The myth that name changes occurred at Ellis Island began with The Godfather, is itself a myth that casts doubt on your source. That idea long preceded The Godfather. How did names that were written in Cyrillic or Yiddish get transformed into English? Certainly not by the non-English speaking immigrants. How did my pre-teen mother who left Russia as Perla Mazurovskia enter the US as Pearl Messeroff? Maybe it was some immigration worker who did that, and maybe it was someone else, but it certainly wasn't the immigrant herself.
Fani Willis - the situation sounds like something from a Tom Wolfe novel.
The myth that name changes occurred at Ellis Island began with The Godfather, is itself a myth that casts doubt on your source. That idea long preceded The Godfather. How did names that were written in Cyrillic or Yiddish get transformed into English? Certainly not by the non-English speaking immigrants. How did my pre-teen mother who left Russia as Perla Mazurovskia enter the US as Pearl Messeroff? Maybe it was some immigration worker who did that, and maybe it was someone else, but it certainly wasn't the immigrant herself.