According to numerous jokes, family legends, and even the movie The Godfather, Part II, officials at Ellis Island frequently Anglicized immigrants’ exotic or difficult-to-pronounce names, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. These stories loom particularly large in American Jewish cultural memory. But Kirsten Fermaglich cites ample evidence that this was not the case; rather, newcomers to U.S. usually took the initiative, changing their names voluntarily after their arrival:
[At Ellis Island], immigration procedures did not typically include the question “What is your name?” Bureaucrats simply checked immigrants’ names to make sure they matched the names already listed on ships’ passenger lists. . . . Between 1892 and 1920, when thousands of immigrants passed through the immigration station on Ellis Island each day, there were no descriptions of Ellis Island name-changing in popular magazines or books. And even after immigration slowed significantly in the 1920s, popular books and magazines for the next four decades did not typically describe Ellis Island officials as changing immigrant names. . . .
It was not until the 1970s that the image of Ellis Island name-changing took hold of the American imagination. One popular 1979 book about Ellis Island and the immigrant experience, for example, described officials who were “casual and uncaring on the matter of names.” . . .
Portraits of involuntary name-changing at Ellis Island fit both with the island’s new prominence [beginning in the late 1960s] as a symbol of immigration, and with growing distrust of government authority. . . . Ellis Island name-changing also fits another emerging theme in American culture in the 1970s: [the] quest for authenticity. . . . From the 1970s through the 1990s, novels, films and plays that portrayed Jewish life, such as Wendy Wasserstein’s play Isn’t It Romantic? and Barry Levinson’s movie, Avalon, represented name changers as phonies or sellouts.
Read more on The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/jewish-americans-changed-their-names-but-not-at-ellis-island-96152