knew him. The boys slept four in a bed, toe to toe. The girls slept three to a bed. It was rather crowded, but it didn’t feel that way because everyone was in the same situation.
There was one tap, running water if you wanted to take a bath. But there was no toilet, just an outdoor john. And each room, of course, had a potty. My job as number seven in the family was to empty the potties. I remember that because it was a terrible job. The youngest one always got the dirty job, you understand. There was no central heating. Each room had a tiny fireplace and an hour before we went to bed, one of us would light the fireplace in each bedroom with a few pieces of coal. We were poor people, not dirt poor. There are different levels of poverty as I see it now. We were poor, but we ate.
My first recollection of my father, he was working in a sweatshop as a tailor making about six dollars a week. I used to walk three or four miles and bring him his supper in a tin can. My mother would make a soup in the bottom layer and the one on top would be a little meat or potatoes. He worked from sunup to sundown, I mean twelve-, thirteen hour days. And he would stop and eat his supper, and I would take the can back home.
My mother used to cook herrings. The Irish were great herring eaters, both fresh and salt herrings. It’s really funny when you think about it because salt herrings you associate with Jewish people, but no. The herrings were salted and pickled so that they would keep. Salt herring on potatoes was a very typical Irish dish, because it was cheap. You could feed a family on it until your belly was full, so that took care of your needs.
About two miles away, in an area of Dublin called Clanbrassil Street, was the Jewish section: a Jewish butcher, shoemaker, draper, bakery, etc. And I used to go there on Friday. The entrails of a cow were considered garbage food for cats and dogs. Humans did not eat the liver, the heart, lungs, and all that stuff. My mother was too embarrassed to ask, so I used to go in. She said, “Tell him you want two pennies’ worth of meat for the cat and the dog.” God forbid you said humans. We were going to eat this stuff. I’d go in there and the butcher would take a big knife and cut off maybe half a liver, throw in a heart, a couple of lungs, and she’d say, “Don’t forget to ask for a couple of soup bones.” That was it. The butcher would put it all in a newspaper and I’d have an armful of stuff for about two pennies, three pennies. And my mother would make a kidney stew. Boy, we fed the whole family for two or three days on that.
My Uncle Jack contributed to the family. He worked. I don’t know where. I don’t know what. You didn’t ask. He was just there, you know. He loved the kids. I remember sitting on his lap, and he would tell us stories. He always wore a shirt and a tie, neat as a pin, and had a derby hat. A real character. To this day I don’t know anything about him. He was just part of us.
The community was Orthodox Jewish. Very religious. Not many people realize this, but there is such a thing as an Irish Jew. It was a small Jewish population, and everybody went to synagogue. The synagogue near us was jammed every Saturday. There was another one on Clanbrassil Street in the Primary Jewish quarter, the main synagogue in Dublin, a beautiful structure called Englisher Synagogue. It was very high-class. On Saturdays, the big shots wore fancy suits, and tall hats like Prince Albert, we called them. In our temple people wore working-class suits. I was bar mitzvahed there.
When World War I broke out, it was 1914. Ireland was neutral and the British government was short of metals. Another uncle of ours, who lived in the neighborhood, had gone into what they called the waste trade business, which included scrap metal. He had a contract with the British government which needed scrap metal for ammunitions. So he approached my father, that it would be better than working in the sweatshop. My uncle taught him the business. In Ireland Gypsies were called tinkers and my father opened a shop and bought scrap metal from the tinkers.
But what happened was the 1916 revolution broke out and there was holy hell. I remember it very well because I remember hearing all of the shooting. Around the corner from our house were British military barracks, the Wellington Barracks. I remember the name. I used to play with the soldiers and the tanks in the barracks. The rebels took the general post office and a couple of the main hotels. I remember my mother went out to the back-yard to get a bucket of coal and some sniper took a pot-shot at her. Next morning we found a bullet hole in one of the windows. After that, we moved from Dublin to the town of Sligo, in northwest Ireland, right on the border of Donegal.
Shortly after we moved, my mother died of kidney disease. That was 1917. I remember when they came to take her away in a horse-drawn ambulance. Soon after my grandmother died.
I went to a Catholic seminary in Sligo called Somerhill College, as a day student. We were the only Jewish family that ever lived in that part of Ireland. I enjoyed life very much there. It was lovely, wild country. I was there until 1919. The war was over. My father’s contract with the government stopped and he came back a man of means. Because of the war, he had done very well. We came back to Dublin. He bought a small factory that made trousers and walking britches, with about ten workers, and bought a duplex apartment right in the heart of Dublin. The family remained intact, ten of us now.
We had about eight bedrooms. We had the second and third floors in the apartment house. It was a big place. My father bought it completely furnished. Downstairs were two stories, a greengrocer and iron monger, or hardware store. The people who previously lived there were going to America so my father bought the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel. And behind the apartment building was the rear entrance to the factory.
I was entering college, Saint Andrew’s College in Dublin. I was fourteen. But the college system was different there. You didn’t have to graduate high school to go to college. You could start college at six years of age and go right through. I was studying pre-med. That was the ultimate direction.
I went there and in 1921, my father died in an accident. He was eating at a friend’s house, and they were joking and kibitzing, and he choked on a piece of meat. By the time the horse-drawn ambulance came, he was gone. I remember the day. It was a Saturday, and I was home doing my homework when the police came, and it was a terrible shock.
My uncle Jack assumed command of the family, so to speak, and he said. “We can’t go on.” My father had lived it up and, after he died, we discovered that there weren’t any reserves and I had to stop college. So I took a crash course in wireless telegraphy. I had to have a trade. I took the Postmaster General examination from London and passed. Now I had a certificate as a wireless telegraph operator, Morse code.
So my uncle says, “The economy is nothing, we’re all going to America. That’s all there is to it. You’ll apply for a passport and a visa …” Which I did. We had no money. Ireland was going through a terrible state. By 1921 civil war had broke out, and it was awful. There were street ambushes and killings and murders. Unemployment was rife. So he thought coming to America would be the panacea.
In the meantime, my brother Lou, who was a year and a half older than me, had gone to America the year before. He was a wild one. He was a nice chap, but he just didn’t behave. He [had] a wanderlust. He had Gypsy blood in him, so to speak. My father was still alive then, and [Lou] said to me, “Listen, don’t tell Pop, but I’m running away.” So he ran away with the Gypsies, the tinkers, and he traveled Ireland and finally wound up in New York.
While we were waiting for our Visas, we paid of our tickets in installments. But we didn’t go all at once. The same year after Lou went to New York, my brother Henry went. Then my sister and my kid brother came. Then in 1924, another sister, Eva, and two more brothers. Finally, in 1925, I came with my sister Bertha. Everybody was already here, but they were scattered. It wasn’t a unified family. My brother Lou was now a cowboy in Wyoming or something; one of my sisters married some chap fro London and moved there, etc.
I was nineteen. I had no ties and looked forward to America as an adventure. My brother Lou was writing, telling me all about the wonderful things he was doing as a cowboy and how he was with Barnum and Bailey’s Circus as an equestrian. I knew so little about America. For me, America was cowboys and Indians and streets paved with gold… I only had the good news, you understand. What I did know was poverty wages were big wages for Ireland. I remember this bank manager in Dublin was getting like twenty dollars a week, and that was considered great. In America, you said, “I raise my boy to be president.” In Ireland you said, “I raise my boy to be [a] bank manager,” because that’s the highest you could realistically hope for.
I bought a secondhand cardboard suitcase for two dollars, which I later donated to the Ellis Island Museum. All I had was a suit of clothes, an extra handkerchief, and a pair of socks. I also had my stamp collection in there, a crummy little collection of stamps, and a few family souvenirs. I didn’t fill the suitcase. We were required to have twenty dollars to show financial independence. Would you believe it? When I came through Ellis Island I had twenty dollars. I had it in my shoe so I shouldn’t lose it or, God forbid, lose it gambling on the ship.
I left from the port of Liverpool with my sister Bertha. We had cousins in Liverpool, so we stayed overnight with them and boarded the Caronia the next day. The ship was jammed. We came third class. It was four bunk beds in a cabin. Two up and two down with a tiny washbasin. Toilet was down the hall, a shower, and they served three meals a day. The men and women were separate. My sister was with some other women in their cabin.
It was the first time I had ever been on a ship that size, know what I mean? There were no amenities, none. But you could hear the second-and first-class passengers having a great time up there. But we didn’t care, I mean, it was ten days. A ten day ride. I was a good sailor, so I had no trouble. But a lot of people were sick. As a matter of fact, I came down one day for breakfast—nobody. The whole dining room was me.
The food was very plain. You didn’t have a choice. They gave you a menu but you didn’t have a choice. You just ate what was on the menu, and it was all right. I mean, as far as I was concerned it was very exotic because after my mother died my sister Bertha did the cooking, and she was probably the word’s worst cook, you know what I mean? She was a great gal, but she was a terrible cook, and so this stuff tasted great to me, you know.
I arrived in New York Harbor August 1. It was a Wednesday, Wednesday morning. I remember about six o’clock I heard the lookout say, “Land ahoy!” Everybody rushed up on deck to see land, the first sign of America. I remember rushing up. I couldn’t see a … thing. I mean the horizon was the sea. Then, as we sailed closer, New York slowly emerged, as though it were coming out of the sea. And the first thing I saw was the Woolworth building. That was the tallest building in the world at the time. So the first thing you saw sticking out of the water was the top of the Woolworth building. And as we proceeded, of course, the building came out of the water. [Laughs.]
Everybody was cheering, “America!” My God, everybody was yelling and crying and kissing, and who could remember? There must have been two thousand people on the ship. You weren’t aware that this was a historical moment, but it was. As we came in, of course, Manhattan Island started coming up, and the Statue of Liberty was. I mean, there it was. I didn’t understand too much about it. I knew about it in vague terms.
The boat anchored mid-harbor, and then they tendered us from the ship to Ellis Island by the hundreds, suitcases in hand. The ferry had to go back and forth a few times, and we landed. Of course, the wharf and the whole area there was not like it is now. There was no grass or nothing. The main building was grimy on the outside. We got right off the ferry and went right into the main building. That day there must have been three, four ships. Maybe five, six thousand people. Jammed! And remember, it was August. Hot as a pistol and I’m wearing my long johns and a heavy Irish tweed suit. Got my overcoat on my arm. It was the beginning of fall back home, see. And I’m carrying my suitcase. I’m dying of the heat. During the day that hall became so hot and all they had was a couple of rotating fans, which did nothing except raise the dust. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Immigration officials slammed a tag on you with your name, address, country of origin, etc. Everybody was tagged. They didn’t ask you whether you spoke English or not. They took your papers, and they tagged you. They checked your bag. Then they pushed you and they’d point, because they didn’t know whether you spoke English or not. Understaffed. Overcrowded. Jammed. And the place was the noisiest, and the languages, and the smell. Foul, you know what I mean? But I was nineteen. You can stand a lot at nineteen. Then we had to go through the physical. I think, frankly, the worst memory I have of Ellis Island was the physical because the doctors were seated at a long table full of potassium chloride, and you had to stand in front f them, and they’d ask you to reveal yourself. Right there in front of everyone, I mean, it wasn’t private! You were standing there. And the women had to open their blouse. This was terrible.
I had to open my trousers and fly, and they checked me for venereal disease or hernia or whatever they were looking for. I was a young buck. I was in good shape, you know, but just the same I felt this was very demeaning, even then. I mean, it’s terrible with women, young girls, and everyone, you know. And we had to line up in front of them…Years later I just thought they didn’t have to d it that way. But this was the height of immigration. We were coming in by the thousands. And again, you’re not aware this is historic, and this is something you’re going to tell your grandchildren about…
Afterwards, we had customs immigration and we had to show our financial security of twenty dollars. I didn’t realize until sometime later, but what happened was a lot of guys on the ship were gambling. Some of the guys lost their twenty dollars. But there was a little racket there, you see. There was a wire fence and you had to go through the customs officers there. Now in order to go through, you had to show your twenty dollars. But a little further back on the fence there were a couple of guys making money. They would loan you the twenty dollars. Cost you two bucks, follow me? And they would loan you a twenty dollar bill, and you’d go to the gate and come through the gate, and the guy would be there to take the twenty dollar bill back from you. Cost you two bucks. For two bucks you could show twenty. Whether the guy was splitting it with the guard I don’t know.
I almost died of thirst. Couldn’t find the fountains. Cold hardly find the restrooms…Finally, Bertha and I got through, and my brother Henry was supposed to claim us. Our claimant. You had to claimed by a responsible person. But Henry didn’t show up, so we’re waiting. They wouldn’t let us on the ferry until we were claimed, and it’s four o’clock and the island closed at five and the staff went home. So they shipped us over to the depot on the other side of the island, the ferry building, and we were held in a group pen for unclaimed, but okayed immigrants. I don’t know how many because you’re concerned about yourself. You couldn’t be less interested. Bertha and I were wondering what the hell we were going to do. We didn’t have Henry’s phone number. We didn’t know where he lived. Are they going to send us back?
Now it’s five o’clock, and they’re closing up. So I explained all this to the guard who called up HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. The idea was we would be turned over to HIAS, who would be responsible for us. About fifteen minutes later this little short, chap came in, and the funniest thing is, knowing we were Jewish, he insisted upon talking Yiddish. We didn’t speak Yiddish. We spoke English, a little Gaelic, but I did understand German from some college courses I took.
So we got along and he took us by the ferry to Battery Park, and we started walking to HIAS headquarters on Lafayette Street. Bertha and I were dying. It’s hot. We’ve had nothing to eat, just a little water, and we’re getting a little weak, and he’s in a hurry because it’s pushing seven o’clock, and this is a chore, and he wants to get home, follow me, follow me.
He takes us to the subway. I had never seen a subway. We knew there were such things as underground trains, and we go down the steps to the noise, the flashing lights. In those days there was no air conditioning. They had little fans in the trains. And I remember sitting in the subway car with my suitcase ad Bertha, and this guy who paid no attention to us whatsoever, and we’re dripping! I must have lost ten pounds that day. And those days I was only about 130 pounds.
It was just one or two stops and we got off. It was one floor up. We could barely climb the stairs. And we came to the HIAS office, and he took off. There was a woman there. “Will sassem?” she asked. Do you want to eat? And she took us into the dining room with long wooden tables, nothing fancy, and brought out a big bowl of cold soup, a milky substance, with some green things floating in it. “Bertha,” I said, “what do you think this is?” “I don’t know, eat!” It turned out to be spinach soup. I’d never seen it before, but it was cold and it was wet and it was delicious, and she brought in a big pile of fresh pumpernickel and a big pile of butter and, Jesus, we ate everything.
When we got through, Henry comes in the door. I hadn’t seen him in four years. He had gone to the island, traced us back. “Where were you?” I asked. The boss wouldn’t let him off. Henry was a tailor. The boss said, “You want off? Don’t come back.”
We took the subway to a three-room apartment on the 118th Street and Third Avenue in East Harlem. In 1925, East Harlem was a mixture of Italian and Jewish. About fifty-fifty. No blacks. And it was a very friendly neighborhood. Everybody ore or less knew each other. As soon as we arrived, Henry said to me, “Get those long johns off and throw the goddamned things out. They stink like hell,” and he loaned me a pair of BVDs Oh, boy! It was like getting out of jail.
He had an icebox, I had never seen one, with a big chunk of ice in there. That was a tremendous novelty. And a modern cooker, and a bathroom with a shower. This was the height of luxury, you know what I mean?
Next morning, I’m up bright and early. It’s like seven o’clock and Henry is up, too, and getting ready.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I gotta go to work.”
“What will I do?”
“Today you take off,” he says. “Tomorrow you get a job.”
“All right.” He’s the older brother so he’s the boss. I was accustomed to accepting authority, see. So I said, “What’ll I do?”
“Take a trolley car and go downtown. Take a look around.”
“What’s a trolley car?”
“Tram. That’s what they call them over here. Trolley cars.”
“How much it costs?” because in Ireland we had a zone system. You go from one zone to the next, you pay so much for each zone. “No, there’s no zone,” he said. “One fare all the way.”
“How much?” You know, I had never seen a nickel. I didn’t know what he was talking about. So he goes in his pocket and he takes out a coin, a five-cent piece.
“That’s a nickel.”
“Why do they call it a nickel?”
“Figure it out. I gotta go to work,” and he took out another one. “See this one here, the little one. That’s called a dime.”
“Why?”
“Look, I can’t stand here all day arguing with you. That’s five cents. This is a dime. Two of those nickels make one dime, see? You go downtown. It will cost you a nickel, follow me? But remember, only pay one nickel each way.”
Then he hands me a quarter, the big shot. Not the most generous act he ever did in his life. He was a tight bugger. Anyway, he says, “That’s a quarter. That’s a quarter of a dollar. Twenty-five cents.” So anyway, now I had twenty-five, ten cents, and a nickel and he said, “Go downtown and take a look.”
So I go to the corner, and the trolley cars were open trolley cars. And it’s bright, sunny. The trolley car stopped, and I got on, and I sat down, and the conductor, he had a big, leather pouch, and he came over. The conductors on the Third Avenue trolley were all Irish immigrants. And he says, “What are you doing, young fella?” And I, at that time, spoke with a brogue. And I says, “Just taking a ride downtown.”
“Is it Irish you are?”
“Aye,” I says.
“When did you get here?”
“Yesterday. I just got off the boat!”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” he says, “I wouldn’t have charged you the nickel.” He sat down beside me, and there was nobody else. It was about ten o’clock and he’s pointing, giving me a free tour all the way down Third Avenue. He’s pointing out the buildings, the Singer building, and I was fascinated. Hey, America is a great place. I’m here one day and this guy is giving me a royal reception.
I got off at City Hall Park where the trolley terminated. I saw City Hall. I was feeling very adventurous. Here it’s a beautiful day, and I’m wearing thin underwear, and I’m beginning to feel comfortable now, and I walked across the park, and I looked up and there’s street sign. It says, “Broadway.” Well, I want to tell you, that was one of the most exciting moments of my life. Broadway! I’m only one day in American and I’m on Broadway! I mean, it may sound like nothing to you, but I got so excited. It’s a wonder I wasn’t killed, because the traffic was going in all directions, and I was so confused, watching to the left, to the right.
I started walking down Broadway to the Woolworth building. What an exciting experience to see the bloody building. When I looked up, it was a funny thing, the building looked like it was teetering forward, you know what I mean? Of course, it wasn’t falling, but I had a feeling of hallucination that the building was going to fall down so I kept going to Battery Park, where I had come across from Ellis Island the day before. “How do you like that?” I thought. “One day in America and I’m right back here where I started from.”
Fantastic! I walked across the park and sat down on a bench and nobody was bothering me. No one could identify me as a foreigner, you know, and everybody’s acting like I’m a full-blooded American.
There was a guy with a pushcart selling hotdogs. Now I knew about hot dogs from watching American movies in Dublin. I knew that the people ate this thing here. They didn’t have hot dogs in Ireland. They had sausages. But it was only five cents, so I figured I would speculate. I asked for a frankfurter and he gave me a frank and he wanted to put all this stuff on it. “No, no, no,’ I said. And the people there were buying. They were scooping mustard on it, and I was accustomed to English mustard, like Coleman’s mustard, that’ll burn your guts off. So I said, “How can these people eat with all that mustard on there?”
I didn’t have anything on it. I ate it and it tasted nice. It was garlicky, you know, and it had a nice taste. And there I was eating my hot dog and taking the world in with my eyes and I thought, “I got it made,” you know. I walked further and I saw a guy selling ice cream sandwiches. Nickel a sandwich. I speculated once more, and I had a ball. It was a great feeling. Absolutely.
I felt like I had the world on a string. I mean, this was my day, see what I mean? Well, I figured I had to remember how to get back And I was trying to remember different marks of identification to make sure I got on the proper trolley car. I finally got back to East Harlem, and it was late afternoon when I got back, and my brother came home, and I told him about my day. He thought it was dull and dumb, but it wasn’t to me. It was one of the most exciting days. And that was my first day in America.
