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Leonard Covello's Shutting Out The Sky

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Recommended: Immigration during the 20th century essay

I believe the difficult journey for immigrants and all they had to do to start over in a new country was worth the hardships they faced. This is because after all their hard work, things slowly but surely, started to get better. The hardest part was getting started. Although many immigrants were leaving for a better life or trying to escape political injustice, these men, women, and children were leaving their old life forever. In “Shutting Out the Sky”, Leonard Covello remembered before leaving Italy, “The gold you find in America will not be in the streets… It will be in the dreams you realize-in the golden dreams of the future.” as his grandmother’s last words to him. It cost a lot of money to buy a ticket to America, but even so, the boat conditions were horrible. Most people wrote, or later remembered the he people who were seasick had it the worst. The terrible boat ride to America reminded me of older accounts from …show more content…

Most immigrants went straight to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and rented very small rooms or even just a bed for around fifty cents to a dollar a week. These people were called boarders or lodgers. Usually there were around five large families in a decent size in every tenement house, and there was very little sanitation or extra room. To the rest of America, this wasn’t even a known problem until in 1890; Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives”, featuring pictures of tenement houses and city streets. This book brought to light the real struggle of immigrant life in the early 1900s. Finding a job was something that even children had to do at first. Most people ended up working in factories, coming into work at seven, working overtime, and getting home around eight. In the movie “American Tail”, the mice live in anything that they can find on the streets, which relates to the crowdedness of the

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