Kashrut

Kashrut, the body of Jewish dietary laws, functions in Mary Antin's memoir as both the daily texture of religious life in Polotzk and the most intimate battleground of Americanization. These laws dictated not merely what could be eaten but how every meal was sanctified, and they bound the individual to the community through a shared discipline of the table. The memoir traces the arc of kashrut from an unquestioned, all-encompassing rule of life in the Pale of Settlement to a conscious, painful choice in America, where the same laws that once defined belonging become the measure of liberation and loss.

The Law in Daily Life

In Polotzk, kashrut was not a matter of personal preference but a comprehensive system that governed the most mundane acts. The memoir records that "How to eat, how to bathe, how to work—everything had been written down for us, and we strove to fulfil the Law." This was not a metaphor but a practical reality: when Mary's mother cut up a chicken and found something wrong with it—"some hurt or mark that should not be"—she sent the housemaid with it to the Rav of Polotzk, who consulted his big books and pronounced judgment. Whatever he decided was right; if he called the chicken "trefah," the family could not eat it, "no, not if I had to starve." The Rav's authority extended far beyond poultry, covering journeys, business, marriage, and the purification of vessels for Passover. This system placed the interpretation of dietary law in the hands of a learned elite, making kashrut a matter of communal trust in religious scholarship rather than individual conscience.

Kashrut and the Sacred Economy

The dietary laws were woven into the economic and social fabric of Jewish life in ways that extended beyond the kitchen. The memoir recounts how Mary's grandfather Raphael, early left an orphan and raised by an elder brother, traveled for several years in the train of his unconventional great-aunt Hode, who had married a fiddler and accompanied him on his travels through "far Russia." In this capacity, the grandfather served as a shohat, providing kosher meat for the little troupe "in the unholy wilds of 'far Russia.'" The grateful couple rewarded him so generously that he soon saved a fortune of eighty rubles, which he then used to open a store in Polotzk on the advice of the Rebbe of Kopistch. This episode reveals that kashrut was not merely a set of prohibitions but also a source of livelihood and social standing, a profession that could lift a poor orphan into prosperity. The shohat's role was one of the "holy callings" that, alongside the Rav, the dayyan, and the hazzan, structured the hierarchy of the community, where "It did not matter how poor a man was, he was to be respected and set above other men, if he were learned in the Law."

The Voyage and the Fear of Trefah

When the news spread through Polotzk that Hannah Hayye had received a steamer ticket for America, the dietary laws became a source of acute anxiety about the journey ahead. The stream of visitors who poured into the Antin home to congratulate the family peppered Mary's mother with questions and advice, among them the pressing concern: "Was it sure that we could get koscher food on the ship?" The neighbors' counsel was practical and dire: "If they did serve trefah on the ship, she and the four children would have to starve, unless she carried provisions from home." They urged her to pack her prayer books and Bible, and "twenty pounds of zwieback at the least." This advice reveals the depth of commitment to kashrut among the Jews of Polotzk, for whom the prospect of eating forbidden food was so intolerable that starvation was considered the preferable alternative. The fear of trefah was not merely about physical sustenance but about the integrity of the soul, a concern that would follow the family across the ocean and into the new world.

The First American Meal and the Erosion of the Law

The family's first meal in America, in their new home on Union Place in Boston, was an "object lesson of much variety" that subtly announced the transformation of their dietary world. Mary's father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat without any cooking, from "little tin cans that had printing all over them," a novelty that bore no relation to the kosher kitchens of Polotzk. He attempted to introduce the newcomers to a "queer, slippery kind of fruit, which he called 'banana,'" but had to give it up for the time being. The scene is comic, but it marks a quiet rupture: the foods of the new world arrived without the elaborate system of laws that had governed every meal in the old one. The canned goods and the banana were not labeled kosher or trefah; they simply existed outside the framework of kashrut altogether. This first meal, eaten with laughter over the rocking-chair, was the beginning of a gradual, unremarked erosion of the dietary discipline that had once been absolute.

The Ham at Miss Dillingham's Tea

The most dramatic confrontation with kashrut in the memoir occurs not in Polotzk but in America, at the tea table of Miss Dillingham, the teacher who had helped Mary in so many ways. Invited to tea, Mary entered her first genuine American household, her first meal at a Gentile—a Christian—board, in much trepidation. All went well until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was strange to her. "Some mischievous instinct told me that it was ham—forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it!" She experienced "a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt," but helped herself to a slice of ham nevertheless, hanging her head over her plate to hide her confusion. Furious with herself for her weakness, she began to reduce the ham to "indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table." Yet the act was far from triumphant: "I ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of myself." The episode reveals that the dietary law, though intellectually rejected, had been inscribed so deeply in her body that its violation produced a visceral revulsion no rational conviction could overcome. She compared herself to the Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected, marveling that "so ridiculous a thing as a scrap of meat should be the symbol and test of things so august."

Kashrut as Memory and Metaphor

Beyond the explicit conflicts over forbidden food, kashrut shapes the memoir's most powerful meditations on memory and loss. The famous passages on Polotzk cheese cake, eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of walks, are suffused with the flavors of a world governed by dietary law. Mary insists that the cake's "notable flavor" cannot be reproduced by any recipe, because "It takes history to make such a cake": one must eat it as a ravenous child in memorable twilights, then be removed across the oceans to a land where the pastry is unknown, abstain for fifteen years, and only then rub "the Aladdin's lamp of memory" to have the tidbit restored. The cheese cake, like the Sabbath meals it belonged to, is inseparable from the rhythm of the Jewish week that kashrut helped to structure. The memoir's account of eating cherries with the stones in a contest with Cousin Shimke's boy, and the later disappointment of American cherries that lacked the "transcendent flavor" of the historical ones, extends this meditation: the foods of childhood carry a taste that no identical fruit in America can match, because the flavor is compounded of the entire lost world of Polotzk. Kashrut, in this reading, is not only a set of prohibitions but also the framework that made certain foods sacred, and therefore unforgettable. The mother's gradual forgetting of "the secrets of Polotzk cookery" in her "assiduous imitation of everything American" is presented not as a loss to be mourned but as a condition that enriches the daughter's memories, making her "the richer in memories for her omissions."

The Law and the New World

The fate of kashrut in America is bound up with the larger transformation of the Antin family's religious life. Mary's father, who had left home in search of bread for his hungry family, went "blessing the necessity that drove him to America," for the boasted freedom of the New World meant to him "the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny." This embrace of freethought, which would culminate in Mary's schoolyard declaration that there was no God, necessarily entailed the rejection of the dietary laws as superstition. Yet the memoir refuses to present this rejection as simple or costless. The ham at Miss Dillingham's tea is eaten "in defence of principles," but the body protests what the mind has accepted. The episode at the tea table, like the schoolyard dispute over God, reveals the gap between intellectual conviction and embodied habit, between the new American self and the old Jewish one. The dietary law, which had once been the most intimate expression of belonging to the community of Polotzk, becomes in America the site of a private struggle between the desire for freedom and the persistence of inherited discipline. The memoir's treatment of kashrut thus encapsulates its larger theme: the making over of the self is never complete, and the old laws leave their mark on the body even after the mind has renounced them.