City of Orphans

By the late 1890s, immigrants were streaming into Ellis Island by the thousands. Brought by famine, persecution, and political instability, and always in search of a better life, they sought work and hope amidst the personal turmoil of leaving a country and culture. In Avi’s City of Orphans, the author presents a family struggling to reconcile the promise of hope that brought them to America with the realities of life in an overpopulated, grimy, corrupt city harboring bigotry and intolerance to outsiders. Though Maks was only two years old when his family emigrated from Denmark, he feels the full weight of his family’s position in society. This is most profoundly felt when his sister is used as a scapegoat for theft at the Waldorf. Crime was rampant in large cities in this era, and immigrants were an easy target for blame. Maks knows it will be a formidable challenge to prove her innocence. Hatred for adoptive citizens is rampant no matter their ethnic background or culture. Maks shares a neighborhood block with migrants from Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. They are all treated with the same disdain by the upper-class citizens of New York. Mama says, “People are freer in America. But there are more tears” (344). The Geless family is one in a sea of immigrants weighing the costs of giving up everything they knew in their home country to pursue something new in an alien land.

Within Maks’s family unit, the struggle to accept their immigrant identity is pervasive. Agnes desires to fully integrate into the American way of life. No one could criticize her aim to rise above factory work, gain an education, and thus hopefully change her status. However, Mama worries this endeavor will come at a great cost. Mama grapples most with her immigrant status, revealing only to Willa how much she misses her homeland. She recognizes the reason they left and the opportunities leaving could have afforded, but she feels lost and lonely most days. Papa, too, mourns for his old country and how immigration has damaged his family. His forlorn song sung in his native Danish is unintelligible to his children, but in it, they sense his sadness: “We’re traveling from our home / to an unknown land, / What will be there, / sadness or peace, / we don’t know. / Only God knows” (350). The song punctuates the end of the novel, and though most characters’ stories end in a hopeful tone, the lyrics to Papa’s song ring out like a dirge. One can embrace the hope of a better future, but in reality, no one can know the future. Leaving behind the familiarity of culture and language to settle in a foreign, unfriendly land is a journey fraught with uncertainties and potential dangers.

The heterogeneity of his neighborhood is uplifting to Maks. He sees poverty and need, but he also sees the steadfastness of humanity in the face of great affliction. America came to be called a “melting pot,” suggesting a blanching of cultures and loss of individuality, but what emerges in this urban landscape is not uniformity but an amalgamation of ethnic identities unified by their poverty and pain. Humans fundamentally seek community, and Maks’s neighbors are no different.