Posted on by TracyC

An Ellis Island Christmas

An Ellis Island Christmas by Maxinne Rhea Leighton, illustrated by Dennis Nolan, 1992.

A six-year-old girl, Krysia Petrowski, knows that her family is preparing to leave Poland for the United States. Her father went ahead to America to establish a home for the rest of the family, and she knows that she, her mother, and her brothers will soon follow him. She doesn’t want to leave her home and her best friend, but her mother explains that life will be better in America because there is more food and there are no soldiers in the streets.

When the family begins packing to leave for America, they cannot bring everything with them because they have a long walk to get to the ship that will take them to America, and they can only bring what they can carry with them. The girl can only bring one of her two dolls with her, and she is sad at having to leave one behind.

When they board the ship, the conditions are cramped and cold. The food isn’t good, either. The voyage is rough and stormy, and many people are seasick. The one bright point is that Krysia meets another girl she knows from school, Zanya, so she knows that she won’t be going to America alone and friendless. Krysia and Zanya play together on the ship when the weather is better.

Finally, they reach Ellis Island on the day before Christmas. Everyone lines up, and the family has to show their papers to the immigration officials. Doctors look at them to make sure they are healthy enough to go ashore and into the city. Fortunately, they pass the health tests, although Krysia sees another woman who is told that she will have to go into the hospital or back to Poland because she is ill. The family converts their money to American money and buys some food. A man has to explain to them how to eat a banana because they’ve never seen one before.

Because it’s Christmas Eve, there is a big Christmas tree, covered with lights and toys. There is also a man dressed like Santa Claus, although Krysia thinks of him by the Polish name, Saint Mikolaj. They don’t receive any new presents, but Krysia’s mother does have a surprise for her. The best part is when Krysia’s father comes for them and takes them to their new home.

The book ends with a section explaining the history behind the story.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

The focus of this story is all on the feelings and experiences of the immigrant family, especially little Krysia. Krysia’s impressions of the journey and the arrival at Ellis Island are all a child’s impressions, and she often needs explanations of what’s happening and what’s going to happen next, which is helpful to child readers.

The historical context for the story is provided in the section of historical information at the end and in some hints during the course of the story. The section of historical information in the back of the book discusses the peak years of US immigration, from 1892 to 1924. They don’t say exactly what year this story takes place, but it mentions 48 stars on the American flag. That means that this is the early 20th century, after Arizona and New Mexico were admitted as states in 1912. During that time, 70% of US immigrants came through the immigration center on Ellis Island, just off the coast of New York City. Of those who arrived at Ellis Island, about a third stayed in New York, and the others spread out across the US. The family in the story seems to be going to stay in New York, but because the focus of the story is mainly on the journey, there are still few details provided about this family’s background and circumstances. The section of historical information also explains a little more about the traveling conditions of immigrants around that time and what typically happened at Ellis Island, so readers can understand how the experiences of the characters in the story fit into the experiences of other, real-life immigrants. (For more details, I recommend reading If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island and Immigrant Kids, nonfiction books which echo many of the details included in this book.)

There is some discussion in the section of historical information about the reasons why immigrants left their homes, and we told in the beginning of the story that there are shortages of food in Poland and soldiers everywhere, but there is more that I’d like to say about this. Because I like to add context to historical stories, I’d like to talk what was happening in early 20th century Poland and what’s behind the circumstances the characters describe. During the 19th century, parts of Poland were under the control of three different European empires: Russia, Prussia (a German state), and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (while later dissolved into Austria and Hungary). The oppressive control of these imperial powers accounts for the soldiers the family describes on the streets. There were Poles who resisted the control of these forces and wanted to reunify their country, so the soldiers were to keep the population under control and put down resistance. Around the turn of the 20th century, Polish territories were also suffering from unemployment and land shortages, which explains the food shortages the family experiences. Because of these conditions, there was massive immigration from Poland to the United States during the late 19th century and early 20th century. The Petrowski family in the story would have been on the tail end of this wave of immigration because circumstances changed for Poland after World War I (1914 to 1918), when Poland became an independent country again. Some Polish immigrants to the United States intended to stay only for a relatively short time, hoping to save up money and return to their homeland with the money to purchase land or improve their family’s circumstances, but many of these people remained in the United States anyway.

Because the main character, Krysia, is only six years old, she likely wouldn’t understand the full background of her family’s circumstances and the political causes of the hardships in her country, but I like to explain these things for the benefit of readers. I think it’s also interesting that this story is a Christmas story. We are never told what the religion of the characters is, although it seems that they are Christian because they care that it’s Christmas. Many people from Poland were Catholic, so it’s possible that this family was Catholic, too, but it’s never clarified.

If you read the short biographies of the author and illustrator of the story, the author reveals that the inspiration for the story was the story of her own family’s journey from Poland. The illustrator says that he went on a tour of Ellis Island to prepare for producing the illustrations, and he tried to capture the “awe and anticipation” of the immigrants and the high vaulted ceilings and views of the New York skyline through the windows. I’ve also been to Ellis Island, and the illustrations in the book brought back memories of my trip there. I thought that the illustrator did a good job of capturing how big, impressive, and bewildering the Ellis Island compound would be to a young child.

Posted on by TracyC

When Jessie Came Across the Sea

When Jessie Came Across the Sea by Amy Hest, illustrated by P. J. Lynch, 1997.

Jessie and her grandmother live in a small, thatched cottage in a small village. The little village is poor, and so are Jessie and her grandmother. Jessie’s parents died when she was a baby. Jessie’s grandmother raised her, and she insists that Jessie have lessons with the village rabbi, like the boys in the village. Jessie can read and write, and she also tries to teach her grandmother. Her grandmother makes a little money by sewing lace, and she teaches Jessie how to sew. Although they don’t have much, they are basically content with their lives.

Then, one evening, the rabbi makes an important announcement. His brother, who was living in America, has died. Before his death, he sent a ticket for a ship traveling to America to the rabbi, asking him to join him in America. Now that his brother is dead, there is no need for the rabbi to go to America, and he would rather stay in the village with his congregation. However, he thinks that someone else should use the ticket his brother sent.

Various villagers ask rabbi if they can use the ticket, offering reasons why each of them would be the best person to go. They brag up their best qualities, boasting about how strong, smart, and brave they are. The rabbi knows that they’re boasting, so he just tells them that he will pray about it and let them know his decision tomorrow.

The next day, he goes to see Jessie and her grandmother and tells them that Jessie should be the one to go to America. His reasoning is that his brother’s widow owns a dress shop in New York City. Jessie can work there, and she would be a comfort to a lonely widow. Jessie doesn’t really want to leave her grandmother, and her grandmother fears to send her, but her grandmother can see the rabbi’s logic. She knows that this is an important opportunity for Jessie.

So, Jessie leaves her village and sets sail on a crowded ship for America. On the ship, Jessie is scared, lonely, and seasick. As Jessie spends time with the other passengers, she makes a few friends, and she sews a few small items for them. A boy named Lou, who is a shoemaker’s son, makes a pair of small shoes for a baby, and he and Jessie also become friends.

Finally, their ship arrives at New York. Everyone crowds around the rails of the ship to see the Statue of Liberty and their first glimpse of America. The ship docks at Ellis Island, and the passengers disembark to be inspected and questioned by immigration officials.

The rabbi’s brother’s widow comes to meet Jessie. She is a friendly woman, and she asks Jessie to call her Cousin Kay. Cousin Kay shows Jessie around the city. It’s a crowded, confusing place with fascinating sights, although the streets aren’t paved with gold, as Jessie has heard. Cousin Kay runs the dress shop out of her home, and she pays Jessie to sew for her. Jessie likes watching the busy street outside while she sews, and she saves the money she earns in a jar.

When Jessie puts some lace on a plain white dress, turning it into a lovely bridal gown, the shop becomes popular with young women who are getting married and looking for similar gowns.

Cousin Kay also insists that Jessie go to school and learn English. It isn’t easy, but Jessie learns. She likes walking around the city and going to the local library. Gradually, Jessie begins feeling more at home in New York, and she builds a new life for herself there. One day, she runs into Lou again in the park, and they begin meeting there regularly. Lou proposes to Jessie, and Jessie uses the money she has saved to buy a ticket so her grandmother can come to America for their wedding.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I remember reading this book when I was young! I was really older than the target audience when it was first published, but I enjoyed the story. It’s one of those books that I think takes on more significance when you’re older and understand more of the history behind the story. We don’t know exactly where Jessie is from because the book never says, but her journey resembles the kind of journey that many people made during this same period of history. We don’t know the year, either, but it appears to be set in the late 19th century or early 20th century.

Although coming to a strange country, alone and unable to speak the language, is a scary experience, Jessie is fortunate because there is a friendly and caring person waiting there for her, and she has a job lined up that suits her skills. In real life, not everyone was so fortunate, and it was more of a struggle for them to get established in their new home. Jessie still has to struggle with homesickness and missing her grandmother, but her life changes for the better because she took the chance to go to a new country and start a new life. Readers can emphasize with Jessie’s fears and uncertainty as she starts out on her journey and celebrate with her when things work out for the best.

The pictures in the book are beautiful! Readers really get the sense that they’re seeing another time, with Jessie’s tiny village, the crowded ship in the rain, and busy New York City, more than 100 years ago. Even when the environment and circumstances are harsh, the pictures are charming.

There is a note in the beginning of the book for parents and teachers about how they can use this book to spark discussion with children. They can use the opportunity to invite children to learn how their own families arrived in America, because this book was originally intended for an audience of young American readers, and most people who live in the United States (with the exception of Native Americans) are descended from people who came from somewhere else. It’s an opportunity for children to learn their family’s history and to see how it compares with that of other people, whose families also made a decision to come here and start over, going through their own struggles along the way. There is also some general advice about sharing books with children, and making a point of surrounding children with books and reading aloud to them.

Posted on by TracyC

Kirsten’s Surprise

Kirsten, An American Girl

Kirsten’s Surprise by Janet Shaw, 1986.

It’s winter, and Kirsten’s family is just starting to prepare for Christmas. Kirsten’s mother has her help make their Christmas bread. So many things have changed for their family since they came to America and moved to the frontier in Minnesota, Kirsten asks her mother if they will be celebrating Christmas just like they used to when they lived in Sweden. The family doesn’t have much money and can’t afford extra treats, but her mother says they will do the best they can.

When they arrived last summer, the family didn’t even have enough money to pay for a wagon to carry their belongings to their new house, so they had to leave them in storage in Riverton, including Kirsten’s doll, Sari. Since then, Kirsten has been using a stuffed sock as a doll. Kirsten’s mother tells her that her father has arranged for their trunks to be sent to Maryville, which is closer, but still 10 miles away. Kirsten is eager to retrieve them, but her mother says that will have to wait because there are too many other things they need to do now to get ready for winter. Kirsten worries that they won’t be able to get their trunks before the snows come. If the roads are blocked by snow, they won’t have their trunks until spring! The more Kirsten thinks about the trunks, the more she wishes that they had the things in them, the things that would remind her of her home in Sweden and make their cabin feel more like home.

One day, while she is playing with her cousins, Lisbeth and Anna, Kirsten mentions St. Lucia, and she is surprised when her cousins don’t know what she is talking about. In Sweden, families traditionally celebrate St. Lucia’s Day before Christmas. However, Lisbeth and Anna were too young when they left Sweden, years before Kirsten left with her family, so they don’t remember that tradition, and since they came to America, they only remember celebrating Christmas in December. They ask Kirsten what happens on St. Lucia’s Day. Kirsten explains that it’s the shortest and darkest day of the year. One girl in the family dresses up as the Lucia queen, wearing a white dress and a wreath of candles on her head, and she wakes her family, bringing them a special breakfast with coffee and Lucia buns. Anna is enchanted by this description, and the girl talk about surprising their families with their own St. Lucia’s Day celebration.

Then, Kirsten remembers that the long, white nightgown she used for her St. Lucia’s Day dress last year is in one of her family’s trunks, and St. Lucia’s Day (December 13th) is only five days away. The other girls are about to give up on the idea of celebrating St. Lucia’s Day, but Kirsten thinks maybe they should ask Miss Winston if she knows what to do. Miss Winston is their schoolteacher, and she’s still living with Lisbeth and Anna’s families. Miss Winston has mentioned that she misses the Christmas parties her family and friends had back East, so the girls think that she might enjoy helping them plan a special surprise.

Miss Winston is happy to give the girls some candles and help them make St. Lucia crowns, but Kirsten’s father is still too busy to get the family’s trunks. He gets so annoyed with Kirsten asking about them that he tells her not to ask about them again. Lisbeth says that, if their plan won’t work out for this year, they can do it next year, but Kirsten feels badly for getting their hopes up. Her own hopes are also set on having a St. Lucia Day, but she doesn’t know what to do without the dress in the trunk.

Then, one day, she finally hears her father say that he will have time to go for the trunks, and he thinks he had better do it soon because there will be more snow coming. Kirsten is excited and asks if she can go along with him to get them. At first, he doesn’t want to take Kirsten because there won’t be much room in the sleigh for her, and he thinks it would be better for her to go to school with the other children, but she persuades him to let her come.

The journey to Maryville is fun, riding through the snow and singing a Christmas carol. Kirsten even gets a piece of candy at the general store. When they retrieve the trunks, Kirsten wants to open them right away, but her father says they need to leave because it’s already snowing harder, and they need to get home.

The weather gets worse on their way home, and Kirsten wonders if they should turn back, but her father thinks they can make it home. As it gets worse yet, Kirsten’s father gets out of the sleigh to lead the horse through the snow, and he accidentally twists his knee. With her father injured, Kirsten gets out the sleigh to lead the horse. The situation is dangerous, but fortunately, Kirsten realizes where they are, and she knows that there is a cave nearby where they can take shelter.

When Kirsten and her father arrive home, they are greeted by their worried family, and it’s St. Lucia Day. With some help from Miss Winston and her cousins, Kirsten is able to give her whole family their St. Lucia Day surprise, but it has even greater meaning because of everything they’ve been through.

There is a section of historical information in the back of the book about how Christmas was celebrated on the American frontier in the mid-19th century and how it was different from the Christmases families like Kirsten would have experienced in Sweden.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This was my favorite of the Kirsten books! Although there is some danger to Kirsten and her father when they get caught in the snowstorm after retrieving the trunks, everything turns out fine, and Kirsten saves her father because she insisted on going with him on the trip. This book is also fun because it introduces readers to the concept of St. Lucia’s Day. I think the first book I read as a kid that explained about St. Lucia’s Day was the nonfiction book Christmas Around the World, but I liked seeing this frontier family celebrate their St. Lucia tradition.

thought that Kirsten’s parents impatience with her “pestering” them about retrieving the family’s belongings was realistic, just like parents in real life might act when a child repeatedly asks for something they can’t give them right away. However, at the same time, Kirsten’s mother seems to understand that Kirsten is asking for the trunks for deeper emotional reasons. Not only does Kirsten badly miss her doll, which has been stored in one of the family’s trunks since the beginning of the series, but the other things in the trunk are both useful for the winter season and have connections to the people the family left behind in Sweden. With Christmas coming, Kirsten and other members in the family are missing those connections and the feeling of home. Kirsten’s mother points out that people are more important than belongings, but she also agrees with Kirsten that some belongings represent ties to other people.

Kirsten also misses the tradition of St. Lucia’s Day because that tradition usually marks the beginning of the Christmas season for the family. When Kirsten surprises her family by dressing in her St. Lucia costume, it’s a happy surprise for everyone and really makes everyone feel like Christmas. However, Kirsten also feels the significance of the holiday more than she ever did before because, having been welcomed home by the lights of their house and her waiting and worried family, she better appreciates the tradition of St. Lucia welcoming others with light and food.

As with other historical American Girls books, I also enjoyed the detailed colored pencil drawings of the characters and scenes!

Posted on by TracyC

Meet Kirsten

Kirsten, An American Girl

Meet Kirsten by Janet Beeler Shaw, 1986.

It’s the summer of 1854, and Kirsten Larson is traveling by ship to America from Sweden with her family. There have been storms during the voyage, and the sailing has been rough. It’s crowded on the ship, and people have been seasick. On board the ship, Kirsten makes friends with another girl her age, Marta. The two girls play with their dolls together and talk about the things they’ll do when they finally reach America. The reason why the Larsons are traveling to America is that Kirsten’s Uncle Olav is already there. He has established a farm in Minnesota, and he has married a widow with two daughters. He wrote to the Larsons and asked them to join him and his new family in Minnesota and help on the farm.

When their ship finally reaches America, it docks in New York. No one is allowed to leave the ship until the health inspector declares that they are healthy. Health inspectors will not allow anyone with a serious, contagious disease, like cholera or typhoid, to go ashore. When they are allowed ashore, Kirsten’s father finds an agent to help them change their money at a bank and buy train tickets for their trip west. The agent, who is also from Sweden, will even accompany the family to the Mississippi River as a guide. The family needs help because they can’t speak English yet.

When they go to buy food in New York, Kirsten is accidentally separated from her father and gets lost. Because she can’t speak English, nobody understands what she’s saying, so Kirsten can’t ask for directions. Kirsten is frightened, but a kind lady sees her distress and tries to ask her what’s wrong. Kirsten can’t tell her, but then, she realizes that she can draw a picture, so she draws a picture of a ship. The lady leads Kirsten back to the dock, and she manages to find the rest of her family in the nearby Battery Park.

The next day, Kirsten says goodbye to Marta because the Larsons are leaving the city before Marta’s family. Because Marta’s family is also going to Minnesota, they hope that they will meet again there or somewhere on the way.

Kirsten has never seen a train before, and her first ride on one is frightening at first. The trip lasts for days, but finally, they arrive in Chicago. There, they will meet up with other pioneers heading to the Mississippi River. At the boarding house in Chicago, Kirsten reunites with Marta, whose family will also be traveling with them!

The pioneer families take wagons to the Mississippi River, and then, they board a riverboat. Kirsten’s mother worries because, when they boarded the riverboat, she was sailors burying a passenger who died of cholera. (A disease caused by ingesting contaminated food and water.) Cholera is a serious risk, and her worries are justified. On their third day on the boat, Marta becomes ill with cholera and dies from it.

Kirsten is distressed at Marta’s sudden death, but fortunately, the Larsons all make it to Minnesota. All along, Kirsten has been struggling with homesickness and is still grieving the loss of the only friend she had in America, but she is cheered when she is greeted by her new cousins, Anna and Lisbeth. With her cousins as her new friends, Kirsten thinks that Minnesota might come to feel like home after all.

The book ends with a section of historical information about immigrant families, like Kirsten’s.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

Although I liked the American Girl books when I was a kid, I didn’t like the Kirsten books, partly because of Marta’s death. I don’t think any of the other American Girl books has a child death in the first book. In fact, I don’t even remember any other children dying in any of the series, unless it happens in one of the newer books I haven’t read yet. It is realistic for a child to die while traveling west. Diseases like cholera were a real-like risk to pioneers. I’ve visited places along the old Oregon Trail, and I’ve seen the graves of real pioneer children who died of disease. There’s also a doll at one of the local historical museums in my area that once belonged to a little girl who died on the trip west. I know that children died on the journey west in real life, but it’s still depressing to read about, which is what bothered me about the Kirsten books. For this reason, I don’t think I read all of the Kirsten books when I was a kid, or at least, I don’t remember much about most them.

Reading this book again as an adult, I found it easier to deal with Marta’s death. I knew it was coming, so there was no shock to me. Marta’s illness is only a small portion of the book, and Kirsten doesn’t see Marta dead. We do get a picture in the book of the riverboat sailors carrying Marta’s coffin away for burial.

I always appreciate the sections of historical information in the back of American Girl books. This one discusses immigrants, the reasons why they wanted to move to a new country, and the conditions they encountered during their journey.

Earlier, when I covered Rasmus and the Vagabond, I mentioned that the characters hide in an abandoned village, and Oscar tells Rasmus that the reason that the village is abandoned is because, years before, the people in the village all decided to emigrate to America together, specifically Minnesota (a popular destination for Scandinavian immigrants).  The Library of Congress has more information about Swedish immigrants and the major periods of immigration.  Around the time that Kirsten’s family emigrated to the United States, Sweden was suffering problems from overpopulation, lack of adequate tillable farm land, and famine. We don’t hear the Larsons describe any particular problems they had in Sweden or suffering. We are told that they had a farm in Sweden with a house with a maple tree near the door and a barn, but we don’t know if the family was suffering in spite of owning the farm. The important point is more that conditions in general were bad in Sweden, so the promise of rich farm land in Minnesota was attractive to them. The historical information included in the back of Meet Kirsten doesn’t cover this information about conditions in Sweden. Instead it focuses on what immigrant families might pack to bring with them on such a journey and what the traveling conditions would have been like.

Posted on by TracyC

An Early American Christmas

An Early American Christmas by Tomie dePaola, 1987.

A note at the beginning of the book explains the story behind the book, which is based on the history of early Colonial America. Although Christmas is now a popular American holiday with lavish celebrations, many early colonial groups didn’t celebrate Christmas much at all. Even among Christian groups, Christmas was not regarded as a major holiday. In particular, groups like the Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists tended to avoid celebrating Christmas, seeing it as a frivolous sort of celebration. However, there were other groups, like Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, who did celebrate the holiday in a festive fashion. The author of this book imagines what it would have been like for a family that celebrates Christmas if they moved to a New England community that didn’t during the early 1800s. In particular, he used New Hampshire as his inspiration.

The beginning of the story describes a New England town that doesn’t celebrate Christmas with decorations or songs. Then, a new family comes to the village. They were originally from Germany, and they had lived in Pennsylvania before coming to the village. (This would make them Pennsylvania Dutch.) They are usual because of their festive Christmas celebrations.

They begin planning for their Christmas celebration in the fall. The women and girls pick bayberries and use them to make candles. They say that bayberry candles bring good luck when they’re burned on Christmas.

The men and boys gather the crops that they will need for their feast. The grandfather of the family carves figures for their manger scene.

In December, the whole family makes paper decorations and specially-shaped cookies. I liked the variety of baked goods that they show in the pictures. They pick out a tree and make strings of popcorn and dried apples.

On Christmas Eve, they read the story of Jesus’s birth and decorate their home with all of the decorations they have prepared.

As the years go by and other people in town see what the Christmas Family is doing, they begin to celebrate Christmas, too.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Annie’s Promise

AnniesPromise

Annie’s Promise by Sonia Levitin, 1993.

This is the final book in the Journey to America Saga.  Annie, the youngest of the Platt girls, is more of a tomboy than her older sisters.  Her father thinks that she’s been growing up too wild in America, running around and climbing like a boy.  This summer, in 1945, while her best friend goes to visit their family’s farm in Wisconsin, Annie’s father wants her to stay home and help him with sewing for his coat business, and Annie’s mother has a list of chores for her to do.  It all sounds so boring and dreary.  Twelve-year-old Annie longs for excitement, but because of her recent appendix operation and her migraine headaches, her parents worry about her health.

Then, Annie gets the opportunity to attend summer camp.  She wants to go and do all the fun summer camp activities that other girls do, but her parents worry at first.  They worry about Annie’s health, and they don’t know who is running the camp or what they do there.  Annie’s older sisters, Ruth and Lisa, tell their parents that it’s normal for girls in America to go to summer camp and that the experience might do Annie some good.  When the family doctor says that Annie is healthy enough to go, her parents finally agree.

At first, camp is hard.  Annie faints soon after her arrival, and she worries that maybe her parents were right about her being delicate.  However, one of the counselors tells her that these things happen and that she was probably just overtired, overheated, and still suffering from the rough bus ride to the camp and that she will be fine after she rests.  Annie is physically fine, although one of the other campers, Nancy Rae, makes a big deal about the incident, calling Annie a “sickie” and other names.  Nancy Rae is a terrible bully, and Annie nearly drowns in the lake after accepting a dare from Nancy Rae to swim across it, in spite of not being a good swimmer.  Annie overhears the counselors saying that Nancy Rae should probably be sent home for goading Annie into a dangerous stunt, but they know that Nancy Rae comes from a bad home and that her father abuses her.  For her own sake, they decide to give her another chance.

However, even knowing Nancy Rae’s troubled history doesn’t help Annie when Nancy Rae keeps picking on her and a black girl named Tallahassee (Tally, for short).  Nancy Rae calls Tally and her younger brother (who is also at the camp) “nigger” and says that Annie is a “nigger-lover” when she tries to protect the younger brother from one of Nancy Rae’s tricks that could have really hurt him.  (Note: I’m not using the n-word here because I like it. I’m just quoting because I want you to see exactly how bad this gets.  Nancy Rae uses this word multiple times, and so do others when quoting her. This book is not for young children.  Readers should be old enough to understand this word and beyond the “monkey see, monkey do” kind of imitation some kids do when they learn about bad words.  The management assumes no responsibility if they aren’t.)  Nancy Rae is a thrill-seeker, who frequently does wild stunts to get attention and tries to make other girls hate Annie as much as she does.  At one point, she snoops through Annie’s things and tries to take her diary.  Eventually, she figures out that Annie is Jewish and makes fun of her for that, painfully reminding Annie of what it was like living in Nazi Germany and of her relatives, who died in the concentration camps.

Finally, Annie reaches the breaking point with Nancy Rae.  At a camp talent show, she arranges with other kids to dump horse manure on Nancy Rae’s head after she finishes singing a song.  Nancy Rae is so humiliated by the experience that she ends up leaving camp.  Annie is relieved that she is gone, but one of the camp counselors, Mary, makes her feel guilty about her revenge because she sees Annie as being stronger and more talented than Nancy Rae and wishes that she could have made Nancy Rae her friend instead, giving the bully a chance to improve herself.  (I disagree with what the counselor says, but I’ll explain more later why.)  Annie feels badly about how things turned out, but the incident blows over, and the rest of camp is a great adventure for her.

At camp, Annie mixes with different kinds of children from the ones she usually sees in her neighborhood and at school, and everything is a learning experience.  She becomes friends with Tally and gets a crush on a boy named John.  There is an ugly incident in which an assistant in the camp kitchen tries to molest Annie when he finds her alone (this really isn’t a book for kids), but the camp counselors dismiss him for what he did.  Annie and Tally talk about many things together, and Tally is very understanding.  The incidents with Nancy Rae and the kitchen assistant bring up the subjects of people who try to victimize others and how to deal with them.  Annie resents that people like that force others to be on their guard, limiting them in ways that they can behave in order to avoid being victimized, but Tally says that there’s no help for that.  As long as people like that exist, she says, protecting yourself is a necessity.  They also compare the way Annie feels when John gives her a little kiss to the repulsed and frightened way that she felt when the kitchen assistant tried to force himself on her.  Both incidents involved a kiss, but the way it was delivered and the person delivering it made each experience feel very different.  In the end, Annie’s crush on John turns into friendship rather than love as she realizes that the kiss was just a friendly gesture.  It is a little disappointing to her at first, but it is still a learning experience for her.

Annie learns that everyone at this camp has been through something bad in their lives.  Annie’s family are war refugees, but Tally’s father has been married three times, and she’s often the one to take care of the house and her younger brother, while her current stepmother cleans other people’s houses for money.  Other kids are poor or orphans or have fathers in jail.  The camp gives them a chance to get away from their problems for awhile, to make new friends, and to develop talents that they can be proud of.  Annie really blossoms at camp, learning to ride horses and work on the camp newspaper.  As Annie’s session at camp comes to an end, Mary offers Annie a position as a junior counselor for the final session of camp, helping the young children.  Annie is enthusiastic about the prospect, but family dramas at home threaten to derail her plans.  Ruth’s fiancé is shell-shocked from the war and has broken off their engagement.  Lisa is tired of arguing with their parents about every small piece of independence in her own life and has decided to move to a place of her own.  With all of this going on, and their parents upset about everything, what chance is there that they will sign the permission slip that Annie needs to become a junior counselor?

This book shows how much the lives of the girls in the Platt family have changed since they first left Germany for America.  It’s partly because they are living in a different country, partly because times and habits are changing everywhere, and partly because all of the girls are growing up and making decisions about what they really want to do with their lives.  The older girls in the family, Ruth and Lisa, are women now and thinking about careers and marriage.  As the girls suffer disappointments and changes of heart, their parents suffer along with them, and Annie realizes that she has to make up her own mind about what she really wants.  As Annie tries to decide what she really does want, her parents struggle to cope with all of the changes in their daughters’ lives and in the changing world around them.  They fight against it in a number of ways, and when things go wrong, whether it’s Annie’s illnesses or the older girls’ romantic problems, they tend to get angry or panic.  As the book goes on, it becomes more clear that what the parents really feel is helplessness.  More than anything, they’ve wanted life to be better for their daughters in their new country, and it upsets them when things don’t work out.  They want to help guide their daughters and make their futures work out for the best, but in the process, they often come across as too controlling or making the wrong decisions because they don’t fully understand the girls’ feelings or situations.

Ruth and Lisa each suffer romantic disappointment before they settle down.  Ruth had a fiancé, Peter, who went away to fight in World War II, but having seen the prisoners in the concentration camps, he has returned disillusioned and dispirited.  He was Jewish, but now comes to associate his religion and heritage with pain and suffering and wants to give it up, breaking off his engagement to Ruth in the process.  At first, Ruth is angry with him, saving that it’s like he wants to give up on his whole life, on the whole world.  The girls’ father says that he wants to kill Peter for leading his daughter on, but part of his feelings turn out to be his own feelings for somehow failing his daughter, that he is somehow to blame for allowing this disappointment.  When Lisa is upset because the young man that she’s been seeing says that he doesn’t want to get married, she argues with her parents about the course of her life and leaves home to live on her own.  Her parents see that as turning her back on their love and protection, but Lisa says that she just wants the independence that other girls have.  Even Annie feels abandoned by Lisa because Lisa was always there to comfort her as a sister and help her persuade their parents to listen to her, but Lisa says that she has to deal with problems on her own and that Annie will understand someday, when she’s in the same position.  Annie realizes that, in a way, she already is in the same position.

The one time that Tally comes to visit Annie at her house and the girls go to the beach together, Annie’s parents make a scene when she gets home because she’s left sewing all over the house and eaten more food than she should have.  Tally was going to apply for a sewing job with Annie’s father, which would have helped both of them, but Annie’s parents send her away, thinking that she’s a bad influence who encouraged Annie to goof off.  Then, Annie hears her own parents use the n-word.  It’s the final straw for Annie, and she runs away to camp.

The people at camp are glad to have her because they need her help, but being there, helping them, and thinking about her own life and future help Annie to realize what’s really important to her.  She’s been feeling bad about the hate she got from Nancy Rae and the hate that she felt from her parents with their insults to her friend.  However, her parents don’t really hate her, and in spite of what they’ve done, she doesn’t really hate them.  She realizes that, before she does anything more with the camp, she needs to go back and see them.

Annie rethinks what Nancy Rae was really about, how she was filled with hate for everyone, dealing out hatred because of all that she’d received from everyone else.  The counselors realized that she needed love more than anything, but Nancy Rae’s own hateful behavior pushed away the people who would have given her more positive attention and Annie’s revenge (although provoked) ended her camp experience.  Annie realizes that she doesn’t want to go down the same path and that she must mend her relationship with her family.

I said before that I disagreed with the counselor’s approach to the problem of Nancy Rae and what she said to Annie about her revenge.  I see what they were trying to do with giving Nancy Rae another chance, but what bothers me about it is that they act like Annie was in a much less vulnerable position to Nancy Rae and that she should have been strong enough to take what Nancy Rae dished out without hitting back, and I don’t think that’s true.  All of the kids at the camp were there because they had something troubling in their lives, some vulnerability, including Annie.  To say that Annie was more fortunate and more talented and that it should have been enough was to discount the harm that Nancy Rae was doing.  I know that the counselors were trying to make the camp experience positive for Nancy Rae, but she was making the camp experience more negative for everyone else around her and needed to be stopped.  Everyone suffers from something in life (as this book also demonstrates), but not everyone chooses to become a bully because of it.  Nancy Rae made that decision herself, within herself, and for herself alone.

Part of the problem, I think, was that there were no obvious consequences for Nancy Rae’s bad behavior, and therefore, she had no reason to stop doing what she was doing.  The lack of punishment and the inequity of the situation was what finally sent Annie over the edge with her.  Since the counselors didn’t make it obvious that Nancy Rae was in the wrong, Annie felt that she had to, and that says to me that there was a lack of responsibility and accountability.  I think that life is a balance and that both positive reinforcement (giving rewards to people who do good) and negative reinforcement (punishment for bad behavior) are necessary.  I believe in plain speaking, and if I were in the counselors’ position, I would make it plainly and specifically clear that no campers were to use the n-word, to mess with others’ belongings, or to do the other things that Nancy Rae was doing and that there would be consequences for doing so, telling them exactly what those consequences were so that no one could say that they were surprised.  I would also make it clear to Nancy Rae that I knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it and that it was unacceptable.  When we choose what we do and say in life, we all consider (or should consider) what we want to happen in life, and I would put it plainly to Nancy Rae how she really expects others to react to her and how their reactions would change if she did things differently.  Clearly, no one has ever told her that in her life before, and it was about time that she heard it from someone.  I suppose we could guess that the counselors may have said something of the sort to her out of hearing of the others, but I would also say the same thing to Nancy Rae’s victims.  Letting them know that I’d dealt with her adequately might head off their attempts to deal with her themselves and talking about what our behavior might lead others to do might also discourage revenge.

Also, the counselors were counting too much on the idea of friendship with Annie to get Nancy Rae to stop treating her badly, but that’s not at all the way that bullies work.  One of the primary reasons why people bully is that they know that there are a lot of people who like mean humor, and they use their bullying to bond with those people, not their victims.  Their friendships are formed on mutual contempt for the victim and the fun of humiliating that person.  They’re getting everything they want through their bullying, so there’s no reason for them to stop until someone else gives them consequences and puts an end to their bully support network.  I think that the counselors should have also talked to the people Nancy Rae was trying to bond with, explaining that they know what Nancy Rae is attempting to do and telling them that they would also be punished if they tried to help her, further cutting off one of Nancy Rae’s incentives to keep doing what she’s doing.

I’m not saying that it’s a perfect solution or that it would be guaranteed to work, just that I believe in being direct rather than letting things slide and just hoping that people will someday see the light.  Sometimes, people just need to have things spelled out for them in no uncertain terms.  If they chose to ignore what you say, then it’s on their own head, and they can’t say otherwise because you were clear and backed up your words exactly how you said you would.  I do think that the counselors were right that, in the long term, revenge never turns out well.  It often turns into a vicious cycle, as Annie later considers.  However, in this case, some proper handling in the first place, with consequences as well as words, might have headed off the situation before it got that far.

We don’t know what eventually happened to Nancy Rae by the end of the story, but I’m not sure that Annie is right to think that she wronged her.  In fact, she might have actually done her some good.  Sometimes, seeing others react badly to bad treatment can make a difference to someone’s future.  In my experience, people sometimes don’t realize that they’ve pushed another person too far until that other person finally reacts and says or does something.  Realizing that they’ve pushed someone too far can give them a reason to change because they realize that people won’t put up with their behavior forever.  Part of me thinks that maybe, at some point in the future, Nancy Rae might look back on this experience and quietly admit to herself that she had provoked it, being more careful the next time not to pick fights because she can be humiliated or excluded when people get fed up.  It might even help Nancy Rae to realize that she doesn’t have to put up with her father’s ill treatment forever because she also has the right to lose patience with bad treatment, too.  At least, I hope that this was a learning experience for her.

Annie realizes that both her parents and Nancy Rae are angry and hateful because of what they’ve suffered in their lives, but the problem is that both of them are taking it out on the wrong people.  Annie’s parents, at least, seem to realize that what they did was going too far and taking out their feelings on someone who didn’t deserve it.  By the time that Annie arrives home, they are also ready to make their peace with her and even support her return to the camp as a junior counselor, if that’s what she really wants to do.

The final days of World War II frame this story, beginning with the reports of Hitler’s death in the late spring of 1945 and ending with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender in August.  With the end of the war comes a new chapter in the lives of the Platt family.  They’ve been through a lot together, but in spite of the girls growing up, moving out, and arguing with their parents, they still are a family.  There are no more books in the series, but Annie explains that Lisa gives up the dream she once had of being a dancer because she doesn’t think that she’s star material and because she decides that what she really wants is to get married and have children of her own.  In the end, she and her boyfriend get married, and she is happy with her life.  Similarly, Ruth, who is now a nurse, meets a new love when she visits Annie at camp and later marries him.  Annie realizes that she has found what she loves most in teaching young children, taking care of animals, and writing, and these things will form the basis of what she does with her future life.

Posted on by TracyC

I Hate English

HateEnglish

I Hate English! by Ellen Levine, 1989.

When Mei Mei’s family moves from Hong Kong to New York, she finds herself forced to go to a school where no one else speaks Chinese.  She is expected to learn English and to read, write, and speak in English, and she hates it!  To her, English is a very strange language, and the writing system is nothing like Chinese.  For a time, Mei Mei refuses to speak in English, even when she understands what is being said around her, because she hates it so much.

HateEnglishArrival

The only part of New York that Mei Mei really likes is Chinatown and the Chinatown Learning Center.  Mei Mei likes it because she is surrounded by people speaking Chinese. There, she can relax and be herself because people there understand her.

HateEnglishLearningCenter

However, Mei Mei’s refusal to speak English isn’t helping her at school or anywhere else.  It’s keeping her from speaking to anyone outside of Chinatown, and it can’t continue.  When an English teacher, Nancy, comes to the Learning Center to help Mei Mei with her English, she resists learning at first.  She feels like she’ll lose her Chinese and part of her identity if she uses English.

HateEnglishNancy

At first, Mei Mei’s worries about speaking English intensify with Nancy’s lessons.  It disturbs her how English has words that would be difficult or impossible to translate into Chinese and English words seem to be coming more easily to her, even when she doesn’t really want to speak the language.  Nancy explains to Mei Mei that English is necessary for her because she will need it to talk to many people in America, and there are many people who also want to talk to Mei Mei and be her friend, including Nancy.  It’s only when Nancy overwhelms her by constantly talking in English and Mei Mei becomes desperate to talk about herself and be understood in English that Mei Mei realizes that speaking a new language doesn’t mean losing her identity.  It’s just another way of expressing herself, and she can go back and forth between the two any time she wants.

HateEnglishNancyTalking
HateEnglishMeiMei

Mei Mei’s feelings of strangeness in her new home and the difficulties of learning a new language are relatable.  The hardest part of the experience for Mei Mei is feeling like she might be giving up a part of her past, her culture, and herself by switching from Chinese to English.  But, refusing to speak English puts Mei Mei in the position of being someone who can only listen, never talk, limiting her ability to be understood and to make friends.  In the end, she comes to realize that speaking a new language is not a matter of giving up anything, just adding to what she knows and making herself understood in a new way.  It’s the beginning of expanding her horizons and building relationships with new people.

HateEnglishFriends

My favorite part as a kid was the part where Mei Mei and her friends went to the beach and cooked shellfish that they found.  It was interesting to me because I never lived near a beach when I was young.  The lifeguard at the beach tells Mei Mei and her friends that they can’t eat the shellfish, and they realize that he thinks that because he doesn’t know how to cook them.  I never did either and still don’t, but I liked hearing about it.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island

NameChangedEllisIsland

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island by Ellen Levine, 1993.

Like other books in this series, this book explains about a part of American history using a series of questions and answers.  Each section of the book starts with a different question about what it was like to come to America as an immigrant in the past and what happened when they reached Ellis Island, one of the main ports of entry into the United States around the turn of the 20th century, just off the coast of New York City, such as, “Would everyone in your family come together?”, “What did people bring with them?”, and “What did the legal inspectors do?”  Then, the book answers each of the questions.

The questions and answers start by describing what the journey to America was like from the late 1800s through the early 1900s.  Typically, families would come to the United States in stages: the father of a family (or perhaps one of the older children) would make the trip first, find a job in the United States and start saving money to prepare for rest of the family to come.  Depending on the family’s individual circumstances, it might be years before all the members completed the immigration process and reunited in America.

People traveled by ship in those days, and an often-forgotten part of their journey was even reaching the port the ship to America would be leaving from.  Depending on the starting point of the journey and the travel arrangements each family was able to make, getting to the port might involve crossing borders between other countries, adding another layer of legal difficulties to the journey.

There was also the knowledge that they might be turned away once they arrived at Ellis Island.  One of the chief concerns at the time was illness.  The inspectors at Ellis Island checked immigrants for signs of infectious diseases, and the ship companies knew that if their passengers were turned away because of the fear of disease, they would be required to pay for the return voyage themselves.  To help ensure that their passengers would not arrive with a disease, they would conduct their own health checks before the ship ever left port, looking for signs of illness, giving the passengers vaccines, and disinfecting things.  They were particularly afraid of passengers with lice because lice can spread typhus, which is deadly.  They would often cut the passengers’ hair or comb it very carefully.

The treatment passengers on ships received depended largely on their class of passage.  First and second-class passengers received the best rooms and the best food, and when they arrived in New York (assuming that was their destination), they didn’t even have to go to Ellis Island at all; the immigration inspectors would inspect first and second-class passengers on board the ship.  Only steerage passengers (“third class”, the cheapest possible method of travel, used by the poorest people, the largest group) would have to get off the ship for processing at Ellis Island.

EllisIslandComplex

The processing center at Ellis Island wasn’t just a building; it was an entire complex.  The Great Hall alone was large enough to contain hundreds of people at a time, and when it was full of immigrants there were so many languages being spoken at once (sometimes as many as 30 different languages) that some people described it as sounding like the Tower of Babel.  There were also dormitories that could house more than a thousand people, a hospital for the sick, a post office, banks where people could change their cash for American money, a restaurant to feed everyone (with two kitchens, one kosher and one regular), a railroad ticket office where immigrants who would be moving on from New York could make their travel arrangements, and much more.  Some people called Ellis Island the “Island of Tears” because the arrival there after a long journey was an emotional experience and many immigrants were worried that they might be sent back if they couldn’t answer the inspectors’ questions to their satisfaction.  At the end of the Great Hall, there was a large staircase that came to be known as the Staircase of Separation.  Everyone had to go down this staircase after their examination by the inspectors.  At the bottom, they would go their separate ways, depending on their travel plans or whether they had passed inspection.  People who turned to the right were heading to the railroad ticket office.  People turning to the left were heading to the Manhattan ferry.  People who went straight were heading to the detention rooms because they hadn’t passed the inspection.

EllisIslandStaircase

As I mentioned before, the inspectors were very concerned about people who showed signs of serious diseases.  One of the first things that would happen during inspection was a brief examination by the Ellis Island doctors.  Because of the massive amount of people who had to be processed, this examination lasted only a few minutes, during which the doctor would quickly check for very specific symptoms and signs of possible illness.  If they didn’t see anything obviously wrong, such as red eyes (possible sign of eye infection, although for some, it was just because they’d been crying), difficulty in breathing, or lice, they would let the people pass.  If the doctors thought that they saw something that might be sign of illness, they would write a letter in chalk on the person’s clothes and send them on to be examined more thoroughly by another doctor.  Getting one of these letters didn’t always mean rejection.  If the other doctor decided that the first doctor was mistaken or that the person’s symptoms weren’t serious, they would still be allowed into the country.  Sometimes, if a person was ill but had a curable disease, they would be kept in the hospital on Ellis Island until they were better.  If the doctors weren’t quite sure if a person was ill or not, they might keep the person in the dormitories for a few days and then check them again after they had a chance to rest.  The people who were sent back on the ship were ones who had diseases that were incurable or seriously contagious.  (It sounds heartless, but they were trying to head off deadly epidemics.  During the 1800s, large cities like New York sometimes suffered serious epidemics of deadly diseases because of the sudden influx of new people who were living in overly-crowded conditions with relatively poor sanitation.  By preventing people with signs of serious diseases from joining the rest of the population, they were hoping to head off new epidemics and save lives.)

One of the more controversial parts of the examination was when they tested people for possible mental problems.  They wanted to make sure that they were mentally fit enough to find work, but the problem was that the tests designed by people who didn’t take cultural differences into account when they designed them.  The parts where they asked people to do simple arithmetic problems or to demonstrate that they could read, count backwards, or match up sets of similar drawings were pretty straight-forward.  However, sometimes they were shown a picture and asked to describe what was happening in the picture, and the immigrants gave the inspectors some surprising interpretations because it turns out that some experiences aren’t quite as universal as some people think.  For example, one picture was of some children digging a hole with a dead rabbit lying nearby.  It was supposed to depict children burying a dead pet.  But, some people view rabbits more as food than pets, and some immigrants said that the children were doing their chores because why shouldn’t the children work in the garden (the digging) after hunting a rabbit for dinner?  Fiorello La Guardia, himself from an immigrant family, an interpreter on Ellis Island and later, mayor of New York, particularly despised tests like these because the people who designed them and administered them were trying to test the minds of others without any real idea about what their lives had been like or how their minds actually worked.

EllisIslandGreatHall

The inspectors’ examinations in general weren’t always reliable because they were often hurried (dealing with so many people in a limited amount of time) and because the interpreters weren’t always accurate, which brings us to the question of why people’s names were sometimes changed at Ellis Island.  Sometimes, it was intentional.  Some immigrants thought that they would be more likely to be accepted by the inspectors if they had short, easy-to-pronounce names, so they would purposely give them shorter versions of their names.  There was some basis for this belief because, if an inspector didn’t understand a long, unfamiliar name, they wouldn’t have much time to figure it out and so would either take their best guess at the what the name should be, shorten it when they wrote it down, or give up altogether and write a much shorter name instead.  For example, when they processed Jewish people from Russia, the inspectors often ran into difficulties in understanding their last names and would sometimes just write down “Cohen” or “Levine”, no matter what the original name really was.  Sometimes, name changes were just an honest mistake because the inspector didn’t know how a name was really spelled (I can speak from personal experience because my family’s last name wasn’t always spelled like it is now, and when they found out that it had been changed, it was just too much trouble to fix it) or because they had misinterpreted something that the immigrant said.  One of my favorite examples of this was a young man who tried to explain to the inspector that he was an orphan (“yosem” in Yiddish). The inspector dutifully wrote his last name as Josem.

EllisIslandPlayground

The pictures in the book are paintings based on original photographs of immigrants and Ellis Island.  (See Immigrant Kids to compare some of the pictures.)

The book also contains some further information about the lives of immigrants once they arrived in America (Immigrant Kids goes into a lot more detail), the attitudes of Americans toward immigrants at the time (varied but with strong strains of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, and general anti-immigrant attitudes during the 1800s), and the contributions of immigrants to American society.  I actually bought this book as a souvenir on a visit to Ellis Island years ago.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Immigrant Kids

ImmigrantKids

Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman, 1980.

ImmigrantKidsEllisIsland

One of the best parts about this book is the pictures.  The preface of the book specifically talks about photography at the turn of the 20th century, how cameras were still fairly new technology but growing in popularity.  Cameras that were small enough to be held in a person’s hands were an 1880s innovation, and the book mentions that small cameras like that were known as “detective cameras” because they were small enough that they could be used to take pictures without the subjects noticing.  Over time, it became easier for amateurs to learn to use cameras, and it became more common for people to take pictures of their ordinary, everyday lives.  Pictures like these open up a window on the past.  The pictures in this book are of children whose families had only recently arrived in America from countries around the world.  The photographer for many of these pictures was Jacob A. Riis, a journalist in New York City who wanted to document the living conditions of poor immigrants.  He published a book called How the Other Half Lives in 1890, in which you can see more of his work.  Other pictures in this book are by Lewis Hine, who is known for his photographs of child laborers.  They are not the only photographers whose work appears in this book, but they are the most famous.

The book is divided into sections, covering different aspects of the lives of immigrant children.  In the chapter called Coming Over, the author describes what the journey to America was like.  One of the primary motivations for people to come to America around the turn of the century was money and employment opportunities.  If a family had little money and little or no chance of getting better jobs in their home country, they would decide to try their luck somewhere else.  Because most of the immigrant families were poor, it was common for families to immigrate gradually.  Often, the father of the family would come first, find a job, start establishing a life and home for his family, and eventually send for his wife and children when he’d saved enough money.  The actual journey was by ship, often in “steerage,” the cheapest form of passage available, in cramped rooms in the ship’s hold.

ImmigrantKidsFamilyQuestions

Although the journey could be harrowing, one of the most nerve-wracking parts was the immigrant processing that took place at immigrant ports like Ellis Island.  There were routine questions that immigrants were expected to answer and exams for them to take, and if the questioners weren’t satisfied, the immigrants could be sent back to the country they came from.  Doctors would examine the immigrants to evaluate their health and look for signs of possible mental defects.  They were particularly concerned about signs of infectious diseases.  Sometimes, it was difficult for immigrants to answer all the questions because of language barriers and the immigrants’ own nerves at being interrogated.  If an immigrant seemed too agitated, the examiners would typically let them rest for a while before trying again.

ImmigrantKidsTenement

The other chapters in the book are At Home, At School, At Work, and At Play, which give more details about the lives of immigrant children as their families settled in America.  They often settled in large cities because those were where the most employment opportunities were to be found.  Because they didn’t speak much English and needed help learning how things worked in America, such as how to find jobs and places to live and how laws worked, they tended to settle in neighborhoods with others from similar backgrounds who could help them.  That is why, even to this day, there are certain areas of large cities, such as New York, Boston, or Chicago, which are known for people of a particular nationality (like the Irish neighborhood, the Jewish neighborhood, Chinatowns, etc.).  New arrivals often joined friends or relatives who had already been living in the US for a while, seeking help in getting themselves established.  These ethnic neighborhoods were located in poor parts of town because the people there didn’t have much money.  People lived in small, crowded apartments called tenements, sharing water and toilet facilities with other families because the apartments were not provided with individual facilities.  However, once these groups of immigrant families became established, they remained established for a long time, and they gave these neighborhoods their own distinctive style.

ImmigrantKidsSchool

School was often difficult for new arrivals because the children had to learn English before they could study other subjects.  There were some special English language learning classes for them at larger schools with enough demand for them.  At smaller schools which didn’t have these classes, they often had help from other children who had arrived in America earlier and could act as translators.  They were also frequently put into classes for children who were younger than they were, studying easy subjects, until they had learned enough English to move up to classes with children their own age.

Typically, immigrant children aimed to stay in school until they were fourteen years old because that was the age when they could officially get full-time work.  However, because their families were poor, the children might have to leave school early to find jobs and help their families make ends meet.  The book describes how rules were frequently bent or broken because the laws were not well-enforced, and children often worked at younger ages, even under harsh conditions.  For immigrant children, the most important education was that which taught practical, vocational skills that would help them find jobs quickly.  Some agencies, like the Children’s Aid Society (known for the Orphan Trains), would help them with vocational training.

ImmigrantKidsBaseball

However, immigrant children still like to play.  Boys and girls usually played separately.  Boys frequently played games like baseball in the street, or stickball, which was a variant that could be played in smaller spaces.  In stickball, the “bat” was a stick or the handle of an old broom, and the ball was rubber and allowed to bounce before it was hit.  Girls would play other games, like “potsy,” which was a version of hopscotch.

Because of the lessons they were taught in schools and because the immigrant children mixed with children outside of their immigrant groups in school, the children absorbed the local culture and became Americanized faster than their parents.  Many of them experienced the feelings of being torn between their parents’ traditions and wanting to fit in with society around them.

In each of the chapters in the book, there are anecdotes from people who had arrived in the US as children around the turn of the century, telling stories about different aspects of their lives.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.