Immigration
The imagery of leaving one's homeland and going to somewhere new is a dominant imagery in this book. Through four separate Emigrants' stories, the reader sees the intricacies of that process, both tactically, explaining how they accomplished their relocation, and emotionally, demonstrating in the prose what it actually feels like to have to leave one's homeland. These people are not just immigrants—they are also political refugees, and although they survive, they survive to mourn their dead families, lost to the Nazis.
The Holocaust
The truth about the Holocaust was not well-known in America during the time these refugees finally escaped Europe. As Jews, they were aware of some of the atrocities, but not everything. They knew that it was scary that racist soldiers were dragging Jews away to unseen camps for unseen fates. This imagery places the reader back into the history that is often experienced only factually. These characters aren't just fleeing to flee; they are fleeing the literally Holocaust, but still they are received with contempt in many cases.
Political and racial bias
This is the imagery in the book that makes some people regard Jewish refugees as "other." There are people who treat them as if they don't belong, as if they are essentially different. This imagery is the negative inverse of empathy which is to see other people as essentially same as one's own self. The characters in the book are often victims of political and racial biases that make people mistreat them with prejudice, even if their assumptions about the refugees are exactly wrong.
Death and suicide
This unfortunate imagery exists in tension with the false narratives that biased people express against the refugees. The common narrative amongst the Americans is that people come to America to have more opportunities and to have a better life. For these Jewish Emigrants, that is not the case. They leave Europe more or less against their will under the dire threat of death and Holocaust, to a place that doesn't welcome them where they have no community or role, and the consequence is that their mental health is extremely weakened and many commit suicide. The reader sees the first suicide within the first section of the book.
