{"id":61624,"date":"2020-01-18T00:06:42","date_gmt":"2020-01-18T00:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/?p=61624"},"modified":"2020-01-20T07:16:22","modified_gmt":"2020-01-20T07:16:22","slug":"my-own-private-wikipedia-ellis-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/my-own-private-wikipedia-ellis-island\/","title":{"rendered":"my own private wikipedia: ellis island"},"content":{"rendered":"

[I believe that anything can be cut to 300 words.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Of the two highly symbolic pieces of land in New York harbor, the more obvious icon is the Statue of Liberty; the lady embodies every immigrant\u2019s dream of America. But I\u2019ll take Ellis Island\u2014that\u2019s an icon with its feet in reality. Almost half the people now living in America can trace their ancestry to the 12 million men and women and children who entered the country there. mainly between 1892 and 1924. \u201cIt\u2019s their Plymouth Rock,\u201d says M. Ann Belkov, superintendent of the National Park Service\u2019s Immigration Museum, which occupies the distinctive red brick building, now handsomely restored, where the immigrants were processed. \u201cTourists who come here are walking in their families\u2019 footsteps,\u201d Belkov told me. \u201cThree of my four grandparents first stepped on land in the U.S.A. in this building.\u201d
\nUnlike most museums, which preserve the dead past, Ellis Island feels almost alive, or at least within reach of living memory. People we all know made history\u2013American history and their own history\u2013in the vast Registry Room, where as many as 5,000 newcomers a day were examined by officials and doctors and were served meals that contained strange and wonderful foods. Many had never seen a banana. \u201cThe white bread was like cake already,\u201d says one old man who came from Russia, his voice typical of the many oral recollections that animate the building, along with exhibits displaying the much-loved possessions that the immigrants brought from their own culture: clothes and linens and embroidery, ornaments and religious objects and musical instruments.
\nStrong faces stare out of innumerable photographs: men and women from every cranny of the world. The captions quote them eloquently on the poverty and persecution that impelled them to leave (\u201calways there was the police\u201d) and on the unbelievable freedoms that awaited them here. One of them says, \u201cIt was as if God\u2019s great promise had been fulfilled.\u201d<\/p>\n

stem: william zinsser
\ntitel: the 300-word challenge, on writing short essays
\nbron: the writer who stayed
\nperspectief: Is there anything more about Ellis Island that an ordinary reader needs to know? The first paragraph is packed with necessary facts about the site: its setting and historical importance. It also contains an ideal summarizing metaphor (\u201cIt was their Plymouth Rock\u201d) and a tremendous fact about American possibility: in two generations the granddaughter of three of those immigrants had become superintendent of the place where they \u201cfirst stepped on land in the U.S.A.\u201d The second paragraph fills the long-empty buildings with people\u2013old-world men and women marveling at white bread and bananas\u2014and with the belongings they couldn\u2019t bear to leave behind. The final paragraph tells what kind of people they were\u2013what they looked and sounded like. It also explains why they left the oppression at home to seek a new life in America. The language is highly compressed. Facts are crammed into one sentence that I would normally spread over three or four sentences, adding rhythm and grace and some agreeable details. But nothing fundamental has been lost; the grammar and the syntax are intact. My only preparation was to arrange an interview with Ellis Island\u2019s superintendent; places are only places until they are given meaning by the people who look after them. I just spent a day walking around the site, taking as many notes as I would for a 5,000-word article. Nonfiction writers should always gather far more material than they will use, never knowing which morsel will later exactly serve their needs.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[I believe that anything can be cut to 300 words.] Of the two highly symbolic pieces of land in New York harbor, the more obvious icon is the Statue of Liberty; the lady embodies every immigrant\u2019s dream of America. But I\u2019ll take Ellis Island\u2014that\u2019s an icon with its feet in reality. Almost half the peopleRead more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2007,974,122],"tags":[3517,3516,3518,3515,3187,3046,2950],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61624"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61759,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61624\/revisions\/61759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.imhd.nl\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}