I Was Dreaming to Come to America: Memories from the Ellis Island Oral History Project - Softcover

Veronica Lawlor creates illustration for advertising, editorial, publishing and institutional clients, with a focus on reportage drawing and a fashionable flair. Ms. Lawlor has been recognized by Communication Arts, American Illustration, the Rx Cluband the Society of Illustrators. She is the president of Studio 1482, an illustration collective, and teaches at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design and Dalvero Academy.

Gr. 3^-5, younger for reading aloud. "Going to America then was almost like going to the moon." Distilling the experience of the 12 million European immigrants who came through Ellis Island, this small picture book draws on the oral histories of people who remember how it was. Each left-hand page quotes one or two paragraphs from personal interviews: people talk about what they left behind, the journey to America, what they expected, their first impressions, and what they found. For example, a former immigration official describes the "Kissing Post" on the island, where loved ones embraced after their long separation. On the right-hand page, facing the words, are framed collage folk-art pictures whose playful fantasy expresses the energy, the dreaming, and the dislocation of the immigrant experience. One picture shows the brown high-top shoes that a woman has kept all these years because her mother wore them when she first set foot on American soil. Appended is a brief biography of each person quoted. As Lawlor says, this account is the "melting pot" view of American immigration. Use it with books such as Allen Say's Grandfather's Journey (1993) and Jacob Lawrence's The Great Migration (1993) to extend the account and to help kids seek out their own family stories. Hazel Rochman