Famous Nathan Read Online Free PDF

American shoreline might very well have been a spray of white light on the horizon. The illuminated wonders of Coney Island’s amusement parks could be seen from thirty miles out at sea and were often the first glimpse of the New World for immigrants nearing the end of their exhausting transatlantic journeys.
    Neckar arrived in New York Harbor on April 7, 1912, an Easter Sunday, the sixth day of Passover that year. Manhattan was not yet a crowded forest of skyscrapers, but for an immigrant from the countryside of Poland, the view was still impressive. Dominating the New York skyline was the ornate, still-under-construction Woolworth Building—at 792 feet, the tallest structure in the world.
    The weather on the day of Nathan’s arrival, according to newspaper reports, was “charming,” the warmest Easter it had been in forty-two years. President Taft played his first game of golf of the season that weekend. Oarsmen were out on the Harlem River. The holiday crowds “filled Fifth Avenue with color.”
    Nathan saw none of it. U.S. immigration authorities allowed first- and second-class passengers to disembark when the boat docked that Sunday at a West Side pier. Third-class passengers like Nathan were made to wait until the next day, when they would be ferried to the immigration facility on Ellis Island. Later that afternoon, with the SS Neckar still docked and Nathan still on board, the weather turned nasty. What was termed in the press to be “a mini-hurricane” or “a gale” rocked New York Harbor.
    Back in Europe, war clouds had continued to build. Russian armies mobilized. Serbian troops laid plans for an autumn offensive that would carve up huge tracts of the Balkans for annexation. War was fast becoming modernized, with the first aerial bombing (of Turkish troops by an Italian dirigible) accomplished that March. The next month in Moscow, the first issue of the underground organ of the Communist Party, Pravda, was distributed, only to be immediately confiscated and burned by Tsarist police.
    That was the world from which Nathan Handwerker had escaped. He had gotten out just in time. As James Joyce said about his hero Stephen Dedalus (writing during the same period as Nathan’s miraculous journey), history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Now at last Nathan had done so. He had arrived in America, the land of his dreams.
    His difficulties began almost immediately.

 
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    Luncheonette Man

    â€œAll you have to say is, ‘All hot—get ’em while they’re hot!’” Nathan, age twenty, far right.
    THE FERRY RIDE from Manhattan’s West Side docks to Ellis Island represented a last ordeal in an immigrant journey packed full of such trials. Immigration authorities transferred steerage passengers—so-called because their cramped quarters were often in the ship’s stern, where the steering mechanism for the old sailing ships had once been located—to ferries a few hundred at a time. The ferry fleet was made up of small, flat-bottomed crafts designed to be able to negotiate the shallow waters around Ellis.
    Facilities on the boats were few and crude. After transatlantic voyages that had lasted three weeks, passenger hygiene failed to maintain a high standard. Ship captains crammed the Ellis ferries full and then idled for hours offshore, waiting for processing backlogs to ease on the island. The decks were crowded. Immigrants often bulked themselves up by wearing their whole wardrobes in layers. Memoirs and oral histories repeatedly cite the stench and misery of the three-mile trip across the harbor.
    Although the weather that Monday of Nathan’s transit had turned cold, his memory of his trip to Ellis Island was tinged with fondness for the bounty of the new country: “The first nickel I spent on the boat that took me to Ellis Island, I bought a pie for a nickel. A whole pie. And I don’t remember what to