Ghetto

The Ghetto is the foundational spatial and social condition of Mary Antin's memoir, the fixed point of origin from which her entire American journey departs and to which it repeatedly returns for contrast. It is not a single place but a recurring condition of Jewish life, encompassing both the enclosed world of Polotzk in the Russian Pale of Settlement and the immigrant slums of Boston's South End. The concept carries a double meaning throughout the narrative: it is the physical confinement of a people, and it is also the psychological inheritance that shapes the narrator's sense of self, poverty, and communal belonging. Antin's treatment of the ghetto is neither nostalgic nor purely condemnatory; it is the necessary background against which the drama of Americanization unfolds, the darkness that gives the light of the new world its meaning.

The Ghetto of Polotzk: Origins and Early Consciousness

The ghetto first appears in the narrator's earliest memories of her grandfather's house in Polotzk, where she was born. The house stands in her memory as a small, one-story wooden building whose chimneys touch the sky at the same level as its neighbors' chimneys, a deliberately modest image that defies the tendency of childhood homes to loom large in imagination. The yard is screened from the street by a board fence, outside which there is a bench, and the gate swings so high from the ground that pigs find their way in and are shown the way out underneath it, grunting on arrival and squealing on departure. This is the ghetto as intimate domestic space, marked by poverty and proximity rather than by walls or guards. The interior of the house yields only one remembered room, and not so much the room as the window with its blue sash curtain, beyond which lies a narrow, walled garden where deep-red dahlias grow. The garden belongs to the adjoining house, where lives the Gentile girl who is kind to the child. Even in this earliest memory, the ghetto is defined by its boundaries—the fence, the walled garden—and by the presence of a Gentile world just beyond its edges, a world that offers kindness but remains separate.

The narrator's childhood in the ghetto is also a life of intellectual and spiritual formation within the confines of Jewish tradition. She chants the Psalms to the monotonous tune taught by Reb' Lebe, rocking to the rhythm of the chant, sitting by the low window with the world erased from her consciousness. She loves the full, dense, solid sound of the Hebrew words, and her reading becomes so spirited that ignorant listeners are carried away by her performance; her mother tells her that people used to stop outside her window to hear her read. The narrator reflects that she was an ignorant child in the Ghetto, but that she was admitted at last to the society of the best and given the freedom of all America. The ghetto here is not merely a place of deprivation but also a seedbed of the very aspirations that will carry her out of it. The chant of the Psalms, the rocking rhythm, the low window—these are the ghetto's gifts, the cultural capital that will later be exchanged for the freedoms of the new world.

The Ghetto as Condition: Poverty and Communal Life

The ghetto is also defined by its economic and social conditions, which the narrator describes with a mixture of affection and clear-eyed assessment. In Polotzk, the family's circumstances decline to the point where the father must emigrate with borrowed money, traveling to a German port and then being forwarded to Boston at the expense of an emigrant aid society. The mother's health is permanently impaired, her place in the business world has long been filled by others, and there is no capital to start her anew. Her brothers do what they can, but they all have large families with marriageable daughters and sons to be bought out of military service. The allowance they make her is generous compared to their means, but there are four growing children, and the mother is obliged to make do with very little. This is the ghetto as economic trap, a condition of chronic scarcity that forces the family to seek escape.

The communal life of the ghetto is vividly rendered in the scene of the family's departure from Polotzk. When the steamer ticket arrives, the news spreads all over the city that Hannah Hayye has received a ticket for America, and then they begin to come. Friends and foes, distant relatives and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors pour into the street from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Dvina, from over the Polota, a steady stream both day and night till the hour of departure. The mother gives audience, her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlets straying, her apron often at her eyes, receiving her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She is the heroine of Polotzk, and she conducts herself appropriately, giving heart's thanks for congratulations and blessings, ready tears for condolences, patient answers to monotonous questions, and handshakes, kisses, and hugs gratis. The ghetto here is a dense web of human connection, a community that shares in each other's fortunes and misfortunes, that celebrates and mourns together.

The questions and advice that pour in reveal the ghetto's preoccupations and anxieties. The visitors want to handle the ticket and have the mother read what is written on it. How much did it cost? Was it all paid for? Were they going to have a foreign passport or did they intend to steal across the border? Were they not all going to have new dresses to travel in? Was it sure that they could get koscher food on the ship? Suggestions and solid chunks of advice are rammed in by nimble prophecies. The mother ought to make a pilgrimage to a Good Jew, say the Rebbe of Lubavitch, to get his blessing on the journey. She must be sure and pack her prayer books and Bible, and twenty pounds of zwieback at the least. If they did serve trefah on the ship, she and the four children would have to starve, unless she carried provisions from home. Oh, she must take all the featherbeds, for featherbeds are scarce in America. The ghetto is here a world of shared superstition, practical wisdom, and communal anxiety, a place where the boundaries between the sacred and the practical are blurred.

The poignant story of Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, captures the ghetto's experience of loss and uncertainty. For the eleventh time repeating herself to the still-patient mother, she begs for a promise, saying she does not sleep nights for thinking of him. Her son emigrated to America eighteen months ago, fresh and well and strong, with twenty-five ruble in his pocket, besides his steamer ticket, with new phylacteries, and a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as new, made only three years before, everything respectable, there could be nothing better. He sent one letter, how he arrived in Castle Garden, how well he was received by his uncle's son-in-law, how he was conducted to the baths, how they bought him an American suit, everything good, fine, pleasant, and wrote how his relative promised him a position in his business, a clothing merchant, makes gold. And since then not a postal card, not a word, just as if he had vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him. Already three letters have been sent, the last one written by Hannah Hayye herself, and no answer. Lost, as if in the sea. This is the ghetto's other face: the place of those left behind, waiting in anxiety for news from the new world, a place where emigration is both a hope and a source of endless worry.

The American Ghetto: Union Place and the South End

The ghetto is transplanted to America, where it takes on new forms in the tenement districts of Boston. The family's first American home is on Union Place, off Wall Street in the West End, which the narrator describes as a short box of an alley. Two rows of three-story tenements are its sides, a stingy strip of sky is its lid, a littered pavement is the floor, and a narrow mouth its exit. But the narrator, newly arrived from Polotzk, sees a very different picture. She sees two imposing rows of brick buildings, loftier than any dwelling she had ever lived in. Brick is even on the ground for her to tread on, instead of common earth or boards. Many friendly windows stand open, filled with uncovered heads of women and children, and she thinks the people are interested in them, which is very neighborly. She looks up to the topmost row of windows, and her eyes are filled with the May blue of an American sky. The ghetto is here transformed by the immigrant's hopeful gaze, the same physical confinement rendered as wonder and possibility.

The contrast between the old and new ghettos is made explicit in the description of the family's first American apartment. In their days of affluence in Russia, they had been accustomed to upholstered parlors, embroidered linen, silver spoons and candlesticks, goblets of gold, kitchen shelves shining with copper and brass, featherbeds heaped halfway to the ceiling, clothes presses dusky with velvet and silk and fine woollen. The three small rooms into which the father now ushers them, up one flight of stairs, contain only the necessary beds with lean mattresses, a few wooden chairs, a table or two, a mysterious iron structure which later turns out to be a stove, a couple of unornamental kerosene lamps, and a scanty array of cooking-utensils and crockery. And yet they are all impressed with their new home and its furniture. It is not only because they have just passed through their seven lean years, cooking in earthen vessels, eating black bread on holidays and wearing cotton; it is chiefly because these wooden chairs and tin pans are American chairs and pans that they shine glorious in their eyes. The ghetto's poverty is here transfigured by the magic of American identity, a transformation that the mother alone, perhaps, does not fully share, realizing that for her there is as yet no laying down of the burden of poverty.

The family's initiation into American ways begins with the first step on the new soil, and the ghetto is the stage for this education. The father finds occasion to instruct or correct them even on the way from the pier to Wall Street, which journey they make crowded together in a rickety cab. He tells them not to lean out of the windows, not to point, and explains the word greenhorn. They do not want to be greenhorns, and give the strictest attention to the father's instructions. The ghetto is here the classroom of Americanization, the place where the immigrant learns the rules of the new world, often from fellow immigrants who have arrived earlier. The narrator also finds consolation in the use of her surname, discovering on arrival that her father is Mr. Antin on the slightest provocation, and not, as in Polotzk, on state occasions alone. And so she is Mary Antin, and she feels very important to answer to such a dignified title. It is just like America that even plain people should wear their surnames on week days. The ghetto, in this American form, is a place of rapid transformation, where old identities are shed and new ones assumed.

The South End Ghetto: Harrison Avenue and Its Discontents

The most fully developed portrait of the American ghetto comes with the family's move to Dover Street in the South End, where the narrator offers an extended analysis of the neighborhood's character and its place in the city. Dover Street is intersected, near its eastern end, by Harrison Avenue, which is to the South End what Salem Street is to the North End. It is the heart of the South End ghetto, for the greater part of its length, although its northern end belongs to the realm of Chinatown. Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands. Its multitudinous population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides. This is the ghetto as a living organism, a place of relentless activity and crowding, where commerce and humanity spill out of every available space.

The narrator's critique of the ghetto's conditions is sharp and unsparing. Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat, for although the tenements may be scrubbed to their remotest corners, the cleansing stops at the curbstone. A great deal of the filthy rubbish accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often through the windows, and what the ashman on his daily round does not remove is left to be trampled to powder, in which form it steals back into the houses from which it was so lately removed. The City Fathers provide soap and water for the slums, in the form of excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries, but there they stop, at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and discipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into the gutter, for there are no parks and almost no playgrounds in the Harrison Avenue district, in her day there were none. The ghetto is here a site of social failure, a place where the city's benevolence stops short of addressing the root causes of poverty and squalor.

The family's own apartment on Dover Street embodies the ghetto's physical degradation. Their new home consists of five small rooms up two flights of stairs, with the right of way through the dark corridors. In the parlor the dingy paper hangs in rags and the plaster falls in chunks. One of the bedrooms is absolutely dark and air-tight. The kitchen windows look out on a dirty court, at the back of which is the rear tenement of the estate. To them belongs, along with the five rooms and the right of way aforesaid, a block of upper space the length of a pulley line across this court, and the width of an arc described by a windy Monday's wash in its remotest wanderings. The ghetto is here a place of darkness, decay, and confinement, a space that offers its inhabitants little beyond the bare necessities of shelter. The narrator notes that they had no particular reason for coming to Dover Street; it might just as well have been Applepie Alley, for the father had sold, with the goods, fixtures, and good-will of the Wheeler Street store, all his hopes of ever making a living in the grocery trade. They had to live somewhere, even if they were not making a living, so they came to Dover Street, where tenements were cheap, by which she means that rent was low. The ultimate cost of life in those tenements, in terms of human happiness, is high enough.

The Ghetto as Moral and Social Contrast

The ghetto serves throughout the memoir as a moral and social contrast to the world of American opportunity and refinement. The narrator's experience of justice in the American courtroom, when a great, hulky colored boy who torments the neighborhood is arrested and brought to court for treating her roughly, reveals the ghetto's relationship to the larger American order. The boy is locked up overnight and emerges from his brief imprisonment with a respect for the rights and persons of his neighbors. But what interests the narrator more than her revenge on a bully is what she sees of the way in which justice is actually administered in the United States. Here they are gathered in the little courtroom, bearded Arlington Street against wool-headed Arlington Street, accused and accuser, witnesses, sympathizers, sight-seers, and all. Nobody cringes, nobody is bullied, nobody lies who doesn't want to. They are all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution. The evil-doer is actually punished, and not the victim, as might very easily happen in a similar case in Russia. Liberty and justice for all. The ghetto, in this scene, is the place where the American promise of equality is tested and found real, a contrast to the arbitrary justice of the old world.

The ghetto also provides the backdrop for the narrator's later reflections on her double life. She describes how she took possession of Beacon Street and learned to distinguish the lord of the manor from the butler in full dress, tracing her steps from her bare room overlooking the lumber-yard to the satin drawing-rooms of the Back Bay, where she drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were as delicate as their porcelain cups. Coming straight from the cushioned refinement of Beacon Street, where the maid who brought her hostess her slippers spoke in softer accents than the finest people on Dover Street, she sometimes stumbled over poor Mr. Casey lying asleep in the corridor, and the shock of the contrast was like a searchlight turned suddenly on her life. She pondered over the revelation and wrote touching poems, in which she figured as a heroine of two worlds. The ghetto is here the pole of poverty and squalor against which the narrator measures her ascent, the place she has left but which continues to define her identity and her sense of the world's contrasts.

The ghetto, in the end, is both a prison and a point of origin. It is the place of confinement, poverty, and communal solidarity that shapes the narrator's early life, and it is the darkness against which the light of American freedom and opportunity is measured. The narrator's journey is not simply a movement out of the ghetto but a continuous negotiation with it, a process of remembering and reinterpreting the spaces and conditions that made her. The ghetto is the fixed point of her identity, the place she carries with her even as she moves into the drawing-rooms of the Back Bay and the halls of Barnard College. It is the source of her aspirations and the measure of her achievement, the world she left behind but never entirely escapes.