Dan's Papers - November 16, 2007 - Twentysomething...By David Lion Rattiner

Over the weekend I visited the Statue of Liberty and was reminded of how much good there is in the world. The Statue of Liberty is pretty awesome. The last time I was there I was eleven years old, and I didn't fully comprehend how big of a deal it was back then. I just thought the statue was really cool looking.

Going there on a Sunday was special. Outside on the lawn, a father was playing catch with his two sons directly in front of Lady Liberty and I felt a sense of pride. This Dad playing catch was having a real moment as what felt like all of America was watching while he and his two kids were smiling and giggling and throwing a baseball around less then ten yards away from the Statue of Liberty.

It's pretty crazy what people did to get to America over a hundred years ago. They would travel for weeks in terrible conditions aboard steamships and then arrive at Ellis Island where they would be processed. They came from every country in Europe and arrived speaking only their native language. If an immigrant had a poor medical condition or couldn't perform basic mental tests, they were sent back on a return trip, free of charge to their place of departure. Two percent of immigrants trying to come to America were sent back. Can you imagine that?

Most of you reading this have a family member who traveled through Ellis Island, and it hit me how cool it would be to look up this information at the Statue of Liberty, and I began to really freak out about it. My bloodline ran through this amazingly historical place of America and somewhere there was a piece of paper to prove it. After asking around, I figured out that I could go to the website www.Ellisisland.org and type in my last name and a list of people would come up. Not wanting to pay the five dollars to do this at the computer lab at the museum, I did it on my cell phone and had a chill run through my spine.

There were ten Rattiners that passed through Ellis Island, five of them came as a family. There was Sophie Rattiner age 32 and her daughters Hillel Rattiner age 10, Rosa Rattiner age 8 and Fanny Rattiner age 4. Her dad was David Rattiner (cue the creepy music) who also traveled with his family from Romania. They were Romanian Jews and they traveled aboard the steam ship La Champagne out of Le Havre, France. David traveled with three pieces of luggage, which was everything he owned. I always thought I was named after David Lion Gardiner, but as I looked in awe at my cell phone, I realized I was named after my great great grandfather or great great uncle, and he was pretty great.

I imagined my distant relatives passing through Ellis Island scared out of their minds and being separated for hours as they were processed then reunited and making jokes, and then just through luck and time I ended up here standing in the same place they came through.

There is a lot of romance to the idea of immigration and the struggles that everybody went through at the Statue of Liberty. The statue itself is amazing. At her feet are shackles that are broken, symbolizing breaking free from tyranny. Its sculptor was Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and it was engineered by the same guy who engineered the Eiffel Tower in France, Gustave Eiffel. It was sculpted in France beginning in 1875, finished in 1884, dismantled into 350 huge pieces and shipped to New York in 1885 and reassembled in 1886. You could hang out on the arm of the statue up until 1916 when it was closed to visitors permanently after German saboteurs blew up a cache of dynamite at Black Tom Wharf in New Jersey that rattled some bolts to the arm and caused some damage to it. Although it was repaired, it was never reopened to the public.

I figured that my dad would be interested in all of this and about the late David Rattiner, the great Romanian traveler, who came to the U.S. and is the ultimate reason why we are here, to which he replied, "I never heard of David Rattiner. We have relatives with the last names Brody and Klausner. Your great great grandmother's name was Fanny Brody and then she married a Rattiner."

"Well we got to figure this out. There was a Fanny Rattiner that came here from Romania that was four years old when she got here. What was Mom's last name?"

"Fenner, she's Irish. Good luck with that, there were probably thousands that entered through Ellis Island with the last name of Fenner."

"So that makes me Irish-Romanian?"

"You also have some Lithuanian in you, which is a part of Russia. You're an Irish-Romanian-Russian-half-Jew, who according to your grandmother is really completely Jewish. Welcome to America."