Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Joe Nocera reflects on his Italian ancestors and the poem that lies on the pedestal of our Statue of Liberty.
My grandfather, Lorenzo Nocera, immigrated to America in 1904 from a small town south of Naples, Italy. Like most European immigrants in the early part of the last century, he came through Ellis Island. He was 16 years old. Three years later, Carmela Tartaglia also arrived on a ship that docked at Ellis Island. Another 45 years later, she became my grandmother.
What was Ellis Island like when my grandparents were herded through it? It consisted, writes Daniel Okrent in The Guarded Gate, his great book about immigration in the early twentieth century, of “27 acres of inspection centers, detention areas, and hospitals. Built to process 5,000 people a day, at times it had to handle twice that number. Many of them were exhausted and frightened, most of them impoverished.”
Ellis Island was a harsh entry to the U.S. But a stone’s throw away, on Liberty Island, stood the Statue of Liberty, which even then told these weary immigrants, with no idea what the future held, that America was a country that welcomed them with open arms.
In 1903, the year before Lorenzo arrived, a plaque was attached to the statue’s pedestal on which a short, 14-line sonnet was inscribed. Its title is “The New Colossus,” and it imagines that the Statue of Liberty—“a mighty woman with a torch”—is speaking directly to the immigrants as they are processed at Ellis Island, all of them desperately praying for a better life than the one they had in the Old World. Listen to how it closes:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
As the grandchild of Lorenzo and Carmela, I’ve thought about those lines often during the course of my life.
