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religious Jewish immigrants refused, seeing this mark as the sign of the Christian cross. Instead, they used a circle, the word for which in Yiddish is kikel .
    By the time Nathan was asked to sign his entry paperwork, he was ready. He had learned his signature on the voyage over. Illiterate though he was, he was able to sign his name on his entry papers. In the present-day environment of endless bureaucratic red tape and Homeland Security checks, it seems inconceivable, but when Nathan officially entered the United States, official identity forms were not required.
    â€œI had my twenty-five dollars,” he said, citing the rumored amount that Ellis Island officials required new arrivals to possess in order not to be declared indigent (the equivalent of $585 today). “I also had a workbook. You couldn’t work in Galicia if you had no workbook. But no passport. I didn’t need it. They only take the signature when you come in. So I signed. No papers. They didn’t ask for anything.”
    Entering the United States that day, Nathan was two months shy of his twentieth birthday. He had reached his full adult height, a meager five feet three inches tall. He didn’t have the bulk necessary to describe him as a fireplug, but he had a pleasant, open, strong face and a hank of dark hair that hung over the right side of his forehead. The resemblance to a young Pablo Picasso was uncanny. Most important, and probably like Pablo, he had a look of determination in his eye.
    The healthy-as-a-horse Nathan survived the Ellis Island medical gauntlet unchalked. “I wasn’t afraid,” he said.
    He wasn’t alone, either. After he finished being processed, he descended from the Great Hall to the first floor to meet his brother Israel. Here was the age-old immigrant story, the one who came before paving the way for others. Nathan left Ellis the way he had come, returning to Manhattan with Israel in the same flat-bottomed ferry.
    His brother took him to a restaurant for his first meal in his new home. “He says, ‘Come with me, we’ll eat there; they’ll give you a good meal for ten cents.’” Afterward, Israel guided him to the tenement apartment of a Handwerker cousin, the son of his mother’s brother. “They have a cot bed in the kitchen, and they pulled it out for me to sleep, so I slept there for two nights.”
    It was the last day of Passover. Nathan had successfully completed an epic, life-changing passage. His guardian angels had “covered him up” the whole way. Millions of others accomplished similar journeys, to the degree that 40 percent of the people in the United States have an ancestor who passed through Ellis Island. Nathan took his place among a city teeming with immigrants, what was then a metropolis of five million people.
    Now, after a meal, after sleep, work.
    *   *   *
    The new arrival did not allow grass to grow under his feet. Nathan arrived in New York City on a Monday. Tuesday afternoon found him employed at his first job, working for a shoemaker’s at First Avenue and Ninth Street. Today, the neighborhood is part of the East Village, but in the early part of the last century, it was still within the precincts of the dense, flavorful, immigrant-heavy area known as the Lower East Side.
    Nathan had taken up Jacob’s profession, though the mundane details of the job were slightly different. “I was used to work with wooden nails, and here I have to work with stainless-steel nails. But I learned fast.”
    That small detail of wooden nails measures the gulf between Nathan’s former world in Galicia and his new one in Manhattan. In another sense, though, the new boss was the same as the old boss. The shoemaker’s trade was eminently familiar to him—the smell of leather, the cobbler’s crouch, the endless tap-tap-tap hammering. Had Nathan crossed an ocean simply to fall back into a timeworn routine of