Ellis Island

This highly personal work contains the reconstruction of the ghost of Ellis Island, hidden in the long history of European immigration to the United States. While exploring this small island, near the Statue of Liberty in New York, Perec conjures up the sixteen million people who at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came as foreigners to become Americans. Published for the first time in Spain, Ellis Island is a unique text, a hybrid with both poetic charge and strong symbolic value with which the author delves, with magician's precision, into the concepts of uprooting, survival and exile. The hopes and disappointments of those who left their country behind in search of a golden destiny acquire here, with the current anti-immigration policies, a sad topicality.