A Peek Into the Past with ‘Meet Victoria Confino’ (Review)

The Tenement Museum is the Lower East Side’s premier institution for preserving Manhattan’s rich immigrant history. Powered by incredibly knowledgeable storytellers and guides, the programming of the museum includes intimate educational tours and community-building events within their immersive exhibitions. Pre-COVID, audiences would travel within the restored homes and workplaces of real immigrants who lived within the spaces throughout time: everyone from Jewish Holocaust refugees to Chinese garment factory workers.

In response to the pandemic, the Tenement announced a new program of virtual tours and digital exhibitions. One that premiered at the end of 2020 was Meet Victoria Confino. In this virtual experience, the audience had the opportunity to speak to an actor portraying Victoria Confino, a 14-year-old immigrant from Greece. It’s the ultimate history class-meets-interactive theatre experience.

I began the Meet Victoria Confino tour in a very familiar way, tapping the iconic blue “Join Zoom” button. My computer screen whisked into a Zoom room with people from all over the country. The audience was surprisingly diverse in age and background. While the Tenement educator welcomed us and introduced her colleague who would be supporting her throughout the tour, the excited chatter streaming in from elementary student’s mics was muted.

I was also impressed with the Tenement Museum’s thoughtfulness regarding accessibility when our educator motioned to the closed captions option at the bottom bar of the screen. As someone with hearing sensitivity, closed captions are a key ingredient to my personal recipe for thoroughly enjoying digital experiences.

The Tenement guide also emphasized that the Victoria we would meet today was an actor portraying Victoria. The choice to emphasize our future meeting with an actor seemed to be an ethical storytelling choice made by the Tenement Museum. (I personally did not mind this part of the world-building, and it did not take away from the magic of meeting and interacting with Victoria later in the tour.)

Our facilitator and her colleague concluded the onboarding by asking us to put any questions or thoughts into the Zoom chat. They also shared that there would be times we could also ask questions by unmuting ourselves. Then they began the screen share, and my computer screen became dominated by images from 1913–1917.

During the formal history class portion of our tour, we were immersed in the immigration story of the Confinos, a fairly wealthy family from Kastoria. In the early 1900s, Kastoria, a city in northern Greece, was at war, which led to the Confinos leaving their home country. The family paid around $25 per person for their journey to the United States. At the time, $25 was around one month’s rent. The family consisted of Victoria, her mother, her father, and her brothers, who settled into the Lower East Side to work and live. As immigrants from the Ottoman-Empire, the Confinos spoke a language that was not widely known or popular amongst the other Eastern European immigrants in that part of the city.

Now we as an audience were fully prepared to meet Victoria, who has been living in New York City for a few years and is now fourteen years old. The tour guides shared a countdown graphic to symbolize the time travel transition in our experience. At the end of the countdown, Victoria popped into our Zoom with a virtual backdrop of her tenement’s kitchen with a breathless hello and welcome.

Thanks to the setup, Victoria’s appearance left me feeling star-struck and that atmosphere of amazement seemed to bubble through our eager tour group. The educators quickly jumped in to ask Victoria questions to set the tone and break the ice for our suddenly shy audience. They asked Victoria what she was doing. Victoria was cleaning the home before her parents came home. She apologized for her English, explaining to us how when she went to school, they put her all the way back into a younger grade with babies. She told us about the clothing of the time and how her mother insisted on wearing items that were not considered fashionable.

The tour guides asked if we could see Victoria’s parlor. She became wide-eyed and responded with how messy it was, blaming it on her little brother. She asked for us to give her a moment while she tidied up. She went off screen and reappeared quickly after with a new virtual background.

The conversation moved onto what Victoria liked to do for fun. She almost danced from side to side of the screen when she told the audience about the “nickelodeons” in the theater. She watched one called Crazy Cat. She explained to us that for one nickel we could see three of these movies. Maybe we would like to go with her sometime? The films were so very funny. She loved them so much, especially Charlie Chaplin.

The tour guides told Victoria that they were now out of time. She gave us an enthusiastic goodbye and asked us to visit her again. The tour guides cued the same countdown graphic to symbolize the time travel transition in our experience. Victoria was gone from our Zoom call, and we were back in the 21st century. The Tenement guides went on to fill in the details on the rest of Victoria’s life, revealing that the museum is still in close communication with Victoria’s descendants. The museum does this not only to have permission to share Victoria’s story but because it also understands the impact that immigration has on the generations that follow. For the Tenement Museum, immigration stories are narratives that should be honored, celebrated, and shared by all cultures, eras, and generations.

At the conclusion of the tour, I was very satisfied. I could hardly believe it had been only an hour. I felt I had learned so much new and interesting material from both the historical background portion of the tour as well as speaking and engaging with the character. The educators moderated the Zoom space masterfully and the actress portraying Victoria was fantastically well-rehearsed and very engaging.

With the success of Meet Victoria Confino, the Tenement Museum has expanded its actor-led conversational tours to the Sneiders, a couple who owned 97 Orchard Street’s first business: a lager beer saloon. Both Meet the Sneiders and Meet Victoria Confino are currently running on select dates and times throughout January and February. And you can also check out other virtual experiences, events, and digital exhibitions hosted by the Tenement Museum available on their site.

Meet Victoria Confino runs select dates and times through February. Tickets are $15 or free with museum membership.

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