Immigrants repel us.
No matter how open-minded we are, watching 3600 foreign-type people walking slowly across countries towards our border, to defy our rules for immigration, to cut the line of thousands of hopeful immigrants who are waiting their legal turn to emigrate to the USA, those in the illegal parade hoping to take refuge here, to live off our hard work, watching their progress towards our borders, makes us want to stop them cold; with extra force as punishment.

Immigrants are dirty, shabby, ignorant.

And they look so much like the first immigrants that crossed over from Russia through Alaska, finally making their way into the western part of North America.
Where they turned their backs on western Europeans who immigrated here following Columbus’ reveal.
These immigrants not speaking the “Native” American language; bringing disease.

We ensconced Americans talk the talk.

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Tagging Today
Sunday, October 28, 2018
My 201st consecutive posting.
Time is 12.01pm
Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 60* and the rainstorm will break up.

Dinner is leftover duck with Ravioli bought at Monica’s Pasta Shop on Richmond St in the North End of Boston.
It’s very good.

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Quiz Question of the Day:
Who was Emma Lazarus?

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Short Takes
Some shots of fall in the Public Garden.
Palette reduced to green and brown; a little yellow.
Crowds thinning, too

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Love your notes.
Contact me @ domcapossela@hotmail.com 

Sally Chetwynd sent a quick thought re: cramping legs:

Hi, Dom, 

I think it was Phillip’s chiropractor who recommended a half-cup of club soda every night before bed for leg cramps. That has helped Phillip a lot.  A glass of milk before bedtime can be helpful, too, because the calcium in it relaxes muscles. 

Sally

Web Meister Responds:  Thanks, Sally.

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Hints to Question of Day
Who was Emma Lazarus.

Left:
Movie:
Nuovomondo, literally "new world" (English world-wide title Golden Door), is a 2006 drama film based on a family's migration from Italy to New York City, U.S.A. at the beginning of the 20th century.
The film, written and directed by Emanuele Crialese, opens on location in Sicily and concludes in the United States.
(The Ellis Island sequences were shot at a studio in Rome and in Buenos Aires, Argentina.)
Vincent Schiavelli, whose character was originally planned to play a major part, died during the filming, forcing his role to become a supporting character.

The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, 2006 to critical praise and seven nominations (with six wins) at the festival.
Many praised the director's focus on sound and visual composition.
Others focused on the lack of typical iconography of the time (such as the Statue of Liberty).
Martin Scorsese was involved in the marketing, and introduced the film at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

The first major segment of the film introduces the poor Mancuso family (headed by the widowed Salvatore, Vincenzo Amato), from Sicily, Italy, at the turn of the 20th century residing in a rural mountainous region, who decide to emigrate to the United States after receiving a sign from God in the form of American postcards depicting giant produce and chickens.

Their dreams about the land of opportunity where giant vegetables are grown, people swim in milk, and coins fall from the sky propel their decision, which gives the viewer insight into the unrealistic expectations that many immigrants held about America.
Salvatore takes his family consisting of his two sons as well as his old mother, Fortunata, who we learn is the village witch doctor and involved heavily in mystique (Aurora Quattrocchi).
The dramatic scene that opens up the next segment of the film, the boat trip, visually depicts a sea of people being separated , those on the dock and those on the boat metaphorically representing the departure of the old and the new world respectively.

While aboard the ship to America, a red-headed British woman named Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who is traveling alone, stands out as both an attractive and elusive woman, catching the attention of the men for her beauty and the women for her classiness and independence.
Salvatore is immediately smitten with this woman throughout the journey.
Upon arrival at Ellis Island, Lucy asks Salvatore to marry her purely for administrative reasons, as being a woman she is unable to enter the United States alone.
He agrees; he understands that she is not in love with him yet, but expects that will come with time. Their complex relationship highlights the troubling dynamic of the time, as women must still submit to male authority in the new world in order to even hope for the lesser freedom they so desire.

At Ellis Island, the final major segment of the film, the family join the rest of the immigrants on board to undergo extensive and humiliating physical and psychological examinations and questioning.
The value of class that separated the immigrants on the ship becomes irrelevant in this final segment, as all of the immigrant's places in the new world are not guaranteed; they are all deemed equal.
The ending of the movie reveals a surprising transfer of power between Pietro and Fortunata, as Pietro voices to Salvatore that his grandmother wishes to return home.

After the tests are conducted, Salvatore is informed that Pietro (Filippo Pucillo) is about to be sent back for being mute, and Salvatore's mother for insufficient intelligence.
The viewers are then left with the dilemma of whether Salvatore chooses to return home with his family or enter the United States.

Second from left:
Ellis Island, in Upper New York Bay, was the gateway for over 12 million immigrants to the U.S. as the United States' busiest immigrant inspection station for over 60 years from 1892 until 1954.

Ellis Island was opened January 1, 1892.
The island was greatly expanded with land reclamation between 1892 and 1934.
Before that, the much smaller original island was the site of Fort Gibson and later a naval magazine.
The island was made part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965 and has hosted a museum of immigration since 1990.

Second from right:
Arriving at Ellis, circa 1908
Lewis Hine - Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 84.237.1_SL1.jpg

Between 1905 and 1914, an average of one million immigrants per year arrived in the United States. Immigration officials reviewed about 5,000 immigrants per day during peak times at Ellis Island.
Two-thirds of those individuals emigrated from eastern, southern and central Europe.
The peak year for immigration at Ellis Island was 1907, with 1,004,756 immigrants processed.
The all-time daily high occurred on April 17, 1907, when 11,747 immigrants arrived.

Right:
So “The Golden Door” covers the decision to emigrate and the voyage.
For a brilliant movie illustrating living conditions in Italy before emigration, there is no better movie than “Tree of Wooden Clogs.”

The photo is a screen shot from the movie.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Italian: L'Albero degli zoccoli) is a 1978 Italian film written and directed by Ermanno Olmi.

The film concerns Lombard peasant life in a cascina (farmhouse) of the late 19th century.
It has some similarities with the earlier Italian neorealist movement, in that it focuses on the lives of the poor, and the parts were played by real farmers and locals, rather than professional actors.

It won fourteen awards including the Palme d'or at Cannes and the César Award for Best Foreign Film.

Four peasant families working farms for the same landlord scrape out a meager existence in 1898 in the countryside around Bergamo.
Over the course of a year, children are born, crops are planted, animals are slaughtered, couples are married, stories and prayers are exchanged in the families's shared farmhouse.

Undercurrents of revolution are seen by the peasants but largely ignored, as a communist rabble-rouser gives a speech at a local fair and when a newlywed couple visit the big city of Milan and witness the arrest of political prisoners.
When spring comes, the father from one of the four families cuts down a tree to make wooden clogs so that his son can walk to school, but the landowner discovers this, and the family is forced off their land by the incensed landlord. The remaining families watch them go, praying for them and recognizing their own fragile existence.

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Answer to Quiz Question, Who was Emma Lazarus?
Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist.
She wrote the sonnet The New Colossus in 1883, which includes "lines of world-wide welcome".
Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, installed in 1903, a decade and a half after Lazarus's death.

The last stanza of the sonnet was set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World).
Lazarus was also the author of Poems and Translations (New York, 1867);
Admetus, and other Poems (1871);
Alide: an Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia, 1874);
Poems and Ballads of Heine (New York, 1881);
Poems, 2 vols. ; Narrative, Lyric and Dramatic; as well as Jewish Poems and Translations.

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, July 22, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family.
She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant, and sugar refiner; and Esther Nathan.
One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany; the rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and resident in New York long before the American Revolution, being among the first Jewish emigrants to the United States.
Lazarus's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side, Grace Seixas Nathan (born in New York in 1752) was also a poet.
Lazarus was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Her siblings included sisters, Josephine Lazarus, Sarah, Mary, Emma, Agnes and Annie; and there was also a brother, Frank.

Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature, as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian.
She was attracted in youth to poetry, writing her first lyrics when eleven years old.

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October 28, Sunday
And so, Good Morning.

We’ve talked about immigrants, the movie called “The Golden Door,” a movie called “Tree of Wooden Clogs,” Emma Lazarus, the Statue of Liberty, and the statue called “The Colossus of Rhodes,” with accompanying images.

Have a good day, my friends.
See you soon.

Love

Dom