The gates of November Read Online Free PDF Page B

no intention of joining the army of Russia. Instead he fled, crossing the border on foot into Russian Poland. It is not known if he had somehow obtained the necessary passport from local officials or if he crossed illegally; the only document it is certain he had with him was his school diploma. Carrying few clothes and very little money, he made his way across Poland into Germany, somehow avoiding the numerous control points along Germany’s eastern border. For a while he worked at odd jobs, fixing this, lugging that, accumulating the necessary thirty dollars—about one hundred rubles, a great deal of money in those days—for his travel ticket and the additional thirty dollars he would need to show the American immigration officials at Ellis Island in order to be admitted into the country.
    In Hamburg he obtained a United States visa from the consular office and boarded a ship that sailed to England and America. He traveled steerage class in one of the three enclosed lower decks of the ship with more than a thousand other passengers, in a crowded room that was about seven feet high and extended the entire breadth of the ship and to about one-third its length. The air was unutterably foul, reeking of dirty bodies, tobacco, garlic, disinfectants, and the stench of the nearby toilet rooms; the floor slippery with the vomit of the seasick.
    One sailed in steerage—so named because it was originally located near the rudder—to the noise of the stirring screws, the roll and thud of waves, the staccato of hawsers, and the trembling of steel railings. At times, when the weather grew calm, there might be cardplaying and even music and dancing on the decks, but nearly always the journey, lasting about ten days, was a hell that some thought cleansed them of sins and prepared them as if newly born for the land of Columbus.
    At the end of that dreadful voyage, as the ship made its way through the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, Solomon Slepak gazed spellbound at the Statue of Liberty, utterly mesmerized by the sight of the tip of Manhattan Island. And when the ship docked at one of the piers on the New York shore, he watched as those who had sailed in first and second class disembarked and entered customs directly to have their papers and baggage checked; then he and all the others who had traveled in steerage, save American citizens, left by walking down a gangplank at the stern and assembled on the pier in groups of thirty. From there they were loaded onto barges, together with their baggage, for the brief journey across the water to the red buildings on Ellis Island.
    In 1913, the year Solomon Slepak arrived in the United States, nearly nine hundred thousand immigrants came through Ellis Island. The immigration procedures on the island were a fearful experience. Faces in photographs reveal the fright in immigrant hearts.
    Solomon passed through the preliminary medical inspection in the second-floor registry room—no hernia, no TB, no heart ailments, no mental defects—and then stood on numerous lines and sat on clean wooden benches and went through further examinations: the genitalia for venereal disease, the skin for a “loathsome or dangerous contagious disease.” Light streamed into the vast room from tall side windows, and the air was fresh. One doctor examined his scalp, another his fingernails; a third painfully probed his eyes. He was asked his age, his destination. Was he an anarchist, a polygamist, had he ever been in prison, who had paid his passage, could he read and write, did he have a job waiting for him? To the last question he replied that he did not have a job, and displayed his school diploma to verify his employability and usefulness to America. An interpreter translated his responses to the examiners and the immigration inspector. To the inspectors final query, “Do you have thirty dollars? If less, how much?” he responded by showing the equivalent of thirty dollars in foreign money he had