Gaelle Josse - Ellis Island last guardian

"I hardly knew any other landscape than this Hudsonment, with its line of skyscrapers, which grew in front of my eyes over the years, leaped into the sky, twisted and thickened into the rigid, unchanging stone jungle we know today, with the ships and ferries plying the bay at its base. and with Our Lady of Liberty, or Miss Liberty, as some European immigrants called her when she saw her on her stone plinth, in the majesty of her patinated robe, with a withdrawn face, stretching out her arms above the foam. Sometimes I see that the whole universe has gathered for my pleasure on the territory of this island. Hope and to the island of tears. To the site of the simultaneously grinding and building miracle, which transforms the Irish peasant, the Calabrian shepherd, the German worker, the Polish rabbi or the Hungarian official into an American citizen after stripping them of their nationality." Gaëlle Josse's book won the European Union Literature Prize in 2015 Gaelle Josse