Ellis Island

By Georges Perec and Robert Bober

Book Overview

Georges Perec, employing lyrical prose meditations, lists, and inventories, conjures up the sixteen million people who, between 1890 to 1954, arrived as foreigners and stayed on to become Americans. Perec (who by the age of nine was an orphan: his father was killed by a German bullet, and his mother perished in Auschwitz) is wide-awake to the elements of chance in immigration and survival: "To me Ellis Island is the ultimate place of exile. That is, the place where place is absent, the non-place, the nowhere. Ellis Island belongs to all those whom intolerance and poverty have driven and still drive from the land where they grew up." Ellis Island is a slender Perec masterwork, unique among his many singular works.

The acclaimed poet and scholar M?nica de la Torre contributes an afterword that keeps Perec's writing front and center while situating Ellis Island in the context of America's current fierce battles over immigration.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811229548
• ISBN13: 9780811229548
• Release Date: February 2021
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.1" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

avoid?

At four pages, eleven paragraphs (not incuding the introductory quote), thirty five sentences, and (sorry Georges) more words than I really wanted to count despite how cool it would have looked here, Ellis Island is a tome. It made me more intensely examine my own identity than all three hundred pages of What Color is Your Parachute even came close to doing. (Actually, I only read about four pages of that one too, but I could tell where it was going.) Ellis Island, however, was a complete surprise. The bit about what it means to be a Jew and the fact that that aspect of his identity is more concretely definied by its abscence than its presence, is profound. I mean, other people have said it, certainly, but this is, without a doubt, the clearest presentation I have encountered. I think it's particularly telling that he should set these musings in America, at Ellis Island. We, as Americans, particularly as white Americans, have a watered down and dissapated culture defined not by who we are, what we love, how we live etc., but what, ultimately, we are not. This small work was a four-page invitation to examine my relation to my roots, my country, and my culture. Ugh. I loved it.