Foreign passport

The foreign passport is the document that both enables and nearly destroys the Antin family's emigration from the Russian Empire to America. It is the legal instrument by which the Czar's government controls the movement of Jews, confining them to the Pale of Settlement, and it becomes the fragile key to the family's escape. The passport's power is dramatized at the frontier station of Versbolovo, where it is seized and the family is nearly turned back, revealing the precariousness of Jewish existence under the Czar's rule and the arbitrary authority that governs the lives of the Pale's inhabitants.