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Ellis Island & Other Stories
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and nominee for both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Book Award, these ten stories and the celebrated title novella are “beyond compare . . . [Helprin’s] imagination should be protected by some intellectual equivalent of the National Park Service” ( The Philadelphia Inquirer ).
196 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 1981
139 people are currently reading
774 people want to read
About the author
Mark Helprin
39 books1,703 followersMark Helprin belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend. As many have observed and as Time Magazine has phrased it, “He lights his own way.” His three collections of short stories (A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Ellis Island and Other Stories, and The Pacific and Other Stories), six novels (Refiner's Fire, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir From Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka and, In Sunlight and In Shadow), and three children's books (Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows, all illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg), speak eloquently for themselves and are remarkable throughout for the sustained beauty and power of their language.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
August 16, 2015
Helprin is my favorite living author. I've written glowingly of his work numerous times and the only thing keeping me from doing so again is I can't think of enough superlatives. His stories are masterpieces of subtlety and understated emotion.
My favorite story in this compilation is "A Vermont Tale," the ending of which will haunt me for years.
"Palais de Justice" is written on a theme with which I can readily identify, but all of the stories are worth the reader's time, if for no other reason than to happen across a beautifully crafted sentence that makes one pause and give thanks for being able to read.
My favorite story in this compilation is "A Vermont Tale," the ending of which will haunt me for years.
"Palais de Justice" is written on a theme with which I can readily identify, but all of the stories are worth the reader's time, if for no other reason than to happen across a beautifully crafted sentence that makes one pause and give thanks for being able to read.
April 23, 2020
As usual with a story collection, some were better than others. I loved the long, comic title story, and another about a grieving man who pursues mountain climbing in the Alps. I'll never look at bees the same way, after reading about a Rabbi and his followers and their love of bees. These stories touch on the magical and the impossible, but weave them with reality in a way that is incredibly satisfying and makes the world feel richer.
On the other hand, at times the individual sentences are hopelessly overwritten. For example: "He remembered that he had not eaten since there had been an endlessly high black sky wounded by the scattered broken points of stars." So... since last night?
The line between great sentences and overwritten ones is tricky. Most of the time, Helprin is solidly on the right side, impressively so, but man, that's a bad sentence.
Anyhow, this collection is well worth reading.
On the other hand, at times the individual sentences are hopelessly overwritten. For example: "He remembered that he had not eaten since there had been an endlessly high black sky wounded by the scattered broken points of stars." So... since last night?
The line between great sentences and overwritten ones is tricky. Most of the time, Helprin is solidly on the right side, impressively so, but man, that's a bad sentence.
Anyhow, this collection is well worth reading.
January 18, 2014
It's hard to see even the genuine achievement of the overpraised. Helprin does deserve praise for his ambition if not always his accomplishment. He's too often straining for effect, often even spoiling the effect he's after in his anxiousness to demonstrate to the reader his complex understanding of the scene he's created. Quite ofen his exposition is ungainly and brings the whole forward motion of the narrative to a leaden stop.
Nobody should be remembered for their worst work, but since I seem to be almost alone in my dissatisfaction, here is a paragraph from the story, "A Room of Frail Dancers":
He remembered that he had not eaten since there had been an endlessly high black sky wounded by the scattered broken points of stars. The lamb was good, with a salad, a slice of lemon, and a cold soda. When he left the restaurant, he passed the whores again, dark of skin and painted in sharp angles with the deep colors of the Middle East, colors which lasted through the heat of the day, as if fished from cool earthen urns. The line of one girl's eyebrows traveled so far down her cheeks that she looked like a Kabuki actor.
Nobody should be remembered for their worst work, but since I seem to be almost alone in my dissatisfaction, here is a paragraph from the story, "A Room of Frail Dancers":
He remembered that he had not eaten since there had been an endlessly high black sky wounded by the scattered broken points of stars. The lamb was good, with a salad, a slice of lemon, and a cold soda. When he left the restaurant, he passed the whores again, dark of skin and painted in sharp angles with the deep colors of the Middle East, colors which lasted through the heat of the day, as if fished from cool earthen urns. The line of one girl's eyebrows traveled so far down her cheeks that she looked like a Kabuki actor.
August 21, 2025
The last time I laughed so hard in bed while reading was eighteen years ago when Bill Bryson took me on his Walk in the Woods. We were new residents to North Georgia living within an hour of the Appalachian Trail and were aware of the bears prowling around our cabin. That book was nonfiction. Mark Helprin’s collection of stories and vignettes, Ellis Island, is literary fiction at its stylistic best. These pieces first appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker as far back as 1976, when the author, who is a year older than me, was still a young man. As his reader, I assumed he’d had a lifetime of experience composing these gems, so I’m impressed that he gave the world such literary jewels before the age of 30.
Two longer stories sandwich the other nine like bookends. The one called “Scheuderspitze” imagines a photographer in his twenties grieving the loss of his family and escaping to the Alps for a couple of years. The tale exaggerates the rigors by which he strengthens himself to scale the towering, icy peak. It intensifies his asceticism and embellishes his grandiose dreams, which feel more real to him than actual experience.
The final story, which gives the volume its title, follows a young man from his winter voyage across the North Atlantic to Ellis Island and then to Brooklyn. For a while, everything seems realistic and possible, but eventually, the story takes off in surreal flights of farcicality. It was this story that first attracted my interest because it was bound to be about immigrants and immigration.
Parts of these stories are funnier than anything in the repertoire of Groucho Marx or the buffoonery of Mister Bean. In the story “Letters from the Samantha” he describes an ape which the sailors have rescued out of the ocean. Once they have him aboard, though strictly against regulations, the captain and his crew face the dilemma of what to do next. The story presents the reader such a mixture of humor and sadness that the story if unforgettable.
A key to Helprin’s humor is his familiarity with the storytelling traditions of Jews, especially of rabbis. He neither promotes nor disparages Judaism or Jewish people, but he obviously has immersed himself in their culture. He served in the Israeli infantry and air force, and he has dual citizenship with Israel and the U.S.A.
Overall, it’s not plot structure that makes Helprin’s writing so marvelous, but style. To cite just one example of his style, consider this passage (p. 125) from the story, “Tamar.” The character has shown up late to a dinner party, and the only seat left for him is with “the children,” who are, in fact, teenagers.
They spoke as seriously as very old theologians, but ever so much more delicately; they pieced together their sentences with great care, the way new skaters skate, and when they finished they breathed in relief, not unlike students of a difficult Oriental language and must recite in class.
Reviewers have compared Helprin to other great authors—Joyce, Tolstoy, Kafka, and more. However, I prefer to call his writing incomparable or inimitable.
I didn’t know the writing of Mark Helprin before reading these stories even though he has published seven books, of which two others are story collections. I wonder how his writing has changed over the past 45 years. I now know that he has been a conservative pundit and is associated with the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute. Does he support Project 2025? In Ellis Island he wrote:
For hardened hearts and dead souls are left to those who do not understand that we sometimes do grave damage to those whom we love. Hardened hearts and dead souls are left to those who harm an innocent and then do not embark on a life of careful amends. (p. 201)
When I read those words, I wonder if Mark Helprin favors seizing immigrants, detaining them in prisons, and deporting them to the places they fled. Like Thomas Jefferson, who wrote of equality while enslaving hundreds of people, Helprin might compartmentalize his values. This question leaves me troubled but answering it is beyond the scope of my review of his playful book of stories, which I recommend without reservation.
January 17, 2024
Very few living authors write as beautifully and lucidly as Mark Helprin. He is poignant and humorous and idealistic all at once. The novella Ellis Island is especially delightful.
September 17, 2021
This is a diverse collection of short stories. All of the stories' settings range from such varied places as Germany, the Persian Gulf, London, Vermont, and Ellis Island and New York City, and they all include a degree of magic and mystery. My favorite was "A Vermont Tale" not because of the setting, (a January night somewhere in Addison County), but because Helprin so subtly and skillfully relates the story of two human relationships by retelling a tale about loons. His descriptions are memorable.
March 6, 2015
Until I bought a used copy of “Ellis Island and Other Stories” from our local bookstore, I hadn’t known of Mark Helprin. But I was rewarded for my $4 purchase with a collection of 11 short stories that boasts a wide range of geography, time, and mood. The stories range from Israel to the U.S. to Europe, from the turn of the 20th century into the 1970s. Helprin is an American journalist and writer, born in 1947.
Helprin served in the Israeli infantry, and two of his stories use this experience to depict the realities of combat and a soldier's return to civilian life. In “North Light,” the first-person narrator is an Israeli soldier, who is waiting to enter battle, presumably the Syrian front during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He says this of his fellow soldiers: “It is not the cautious who die, but the overcautious. The married men are trying to strike an exact balance between their responsibilities as soldiers, their fervent desire to stay alive, and their only hope – which is to go into battle with the smooth, courageous, trancelike movements that will keep them out of trouble. Soldiers who do not know how (like dancers or mountain climbers) to let their bodies think for them are very liable to be killed.” The story ends as the half-tracks on a ridge carry the soldiers into the battle.
“Ellis Island” is a funny comic opera about a Jewish writer from Eastern Europe immigrating to the United States. It first appeared in The New Yorker. On a ship in the North Atlantic, the unnamed first-person narrator survives a great storm. (“In January, when the sea is cold and dark, crossing the Atlantic is for the brave. Seen from land during the day, the ocean is forbidding, but it is nearly unimaginable at night in a storm, far north, where the ice tumbles down gray wave troughs like tons of shattered glass.”)
He makes it through a Kafkaesque labyrinth of customs interviews, medical examinations, and various misadventures at foggy, snow-laden Ellis Island. Finally he can leave to start a life in New York City with only pennies in his pocket. His description of taking a ferry from Ellis Island to Manhattan is memorable: “We broke through the fog at a tremendous speed and came upon open water, where we saw a golden city rising before us. The reflecting windows of a thousand buildings were a leafy bronze color that crawled slowly upward across the gleaming facades. At the center of this was a searing disc of yellow-white fire captured from aloft. In the New World, I discovered, faithful images of the sun were held up to it in an elaborate and extraordinary mirror – and we, having been told of such things as the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes, had never been informed of this wonder.”
This title story is truly a funny tall tale that, for me, went on just a little too long (it’s almost 70 pages) and veered from what I would call believable absurdity to the realm of the unbelievable.
The story that most intrigued me most was “The Schreuderspitze,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1977. It is a story that perhaps Thomas Mann might have written, rich in symbolism, blurring the boundary between reality and dreams. A depressed Munich photographer Wallich who, losing his wife and son in an auto accident, disappears from his friends and fellow photographers. He surreptitiously takes a train to a small town in the Alps in southern Germany in late autumn and inexplicably decides to train to be a mountain climber.
There are many eye-catching sentences, including the opening paragraph. “In Munich are many men who look like weasels. Whether by genetic accidents, meticulous crossbreeding, an early and puzzling migration, coincidence, or a reason that we do not know, they exist in great numbers. Remarkably, they accentuate this unfortunate tendency by wearing mustaches, Alpine hats, and tweed. A man who resembles a rodent should never wear tweed.”
Alone for several months in a mountain cabin, Wallich breaks down and buys a large and heavy Telefunken radio console. He listens to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on a Berlin radio station. “The music traveled effortlessly on anarchic beams, passed high over the plains, passed high the forests, seeding them plentifully, and came upon the Alps, waves which finally strike the shore after thousands of miles in open sea. It charged upward, mating with the electric storm, separating, and delivering.”
Wallich buys rope and other equipment and gets himself into shape to climb the famous Schreuderspitze, but how he makes the ascent to the summit is not what you might think.
Helprin, who was only in his early 30s when he wrote these stories, brings readers on a fascinating journey around the world. Those who like travelogues and fictional journeys through history with imaginative descriptive writing should find this collection enjoyable.
Helprin served in the Israeli infantry, and two of his stories use this experience to depict the realities of combat and a soldier's return to civilian life. In “North Light,” the first-person narrator is an Israeli soldier, who is waiting to enter battle, presumably the Syrian front during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He says this of his fellow soldiers: “It is not the cautious who die, but the overcautious. The married men are trying to strike an exact balance between their responsibilities as soldiers, their fervent desire to stay alive, and their only hope – which is to go into battle with the smooth, courageous, trancelike movements that will keep them out of trouble. Soldiers who do not know how (like dancers or mountain climbers) to let their bodies think for them are very liable to be killed.” The story ends as the half-tracks on a ridge carry the soldiers into the battle.
“Ellis Island” is a funny comic opera about a Jewish writer from Eastern Europe immigrating to the United States. It first appeared in The New Yorker. On a ship in the North Atlantic, the unnamed first-person narrator survives a great storm. (“In January, when the sea is cold and dark, crossing the Atlantic is for the brave. Seen from land during the day, the ocean is forbidding, but it is nearly unimaginable at night in a storm, far north, where the ice tumbles down gray wave troughs like tons of shattered glass.”)
He makes it through a Kafkaesque labyrinth of customs interviews, medical examinations, and various misadventures at foggy, snow-laden Ellis Island. Finally he can leave to start a life in New York City with only pennies in his pocket. His description of taking a ferry from Ellis Island to Manhattan is memorable: “We broke through the fog at a tremendous speed and came upon open water, where we saw a golden city rising before us. The reflecting windows of a thousand buildings were a leafy bronze color that crawled slowly upward across the gleaming facades. At the center of this was a searing disc of yellow-white fire captured from aloft. In the New World, I discovered, faithful images of the sun were held up to it in an elaborate and extraordinary mirror – and we, having been told of such things as the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens, and the Colossus of Rhodes, had never been informed of this wonder.”
This title story is truly a funny tall tale that, for me, went on just a little too long (it’s almost 70 pages) and veered from what I would call believable absurdity to the realm of the unbelievable.
The story that most intrigued me most was “The Schreuderspitze,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1977. It is a story that perhaps Thomas Mann might have written, rich in symbolism, blurring the boundary between reality and dreams. A depressed Munich photographer Wallich who, losing his wife and son in an auto accident, disappears from his friends and fellow photographers. He surreptitiously takes a train to a small town in the Alps in southern Germany in late autumn and inexplicably decides to train to be a mountain climber.
There are many eye-catching sentences, including the opening paragraph. “In Munich are many men who look like weasels. Whether by genetic accidents, meticulous crossbreeding, an early and puzzling migration, coincidence, or a reason that we do not know, they exist in great numbers. Remarkably, they accentuate this unfortunate tendency by wearing mustaches, Alpine hats, and tweed. A man who resembles a rodent should never wear tweed.”
Alone for several months in a mountain cabin, Wallich breaks down and buys a large and heavy Telefunken radio console. He listens to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on a Berlin radio station. “The music traveled effortlessly on anarchic beams, passed high over the plains, passed high the forests, seeding them plentifully, and came upon the Alps, waves which finally strike the shore after thousands of miles in open sea. It charged upward, mating with the electric storm, separating, and delivering.”
Wallich buys rope and other equipment and gets himself into shape to climb the famous Schreuderspitze, but how he makes the ascent to the summit is not what you might think.
Helprin, who was only in his early 30s when he wrote these stories, brings readers on a fascinating journey around the world. Those who like travelogues and fictional journeys through history with imaginative descriptive writing should find this collection enjoyable.
May 18, 2015
I was looking forward to this collection and finally reading Mr. Helprin. It started out very good, but with each passing story, i got very tired of his style. I found it stilted, cold and drowning in the weight of simile. After pages and pages of forced comparisons i wanted to shout DONT TELL ME WHAT ITS LIKE...TELL ME WHAT IT IS!
Reading Helprin was like reading a how-to-write-descriptively undergrad textbook. Technically all the elements were there, but none of the enjoyment. I know this collection won all sorts of awards, and I know he is a very talented writer, but some times writers and readers just don't click. He's not for me, but please don't let me stop you from picking this book up, because i'm clearly missing something.
Reading Helprin was like reading a how-to-write-descriptively undergrad textbook. Technically all the elements were there, but none of the enjoyment. I know this collection won all sorts of awards, and I know he is a very talented writer, but some times writers and readers just don't click. He's not for me, but please don't let me stop you from picking this book up, because i'm clearly missing something.
April 12, 2023
I found this an uneven collection. The Vermont tale is the best example of Helprin magical touch with words and stories, the Scheuderspitze treads the line of surreal and poignant skillfully as well. The shorter pieces like letters from the Samantha and room of frail dancers are similar. The others were less memorable but enjoyable. The longest piece, Ellis Island, didn’t work for me - was this another playful description of an immigrant who gets by with humor, guile and a core of goodness or was this an allegory I didn’t quite grasp?
November 25, 2025
So what I have learned about my relationship with Mark Helprin's works with respect to me, is that it really is a flexible 'Marmite' relationship. 'Marmite' being a yeast extract that British consumers either love, or hate.
The 'flexible' bit is that it depends on the individual book.
Now Winter's Tale, A Soldier of The Great War, Memoir From Antproof Case brilliant, fabulous; some of my favourite all-time novels.
In Sunlight and in Shadow? No. Awful, almost 'Mark Helprin by Numbers'.
And, unfortunately, Ellis Island & Other Stories falls onto the In Sunlight and in Shadow side.
I've owned the paperback 1st edition for years, but had never read it. I also have A Dove of The East and The Pacific. Pretty sure I've read The Pacific and can't remember any negative thoughts about it.
Ellis Island though? Nope. Didn't hit any high spots for me. And my ranking of top short story writers is;
Gene Wolfe
Harlan Ellison
Robert Silverberg
So, two Jewish writers amongst those three (Wolfe was a committed Catholic) so it ain't that!
Against those three though, the stories in Ellis Island pale (into insignificance). Ellison's Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman (1965) saw Helprin out-Helprined long before Ellis Island arrived-on-the-scene. Likewise, Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1971) is at the level I would expect a short story from the author of Winter's Tale to be.
We don't get there though. Not this time.
The 'flexible' bit is that it depends on the individual book.
Now Winter's Tale, A Soldier of The Great War, Memoir From Antproof Case brilliant, fabulous; some of my favourite all-time novels.
In Sunlight and in Shadow? No. Awful, almost 'Mark Helprin by Numbers'.
And, unfortunately, Ellis Island & Other Stories falls onto the In Sunlight and in Shadow side.
I've owned the paperback 1st edition for years, but had never read it. I also have A Dove of The East and The Pacific. Pretty sure I've read The Pacific and can't remember any negative thoughts about it.
Ellis Island though? Nope. Didn't hit any high spots for me. And my ranking of top short story writers is;
Gene Wolfe
Harlan Ellison
Robert Silverberg
So, two Jewish writers amongst those three (Wolfe was a committed Catholic) so it ain't that!
Against those three though, the stories in Ellis Island pale (into insignificance). Ellison's Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman (1965) saw Helprin out-Helprined long before Ellis Island arrived-on-the-scene. Likewise, Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1971) is at the level I would expect a short story from the author of Winter's Tale to be.
We don't get there though. Not this time.
August 6, 2020
What an exceptional book of short stories! I just finished The Stories of John Cheevers just before this and thought it was one of the finest short story books I've read but this is even better. Every story was incredible but my favorites were Letters From the Samantha, a humorous tale told as a series of letters, about a monkey on a ship, A Vermont Tale about a couple of kids staying with their grandparents in Vermont and Ellis Island another humorous tale about an immigrants experiences upon his arrival to America. This was my first Mark Helprin book but I'm definitely going to have to read more.
January 26, 2025
Helprin seems to choose a historical literary period and then blend what is best of modernity into the story he tells.
Masculine stories that are tender. I enjoyed them all, but the first couple "The Schreuderspitze" and Letters from the Samantha stood out among the shorter works, the first feeling Goethesque and the latter being a perfect ode to the pulp adventure writers. But Ellis Island, which surprisingly turned out to be a burlesque ala Baron Von Munchhausen written like I. B. Singer at his most playful.
Masculine stories that are tender. I enjoyed them all, but the first couple "The Schreuderspitze" and Letters from the Samantha stood out among the shorter works, the first feeling Goethesque and the latter being a perfect ode to the pulp adventure writers. But Ellis Island, which surprisingly turned out to be a burlesque ala Baron Von Munchhausen written like I. B. Singer at his most playful.
December 31, 2017
This collection includes two memorable stories (“The “Schreuderspitze”and “A Vermont Tale”),a few good ones and a number that are (at least to this reader) totally obscure. Mark Helprin is clearly a most gifted and versatile writer, but Hemingway-esque he isn’t. “Ellis Island and Other Stories”will appeal more to connoisseurs of literary style and descriptive passages than to those whose tastes run to the direct and spare.
February 15, 2024
Helprin does some beautiful and descriptive writing. I laughed out loud several times and other times just absorbed a great sentence. But the collection overall was just not my style. Ellis Island seemed like a bunch of vignettes linked together, yet it was my favorite of the collection. Still, I tend to like things to be a little more obvious and nicely wrapped up. I am glad I tried it, but won't be reading others.
October 25, 2021
"A Vermont Tale" was the standout in this collection of stories. It draws several parallels between animal tales and human realities, and between one generation and the next (and the one after that?). The title story went on for about 10 too many pages, and too often descended from almost magical to embarrassingly cartoonish.
April 12, 2018
Mark Helprin's writing is most evocative and moving, for me, when he writes about weather. Perhaps it's because I first read Winter's Tale as a girl, and his descriptions of, well, winter, imprinted on me. Many of these stories seem quite German to me, in the style of Mann and even Kafka.
September 8, 2018
Loved the visual imagery created by these stories. Some of the stories were more like self-contained and visually evocative scenes than narrative driven tales, but at their best they are both. They have a good spirit too.
November 25, 2020
Brilliant
Very well written. The short stories before Ellis Island were curious and I could not see the connection to the last story. The last story Ellis Island was brilliant and captivating.
Very well written. The short stories before Ellis Island were curious and I could not see the connection to the last story. The last story Ellis Island was brilliant and captivating.
April 26, 2022
I honestly don't know what to make of this. I only read the last short story titled Ellis Island (skimmed it towards the end) but it's just very hmm... scattered? But the author has flair that's for sure. I suppose I should give it a fairer shot.
January 28, 2025
There were some damn good stories in there, but also some skips for certain. Read The Schreuderspitze, Martin Bayer, A Vermont Tale, and Ellis Island if you’re going to choose any. I think the first one was my favorite.
January 8, 2018
Interesting group of stories.
March 21, 2019
Great collection of short stories, humorous, sad, thought provoking. Real good reading.
March 10, 2021
Beautiful collection of short stories. Found a new author and want to read more from him.
January 12, 2022
No. Horrible…especially the namesake story. Overhyped for reasons unknown.
February 11, 2022
Wonderful story telling. I had so many fellings as i read these stories. I highly recommend this book. Especially the title story "Ellis Island"
June 12, 2022
Helprin’s writing is so poetic and delightful
February 27, 2023
Stories as bright as polished brass, and emotions and dreams spun as skillfully as man can do. A pleasure and a wonder to read.
April 16, 2023
Glowing, flowing, wonderful words!
All hail the blessed sap of Helprin!
But truly, words and sentences and thoughts to linger over and enjoy.
All hail the blessed sap of Helprin!
But truly, words and sentences and thoughts to linger over and enjoy.
March 26, 2024
The ape story made me unbearably sad.
October 28, 2025
Loved these stories
Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews