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The medical examination began before immigrants were even aware of it. Doctors stationed in the hall simply observed the newcomers as they walked by. In six seconds, physicians checked off 15 diseases. They placed chalk marks on the lapels of those who needed closer scrutiny: H for heart, L for limp, X for mental defect. With still evident embarrassment, Sophie recalls a distressing moment when a nurse "put her hand under my skirt. She was checking for I don't know what, but she did it to everyone." Then a doctor dipped a buttonhook into an antiseptic solution and used it to flip back the eyelid. The reason: to check for trachoma, a blinding disease that would leave the immigrant an unwanted public charge. Trachoma was the most common medical reason for sending immigrants back to their native countries. (In fact, out of 12 million or so people who came to Ellis, most during the peak years of 1900-24, only 250,000 were turned away.) Sophie may have been the unwitting object of another American worry: that young single women would become prostitutes. So great was that concern that if a woman claimed she was engaged, immigration officials actually hunted up her fiance and saw to it that they were mar ried before relinquishing control over the newcomer. Authorities wired Sophie's un cle in Madison before letting her visit relatives in New York. The first days in Manhattan were overwhelming. Sophie had never seen subways, trolley cars, coal stoves, pineapples and mobs of people "so friendly you did not have to be afraid to talk even if you didn't speak English. In Europe we'd have made fun if you couldn't speak right. I thought, that's America." She looked askance at only one thing: "What got you as a European was the filth." She remembers a shiny red apple she wanted to buy. It cost only a penny. But she didn't want to break her uncle's $25.
On her way west, during a stopover in Cincinnati, she used pin money from relatives to buy her first machine-made piece of clothing, a short-sleeved dress in French blue. After three years, selling the bread, macaroons and cake in her uncle's bakery in Indiana, she saved enough for a trip east to visit her aunts. One night, dancing to the music of a German band in Manhattan's Yorkville section, she met Fritz Wolf, a baker from Baden who had also graduated from Ellis in 1923. They married, settled in Queens and had two sons, who now live in Los Angeles. One is in the refrigeration and air-conditioning business. The other served in the U.S. Army for 20 years. Sophie became a U.S. citizen in 1937. She has since voted in every election, federal, state and local.
She is proud of her sons and troubled about the new wave of Cuban, Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants. "We should not let anyone in," she says firmly. "When we came, the rules were you could not be a burden to the state. There were no schools where you could learn the language." Then she sighs, and adds: "But you've got to give people a chance. You can't send them back." As for herself, at 83, she is busy organizing outings for senior citizens and looking forward. Says Sophie: "You give up and you're dead, and I am not yet."
—By Anastasia Toufexis