The Orphan of Ellis Island

“Having new, fashionable sneakers, and keeping up with Dominic’s quickly growing feet was almost impossible as long as he lived with one foster family after another.”

In this quote, Woodruff characterizes one practical effect of Dominic’s unstable home life. The shoes, which indicate that Dominic hasn’t been in one place long enough for anyone to recognize his feet have grown, are a measure of the neglect he feels. They also indicate his feeling of separateness from his classmates, who take their trendy footwear for granted. When Dominic meets Francesco, who doesn’t have shoes at all, Dominic sees the contrast between their forms of poverty.

“Dominic stood for a moment, wiggling his free toes within his sock, wondering about his family tree. What would it look like? He imagined a little twig with one tiny leaf hanging from it. On the leaf was his name. That was it.”

In this quote, the paltry family tree is a concrete image of Dominic’s lack of identity. The metaphor of Dominic as a single fragile twig and tenuous leaf indicates his loneliness and vulnerability.

“[T]he most important thing that Dominic owned was a gold key that hung from a chain around his neck. You could see that the key was very old. It had been with his mother’s belongings when she died.”

The key Dominic wears, his only possession from his mother, represents his family legacy and all he doesn’t know about his family; that information is locked away from him. Ironically, he loses the key during the journey that unlocks his ancestry and identity. In its place, he gains a sense of family and belonging that is more useful to him than the key itself.