The view of New York Harbor was a welcome sight for Samuel Siegal, one of nearly two million Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1922.Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 38–68; Samuel Joseph, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881–1910 (New York, 1969). For Siegal and his shipmates it was the end of an enfeebling boat journey as well as their first glimpse of the goldene medinah (golden land) they had heard and talked about so much in the Pale of Settlement (the region of Czarist Russia open to Jews). Like the overwhelming majority of his coreligionist immigrants, Siegal had traveled to the United States in steerage. There, he ate nearly inedible food—and then only when he was not too nauseated to swallow.