In New York: Ellis Island Revisited

By Anastasia Toufexis

Sophie Wolf, 83, is a small, solid woman with curly white hair. She speaks softly but forcefully in faintly accented English. One day not long ago Sophie visited Ellis Island. The cold weather reminded her of the raw foggy day 57 years ago when she saw Ellis for the first time.

She was Sophie Steurer then, 25 years old, one of eleven children born to a German hatter and his wife. They had lived comfortably in Ebingen, about 40 miles south of Stuttgart. But the inflation and unemployment that ravaged Germany in the 1920s changed all that. By 1923 a loaf of bread cost up to 3 million marks. Sophie could find work only half a day a week --sewing men's shirts. Her friends sought jobs in The Netherlands and Spain. "But for me," Sophie recalls, "America was the thing." She was fortunate in having a sponsor: an uncle who ran a bakery in Madison, Ind. He paid for her steerage-class ticket and sent $25, the amount needed to prove to the U.S. that she would not become a public charge.

With only one suitcase, filled with clothing and favorite photographs, she set sail from Bremen on the steamship Munchen. "I had seen the Rhine, but this was the biggest puddle of water." The ship reached New York on Dec. 11, 1923. The spectacle of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline lavishly lit up at night seemed to be a sign of America's astounding wealth. "At home, lights were out after 9," says Sophie. Her overwhelming sensation was fear: "If you didn't pass the tests, they would send you back."

For a place once so feared, Ellis Island has a surprisingly welcoming air today, though most of its 35 buildings have badly deteriorated from decades of neglect and vandalism. It would take an estimated $150 million to save them all. "It sure looked better then," admits Sophie. The low-slung main building of warm red brick with limestone trim has large paned windows to let in air and light. Trees and lawns sweep to the gently lapping waters of the harbor. But at the time, immigrants like Sophie did not notice such things. They simply felt lost, especially in the great registry hall, where 5,000 immigrants a day were processed. A constant babble of incomprehensible tongues rose like flocks of starlings to the ceiling. Sophie did not speak English, but managed to comply with directions: "I just followed the pointing."

"It was so impersonal," she says.

"Bring the cattle in and ship them out." There was a rapid legal examination. In two minutes, inspectors aided by interpreters fired 29 questions at a newcomer. Among them: "Are you an anarchist?" And the trick question: "Do you have a job?" A few proud would-be citizens could truthfully answer "Yes." But a yes answer raised suspicion that the newcomer was a strikebreaker--or had been conned into a slave-labor agreement.

The medical examination began before immigrants were even aware of it. Doctors stationed in the hall simply observed the newcomers as they walked by. In six seconds, physicians checked off 15 diseases. They placed chalk marks on the lapels of those who needed closer scrutiny: H for heart, L for limp, X for mental defect. With still evident embarrassment, Sophie recalls a distressing moment when a nurse "put her hand under my skirt. She was checking for I don't know what, but she did it to everyone." Then a doctor dipped a buttonhook into an antiseptic solution and used it to flip back the eyelid. The reason: to check for trachoma, a blinding disease that would leave the immigrant an unwanted public charge. Trachoma was the most common medical reason for sending immigrants back to their native countries. (In fact, out of 12 million or so people who came to Ellis, most during the peak years of 1900-24, only 250,000 were turned away.) Sophie may have been the unwitting object of another American worry: that young single women would become prostitutes. So great was that concern that if a woman claimed she was engaged, immigration officials actually hunted up her fiance and saw to it that they were mar ried before relinquishing control over the newcomer. Authorities wired Sophie's un cle in Madison before letting her visit relatives in New York. The first days in Manhattan were overwhelming. Sophie had never seen subways, trolley cars, coal stoves, pineapples and mobs of people "so friendly you did not have to be afraid to talk even if you didn't speak English. In Europe we'd have made fun if you couldn't speak right. I thought, that's America." She looked askance at only one thing: "What got you as a European was the filth." She remembers a shiny red apple she wanted to buy. It cost only a penny. But she didn't want to break her uncle's $25.

On her way west, during a stopover in Cincinnati, she used pin money from relatives to buy her first machine-made piece of clothing, a short-sleeved dress in French blue. After three years, selling the bread, macaroons and cake in her uncle's bakery in Indiana, she saved enough for a trip east to visit her aunts. One night, dancing to the music of a German band in Manhattan's Yorkville section, she met Fritz Wolf, a baker from Baden who had also graduated from Ellis in 1923. They married, settled in Queens and had two sons, who now live in Los Angeles. One is in the refrigeration and air-conditioning business. The other served in the U.S. Army for 20 years. Sophie became a U.S. citizen in 1937. She has since voted in every election, federal, state and local.

She is proud of her sons and troubled about the new wave of Cuban, Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants. "We should not let anyone in," she says firmly. "When we came, the rules were you could not be a burden to the state. There were no schools where you could learn the language." Then she sighs, and adds: "But you've got to give people a chance. You can't send them back." As for herself, at 83, she is busy organizing outings for senior citizens and looking forward. Says Sophie: "You give up and you're dead, and I am not yet."

--By Anastasia Toufexis

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