All are tucked away in tight cabins like lockable pigeonholes set in the walls. The Jews, children or bearded, the Russian peasants, their faces furrowed like their fields, and the shining Ukrainian peasant women are all boxed up. Their emigrant poverty hidden, no longer open to the shameless prying eye. Still, there is a good deal of misery on show before it is all packed away. The luggage—strange, eccentric-looking items, down pillows bagged up in hessian, coverlets, red and white striped privities, tied and endlessly retied bundles and baskets with antediluvian padlocks. Everything is loaded onto small wagons running on electric motors and taken to port. Even so, the emigrants are still carrying a lot. There are things a person doesn’t like to lose from sight, not even for half an hour. And so the Jews are left to sweat under their cherished loads which they lug on their crooked backs and in their frozen hands as far as the plump, helmeted policeman. This policeman is a splendid instance of a half-terrestrial, half-marine authority. His round cheeks are of a red that seems to glow from within, as if he had a lit candle in his mouth like a paper lantern at a summer fete. Ships’ cooks all look like that. The helmet, the dark cloak, and the sabre, none of them go with the salt water face. A great calm radiates from that broad, improbably luminous face, and a benevolence that denies the severity of the blinking badge on the helmet, and quite disavows the sabre. The policeman stands at the far end of the narrow bridge that connects terra firma to the great sea. The emigrants need to go past him with their heavy loads. Clumsily as can be, they set their loads down, looking for a clean spot; ideally they would spread one of their red and blue check handkerchiefs on the ground before setting their bundle down on top of it. All that takes a good five minutes, and already a gong is being sounded on board: in ten minutes the Washington is due, and so the Pittsburgh will have to leave its berth. But the policeman radiates the calm and ease of a traffic light; they look at him, and think they have all the time in the world, whatever the urgency of the ship. They produce passports and tickets sewn into undershirts or variously secreted about their bodies. The policeman, by the light of his own countenance, studies them assiduously.

The ship (it has a tonnage of 16,000) carries 1,800 passengers. About a third of these are emigrants. They come from Russia and the Successor states, Poland and Lithuania. The East of Europe pours them out. These Eastern Jews and peasants have been emigrating westwards for hundreds of years, leaving their old homes behind, looking for a new one. A great sadness emanates from them, their grey beards, their wrinkled faces, their adorable, helpless bundles. A family from Kowel is here, an old matron swaddled in black, two young daughters with cropped curls, and a twenty-year-old son, with broad shoulders and red hands dangling from his sleeves like giant appliances. He laughs and shrugs his strong shoulders. For two years now he and his family have been wandering through the sorry, moribund West of Europe, in search of his father, who left Kovel ten years before—God only knows where he is. They were in Budapest, six months in constant dread of the expatriation that might come at any hour of day or night; finally it came and they were chased to Vienna, where they hung on for a year in a basement hole on Kleine Schiffergasse.