Hasidim

The Hasidim, a numerous sect of Jews distinguished for their enthusiasm in religious observance and a fanatical worship of their rabbis, appear in Mary Antin's memoir as the spiritual aristocracy of the Pale of Settlement, the movement whose ecstatic piety and communal idealism defined the religious world of her father's family and, by extension, the moral inheritance she carried into America. In the closed society of Polotzk, where a caste system sharply marked off the rich from the poor and the merchant from the artisan, the Hasidim offered a radical counter-hierarchy: simple piety unsupported by learning had a parallel value in the eyes of good families, and religious exaltation could raise a man above his social level more surely than wealth. The sect's emphasis on ecstasy in prayer and fantastic merriment on days of religious rejoicing made a Hasid a hero among his kind, and it was this ethos, more than any doctrine, that shaped the household into which Mary Antin was born and the standards by which her family was measured.

The Sect and Its Ethos

The Hasidim, as Mary Antin describes them, were the sect of enthusiasts who set religious exaltation above rabbinical lore. Where the learned scholar might be preferred in the marriage market to a rich ignoramus, the Hasid achieved his distinction through fervor rather than study. Ecstasy in prayer and fantastic merriment on days of religious rejoicing raised a Hasid to a hero among his kind, and this enthusiasm was the movement's defining trait. The sect's worship was marked by a fanatical devotion to their rabbis, and their religious life was expressed in song as much as in prayer. In her father's house, between courses of the Sabbath midday dinner, the family sang their favorite songs, sometimes Hebrew, sometimes Yiddish, sometimes Russian, or some of the songs without words for which the Hasidim were famous. These wordless melodies were the audible signature of the movement, a form of devotion that bypassed text and commentary in favor of pure, unmediated feeling.

The Zaddik and the Family's Heritage

The most concrete embodiment of Hasidic piety in the memoir is Mary Antin's great-grandfather, Israel Kimanyer, called after the village of Kimanye where he lived. He knew of Hebrew only enough to teach beginners, yet he was famous through a good part of the Pale for his holy life. Israel was poor to the verge of beggary, but he prayed more than other people, never failed in the slightest observance enjoined on Jews, shared his last crust with every chance beggar, and sat up nights to commune with God. His family connections included country peddlers, starving artisans, and ne'er-do-wells, but Israel was a zaddik, a man of piety, and the fame of his good life redeemed the whole wretched clan. The little house that the pious Jews of Kimanye and the neighboring villages built for him, close on a century ago, was constructed with their own hands, for they were too poor to hire workmen. They carried the beams and boards on their shoulders, singing and dancing on the way, as they sang and danced at the presentation of a scroll to the synagogue, and when they conducted the holy man to his new abode, the rejoicing was greater than at the crowning of a czar. When his grandson, Mary's father, came to marry, he boasted his direct descent from Israel Kimanyer and picked his bride from the best families, demonstrating how Hasidic sanctity could be converted into social capital.

The Religion of the Pale

Beneath the grotesque mask of forms, rites, and medieval superstitions, Mary Antin insists, the religion of these fanatics was simply the belief that God was, had been, and ever would be, and that they, the children of Jacob, were His chosen messengers to carry His Law to all the nations. Beneath the mountainous volumes of the Talmudists and commentators, the Mosaic tablets remained intact, and out of the mazes of the Cabala the pure doctrine of ancient Judaism found its way to the hearts of the faithful. Sects and schools might rise and fall, deafening the ears of the simple with the clamor of their disputes, but the core conviction endured. This was the substance behind the show of the Judaism of the Pale, and it was this inheritance, stripped of its outward forms, that the family carried with them when they left Russia. The Hasidic enthusiasm that built her great-grandfather's house was, in her telling, a species of idealism rarely known outside the Pale, a monument to a faith that expressed itself in communal labor and shared joy rather than in wealth or learning.

The Sabbath and the Festivals

The Hasidic spirit governed the rhythm of the family's religious life in Polotzk. On Sabbath morning almost everybody went to synagogue, and those who did not read their prayers and devotions at home. Dinner, at midday, was a pleasant and leisurely meal, and between courses the family sang, sometimes the wordless Hasidic melodies. In the afternoon they went visiting or took long walks out of town, where the fields sprouted and the orchards waited to bloom, and wherever they spent the day, the talk was pleasant, the faces were cheerful, and the joy of Sabbath pervaded everything. The festivals were observed with all due pomp and circumstance: Passover was beautiful with shining new things all through the house, Purim was gay with feasting and presents and the jolly mummers, Succoth was a poem lived in a green arbor, New-Year thrilled the heart with its symbols and promises, and the Day of Atonement moved even the laughing children to a longing for consecration. The year, in this pious house, was an endless song in many cantos of joy, lamentation, aspiration, and rhapsody, and the Hasidic emphasis on ecstatic celebration gave the religious calendar its emotional intensity.

The Legacy in America

Though the outward observances of the Pale were gradually abandoned in America, the Hasidic inheritance persisted in subtler forms. The family's first meal in Boston was an object lesson of much variety, as Mary's father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them, and attempted to introduce the newcomers to a queer, slippery kind of fruit which he called banana. The old world of Sabbath songs and festival rejoicing gave way to new rituals of Americanization, yet the moral seriousness that had animated the Hasidim remained. When Mary, the liberal, the free, found herself afraid to touch a slice of ham at Miss Dillingham's tea, she experienced a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, and self-contempt, and she helped herself to the forbidden meat anyway, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table. The very strength of her reaction testified to the depth of the religious training she had supposedly cast off. The Hasidic world had taught her that the body's appetites were subject to divine law, and though she defied that law in defence of free thought, she could not escape the inner protest that the old piety had installed in her. The grocer Mr. Rosenblum, who supplied the family on credit by the week and by the month, accepting partial payment with thanks and letting the balance stand by the year, embodied a different survival of the old ethos: the communal generosity that had built Israel Kimanyer's house with singing and dancing was still alive in the Harrison Avenue ghetto, where a poor grocer insisted on Mary's mother taking almonds and raisins for a cake for the holidays and detained her father by the half-hour to discuss Mary's progress at school. The Hasidim, as a sect, belonged to the lost world of Polotzk, but their spirit of enthusiasm, communal solidarity, and reverence for the holy survived the crossing, transmuted into the idealism with which Mary Antin embraced her new country and the gratitude with which she remembered the old.