The Tenement Museum was small, and unlike any museum I have been to before, lacked exhibits or even pretensions of exhibits. But the information the Tenement Museum wants to present, they adequately do, through authentic-seeming depictions of immigrant life in a genuinely authentic setting. Being allowed to walk through the tiny hallways and squeeze into the minuscule apartments that tenements really did live in, (although we were not supposed to touch) gave us a much better sense of immigrant life than a roped-off, to-scale model of a tenement apartment.
The simulation that we went through, however, was equally informative if less real-seeming. The actress playing Victoria Castoria genuinely drew pathos from us, at least from me. I was at once guilty for having burst in on her private dwelling, devastated that she could not go to school any longer, and grateful that I had met such a nice friend in the neighborhood, forgetting that she was probably in her mid-twenties and did not live in the Tenement Museum. On my side, I felt a little ridiculous posing as an insecure German, Ashkenazy Jew immigrant, responding “ja!” to her questions in an effort to play-act. But even though my own immigrant-scenario did not seem believable to me, I was still in a total panic, realizing how unprepared my family WOULD be if we moved to another country, especially when we didn’t know anyone in America and had formerly been farmers who would have to suddenly work in a city.
Most of my worries were the results of improvisations when we interacted with the fake Victoria Castoria, but they suddenly took on tangible weight. The Tenement Museum’s greatest strength is the authentic scenario it creates, without the help of the artifacts and signposts present in other museums.
