Howard Fast: I picked up The Immigrants and read the first couple of pages. When he described Ellis Island as a rocky crag in New York Harbor I put the book down and never read another word of his. (Ellis is a mudflat built up over the years with ships' ballast and rubble from the digging of the NY subways).

The stories of Issur Danielovitch's family in the early years of the twentieth century sounded interesting - I picked up that Ragman's Son volume, though I don't think I read much of it at the time. It may still be around here somewhere, I had it as part of the research I was doing into life in Lower Manhattan during the busiest years at Ellis Island. What an interesting trajectory his life took in those 103 years.