Hushed and haunted, French poet Gaëlle Josse's slim novel The Last Days of Ellis Island finds an American immigration official looking back on half a century at the New York Harbor outpost where millions of residents of the Old World endured inspection and questioning as they entered the new one. In 1954, after the facilities have mostly shuttered, Josse's narrator looks back through diary entries at Ellis Island's peak years, when doctors allowed themselves about six seconds per individual when apprising the health of the throngs streaming off steamers. The diarist's tone is awed but melancholic, touched by having helped facilitate the huddled masses' final steps toward new lives but regretful at the institutional cruelty of the process, and gutted by a pair of personal romantic tragedies. He's a ghost-like figure, wandering an island he never leaves, reliving a long-gone past of heartbreak that for him never recedes. Natasha Lehrer's translation, from the French, captures both a tragic poetry and the bureaucrat diarist's commitment to formality.
The novel's key scene involves this official, who has always strived to stamp out corruption or abuse on Ellis Island, seizing an opportunity to take advantage of a beautiful refugee. Josse's portrait is pained and unsparing but always empathetic, both to the immigrants who suffered such horrors and to the merely human officials given power over them. Her diarist is shocked by what he has done, and readers will be, too--and nudged toward a greater understanding of why, in overwhelmed systems with little apparatus for accountability, such crimes remain inevitable. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor