Dvina

The Dvina is the river that runs through the heart of Mary Antin's childhood world, the fixed geographical fact around which the entire universe of Polotzk is organized. In her memoir, the river is not merely a landmark but the very substance of home—the water whose sweetness she carries in her memory, the highway and playground and drinking-fountain of her early years, and the boundary that, she long believes, marks the edge of all existence. It is the constant against which she measures every later experience of nature, from the ocean of her Atlantic crossing to the tide pools of Nahant, and its imagined permanence becomes the foundation of her childhood understanding of how the world is put together.

The River as the Boundary of the World

For the child Mary, the Dvina is coextensive with Polotzk itself. She has spent her whole life on its banks, and she has always supposed that the river stops where Polotzk stops—that the town and the water together form the whole of the habitable world. The Dvina serves the town in a dozen capacities at once: it is a drinking-fountain and a sewer, a bridge in winter when it freezes over, a highway in summer, and a playground at all times. In thawing time, the streets of Polotzk are clogged with the winter's ice chopped up by street cleaners, and the poor old Dvina is hard-worked carrying away tons of ice and snow and city rubbish accumulated during the long closed months. The river is so thoroughly woven into the town's daily life that Mary cannot conceive of it existing anywhere else; its waters and the town's identity seem to her one and the same thing.

The Revelation at Vitebsk

Mary's childhood cosmology is shattered on a journey to Vitebsk, when she is about eight years old. She has stowed away on a train with a grown-up cousin who is going there, her best dress tied up in a bandana, and after hours of rushing through places with strange names, she arrives in a city much bigger and finer than Polotzk, with beautiful streets and shops and an immense railroad station. But what gives her her one great surprise is something not new at all: the river. The Dvina is in Vitebsk. All her life she has seen the Dvina in Polotzk, and she cannot understand how it can also be here. The train, everybody knows, can go everywhere, even to Russia—but the river? It becomes clear to her that the Dvina goes on and on, like a railroad track, whereas she had always supposed it stopped where Polotzk stopped. She had never seen the end of Polotzk, and she had meant to, when she was bigger. But how can there be an end to Polotzk now, when the Dvina never breaks off at all? It is very curious, she reflects, that the Dvina should remain the same while Polotzk changes into Vitebsk.

This mystery of transmutation leads to much fruitful thinking. The boundary between Polotzk and the rest of the world is not, as she had supposed, a physical barrier like the fence dividing her garden from the street. The world goes like this now: Polotzk—more Polotzk—more Polotzk—Vitebsk! And Vitebsk is not so different, only bigger and brighter and more crowded. And Vitebsk is not the end; the Dvina and the railroad go on beyond it, on to Russia. Then is Russia more Polotzk? Is there also no dividing fence? She longs to see Russia, but very few people go there; when people go to Russia it is a sign of trouble—they cannot make a living at home, or they are drafted for the army, or they have a lawsuit. Nobody goes to Russia for pleasure, for in Russia lives the Czar and a great many cruel people, and in Russia are the dreadful prisons from which people never come back. The river that once defined the limits of her world has become the thread that reveals the world's unboundedness—and its dangers.

The River in Memory and Imagination

The Dvina persists in Mary's memory as the taste and texture of childhood itself. The flavor of Polotzk cheese cake, she writes, contains the sweetness of Dvina water, along with the flavor of daisies and clover picked on the Vall, the richness of newly turned earth she moulded with bare feet and hands, the ripeness of red cherries bought by the dipperful in the market place, and the fragrance of all her childhood's summers. The river is one of the essential ingredients of the phantom dish that memory serves up after fifteen years of abstinence in America. When she tries to recover the transcendent flavor of her cousin's cherries by eating American cherries with the stones, she finds the fruit has no such flavor to yield; and she fears that if she returned to Polotzk and bought a measure of cherries at a market stall, the old species of cherry would prove extinct. The Dvina water that once gave sweetness to everything is now unrecoverable except through the Aladdin's lamp of memory.

The River and the Sea

Mary's inland childhood on the Dvina shapes her first encounter with the ocean. She has spent her life believing that the great waters of the world are spread out before her in the Dvina, and when she comes to live on the edge of the sea during the idle summer after her arrival in America, she must expand her idea of the earth with every day at sea. She lies stretched out in the sun, her eyes level with the water, till she seems absorbed bodily by the materials of the world around her; she crouches on the beach at full moon, wondering between the two splendors of sky and sea; she runs out to meet the incoming storm, her face full in the wind, clinging to a stake or upturned boat, deliciously frightened by the roar and rumble of the waves. The Dvina, which once seemed the whole of the watery world, is revealed as merely its beginning. Yet the river's lesson—that the world goes on and on, that there is no dividing fence—has prepared her for this expansion. The Dvina taught her that Polotzk was not the end; the sea teaches her that America is not the end either.

The River's Place in the Larger Story

The Dvina also marks the human geography of the emigration that structures the memoir. When the news spreads through Polotzk that Hannah Hayye has received a steamer ticket for America, the visitors pour in from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, from nowhere—a steady stream day and night till the hour of departure. The river that once bounded Mary's world becomes the gathering point of the whole community's farewell, as friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, debtors and creditors come to see the family off. The Dvina is the last landmark of the old world, the water that carries the town's identity, and its banks are where the emigrants stand before crossing the ocean. Years later, in America, the river survives only in memory and in the stories the family tells—the history of Polotzk that the children, impatient with the past, have no patience to hear reviewed. The Dvina, which once seemed eternal and all-encompassing, becomes a relic of a world that exists now only in the minds of those who left it.