14 Remarkable Immigrant Stories You Can Find in a Favorite Museum’s Gift Shop

In 1913, Malka Treynovsky flees Russia with her family, but loses them upon arriving on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan. Taken in by an Italian ices peddler, she learns the secrets of his trade and reinvents herself into Lillian Dunkle, head of an empire of ice-cream franchises. But when her past begins to catch up with her, everything she has built is at stake.

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the characters that Joseph Mitchell—known for his precise, respectful observation, graveyard humor, and offhand perfection of style—immortalized in these essays, originally written for the New Yorker.

In this funny, compulsively readable book, Robert Sullivan chronicles his year spent investigating a rat-infested alley a few blocks from Wall Street. He gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: exterminators, sanitation workers, and agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat.

Eilis Lacey is a young woman who abandons small-town Ireland and the comfort of her mother’s home for the anonymous shores of New York City. In Brooklyn, she finds a city in flux—a city where immigrants from Ireland and Poland live amongst Jewish and black communities. Just as she is beginning to fall in love with a young man, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.

Read the full review of BROOKLYN.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she begins a double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—like the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language, but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.

A remarkable story of New York told through one of its most fascinating inhabitants—the oyster, a shellfish famous in New York for centuries. Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight, this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the founding of New York to the oyster cellars of the Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining rooms.

TRIANGLE is a poignantly detailed account of the 1911 disaster that horrified the country and changed the course of twentieth-century politics and labor relations. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York’s Greenwich Village. The final toll was 146 people—123 of them women. At the time, it was the worst disaster in New York City history. TRIANGLE is a vibrant and immensely moving account that chronicles the fire as well as the social and political aftermath.

Esmeralda Santiago’s story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be 11 children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity.

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured, imprisoned in the same castle, and sold into slavery. This novel follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem.

Read the full review of HOMEGOING.

Inspired by a real midwife who became one of the most controversial figures in Victorian New York City, this is the story of Axie Muldoon, the impoverished child of Irish immigrants who apprentices to a doctor and eventually builds a thriving midwifery business. Flouting convention and defying the law in the name of women’s rights, Axie rises from grim tenement rooms to the splendor of a mansion on Fifth Avenue.

Okey Ndibe’s funny, charming, and penetrating memoir depicts his move from Nigeria to America. It examines the differences between Nigerian and American etiquette and politics; details an incident of racial profiling just 13 days after he arrived in the US; and juxtaposes African folk tales with Wall Street trickery. All these stories and more come together in a generous, encompassing book about the making of a writer and a new American.

This beloved children’s series chronicles a Jewish immigrant family at the beginning of the twentieth century in New York City. Sydney Taylor, who was born in 1904 on New York’s Lower East Side, based the richly drawn characters on her own life. The series centers on five sisters—Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie—and their mischievous younger brother, Charlie, who share many adventures.

At the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, a casino owner was gunned down, and the ambitious district attorney charged decorated policeman Charley Becker with ordering the murder. Was he a bad cop leading a double life, or a pawn felled by the rogues who ran Manhattan’s underworld? Chronicling Charley Becker’s rise and fall, this true account describes the raucous, gaudy, and utterly corrupt city that made him.

The United States has a culturally and ethnically diverse population that makes for a continually changing culinary landscape. But Sarah Lohman discovered that American food is united by eight flavors: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and Sriracha. In this well-researched exploration of American culinary history, Lohman sets out to explore how these influential ingredients made their way to the American table.