The ranger (an immigrant himself, who came to America as a child with his Austrian Jewish parents fleeing the Holocaust) risks his job to save the shack when the park service wants to tear it down, and reaches out to a former professor of his at SF State who photographs every inch of the building and then starts taking Asian-American Studies faculty and students out on the ferry to look at the wall poems. The book is filled with snippets of these poems, some very beautiful and sad. It turns out to be a detention center where dejected detainees wrote poems and stories all over the walls. And I used to live in SF in the late '90s! I went hiking on Angel Island! I picnicked there! How did I have NO CLUE that immigrants even came THOUGH there? Was I a dimwit?Īnyway, the book starts in 1970, with a newly minted Park Ranger patrolling after the island's been closed to the public, finding a falling-down wooden shack just FILLED with Chinese graffiti (and also a smidge of Japanese, Korean, Russian, Punjabi, Spanish, German and English). This is a photographic history of immigration (mostly Chinese, but also Japanese and Jewish and other groups) through "the Ellis Island of the West." I had NO CLUE. And waaah, I somehow missed this book last year! (I'd thought it pubbed in 2014 but it's 2013 so i can't use it BOO HOO.) But let me gush here. I'm frantically reading for my annual Tablet best-Jewy-books Hanukah-gifting roundup.
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