U. S. Seems To Be Land of Husbands

1920

FOREIGN GIRLS INVADING AMERICA BY WHOLESALE.

Feminine Army Hailing From All Nations Waits at New York for Lovers.

NEW YORK, N. Y., Aug. 5. — Brides, pink, nut-brown, olive and rosy, slender, chubby and plump, are anxiously inquiring at Ellis Island these days in a Babel of tongues for the sweethearts they have come so far to capture and break into domestic teamwork.

These modern Penelopes, who have reversed the old story and gone in search of their mates instead of supinely waiting and spinning at home, have adventured to more businesslike purpose than did old meandering Odysseus. They have winged a true course despite all the difficulties of these unsettled times.

They, together with aged relatives of kinsfolk already established here and wives and children coming to rejoin husbands, form a considerable part of the present mounting wave of immigrants, and their eager attractiveness just now is doing much to brighten the Island's grim labyrinth.

They're From All Lands.

There is such a choice and so cosmopolitan a bouquet of young brides at the Island that they deserve a consideration all to themselves, excluding from notice all of the faltering steps beside them of the aged fled from the chaos of Europe to secure haven with their children in America, and the prattlers in everything from Gaelic to Arabic, at last in a land of plentiful bread and milk.

Mary, Kathleen, Mollie, Malaki, Helena, Gastana, Taube, Conception, Mitzi and Germaine, all tender in years, all distractingly pretty, all in sparkling spirits, hailing from seven different countries and speaking seven different languages, clustered together in the New York detention room awaiting the arrival of their sweethearts, formed as inspirational citizen material as the Old World has ever sent us.

Mary, Kathleen and Mollie were Irish girls — home-makers they said — impatient to be away from the Island and at their chosen profession. Mollie Malone, a slender, brown-haired, brown-eyed girl from Dublin, jollied all rhyme and reason out of a would-be serious interview. She volunteered that she was going somewhere west of the Hudson River to marry a Yank whom she had met while he was doughboying overseas.

Draws Paper From Stocking.

Malaki Ayoub, a Syrian girl from Beirut, an exotic moving picture princess without half trying, olive skinned, dimpled, lustrous dark eyes, black hair, of plump, languorous dignity, also comes to marry. The interview with Malaki was limited to a word or so and nods, the interpreter, Nathan Greenberg, master of a sheaf of languages, being unable to understand much of the meat of her speech. Malaki, with naive, near-Eastern frankness, drew an official paper from the National Lisle Bank and verified the spelling of her name.

There was a slight English girl from Manchester among the brides. She refused to tell her name or anything about herself, but did consent to tell the interviewer that he should be heartily ashamed of Ellis Island and its tedious ways. She said that she reached New York on the Aquitania and she thought it a needless delay to be kept from her friends and sweetheart for four days.

Gastana Marchegiana[*] from Abruzzi and Conception Rodriguez from Seville, Spain, were two Southern beauties. Mitzi was a reticent girl from St. Gall, Switzerland, an embroidery worker. Taube (dove translated) Green (also a translation which she has adopted as appropriate to beginning her life in America) was an unusually pretty Polish Jewess, accompanied by her mother. Taube is a seamstress, as eager to enter the field of American business as she is to begin home-making here.

Conditions Bad in Poland.

Taube, who is going to Chicago, gave a discouraging description of conditions in Poland, where, she said, there is much near famine, and already much of the graft that characterizes democratic government. She said that it took four weeks' time and considerable backsheesh for her party to get its passports to leave Poland.

Germaine Dubuc of Bordeaux, France, following two years later in the wake of a California doughboy now established in a Western export house, was the last but not least attractive of the young brides-to-be greeted as they paced expectantly, some fretfully, before the doors of the detention room awaiting their sweethearts to claim them.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Aug. 7, 1920, p. 5.

Note: [*] This name is right on the fold and so is hard to read. But it looks like it says Gactana Marchegina, more sure about the first name than the last. Earlier in the article, though, there is a reference to Gastana, certainly this same person. And the last name doesn't Google well, but with Marchegiana there are a lot more. Neither, of course, is necessarily right, but this is what we went with.