What I, Georges Perec, wanted to learn about here is wandering, distraction, diaspora. Ellis Island is for me the true place of exile, that is, the place of placelessness, the non-place, the nowhere. In this sense, these images affect me, fascinate me, involve me, as if the search for my identity were tied to the appropriation of this dumping ground, where exhausted officials baptized Americans in droves. What I find here is by no means points of reference, roots, or traces, but rather the opposite: something formless, at the edge of the sayable, something I can call enclosure or division or incision, and which is very closely and vaguely connected to the fact of being Jewish.