Ellis Island by Georges Perec

Author:Georges Perec
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229555
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:01+00:00

Afterword

There he is, Georges Perec on site, in one of the immigration center’s old buildings, during the 1978 filming of Récits d’Ellis Island (he wrote the narration that is the book now in your hands). We see him at a borrowed writing table, on his visit with the director Robert Bober and his crew to Ellis Island, that port of entry into “the land of the free” — at least, at first sight, to the weary eyes of the emigrants arriving on its shores, fleeing poverty, war, and persecution.

Ellis Island’s spell as an immigration center was relatively brief, lasting only thirty-two years, from 1892 to 1924, after which — until its closure in 1954 — it served only as a detention center, as Perec reminds us. Yet it looms large in the collective imagination of a nation that has long prided itself on having been built by immigrants. It figures too in the family histories of those who were barred entry to the US and were deported back to Europe or elsewhere, which was the case for Bober’s Polish great-grandfather, who, inspected on arrival at the island, had tested positive for trachoma, a contagious bacterial eye infection that can lead to blindness and for which there was then no effective cure. Along with other infectious cases — as well as criminals, anarchists and those deemed physically or mentally deficient (and therefore considered liable to become a public charge) — he was put on a steamship back to the Old World and never set foot in the US.

Bober, when he learned that parts of Ellis Island had opened to the public in 1976, wanted to retrace his great-grandfather’s failed voyage and also interview Jewish subjects who had made it through the Golden Door and found a home in New York City. In Georges Perec: A Life in Words, David Bellos recounts that Bober, when inviting Perec to collaborate on the film, had to approach him multiple times. Perec was not drawn to nostalgia, or to the prospect of delving into Jewish themes. The buildings on Ellis Island, however, had sat abandoned for decades and their ruins did pique his interest.

Although annexed by Lyndon B. Johnson to the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965, Ellis Island was never restored or developed. Its buildings remained vacant and prey to looters for another decade. A 1968 New York Times article described it as a “seedy ghost town,” its buildings full of what Perec and Bober found there a decade later: “old bedframes and mattresses stacked in disuse. Tables, benches, and chairs lie about haphazardly. The floors of side rooms are strewn with broken ceiling plaster. . . .” Except for vandals, no one visited but “pigeons and insects and sometimes Mr. Pingree Crawford,” the national park ranger assigned to it.

“It was the idea of making a film about dereliction that finally swayed Perec’s mind,” Bellos writes. In June of 1978, only a few weeks after finishing his mammoth, 500-page Oulipian masterpiece Life: A

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