Fictional 1905 Letter from an Immigrant I am sure that

I'm sure that nothing of the journey will surprise you. After we crossed over to Germany I was not surprised that there were sharpers trying to fleece us--I was only surprised that there were so many and that so many were Jews (Howe 36). It is so welcome to hear people speaking Yiddish that many people, apparently, trust these men with their money. They must, they claim, guide you here or there and they must buy your train tickets for you or you will surely be arrested--once your money is in their hands, of course, it's good-bye. In Berlin the authorities inspected us like livestock and everyone passed on by train to Hamburg. The crooks in that town make everything else look easy. Two or three men had their passage money stolen outright. Since I will send you your tickets this will make you much easier for a large part of the journey (Howe 39).

The inspection at Hamburg, however, went on and on and they kept us in a quarantine for a whole two weeks. The anxiety of all this waiting is enormous and you keep lo

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place a family of four if they have no relatives they can stay with (Simons 32-3). Luckily Jacob also knew a landsmann who lived a few doors away and had room for us since two of his boarders had moved on. There is a lot of mutual assistance going on here among those who come from the same locations and it is surprising how happy you are to hear of someone from the town when you never would have spoken to that person back there (Rose 3). The oddest thing is that anyone--educated or not--from the east is treated with the greatest scorn by the Jews who have been here much longer than us. They come mostly from Germany and take to calling us "kikes" and worse even before you have a chance to open your mouth (Simons 32). A lot of these big Jews own the factories and the workshops--or so they call them--are owned by people who have come over more recently. There are factories located in the area where people make every kind of clothing you can imagine. But mostly people sew or press clothes all day in the workshops--places crammed into the big apartment buildings where some energetic fellow and his family take in the work from the big companies and pay wages to the workers who put in their 10 or 12 or 14 hours each day, six days
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Yiddish Russian, Jews Howe, Rachel Simons, Sabbath Howe, Jews Germany, Dear York, Luckily Jacob, Ellis Island, Society HIAS, Houghton Mifflin, ghetto beyond, apartment buildings, hias help, send tickets,
Approximate Word count = 1617
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)