Marriage of Frieda Antin and Moses Rifkin

The marriage of Frieda Antin to Moses Rifkin is the event in Mary Antin's memoir where the Old World's social order reasserts itself on American soil. Before the family had been two years in America, Frieda was engaged to be married, a step taken under what Mary calls "the old dispensation." Frieda came to America too late to avail herself of the gifts of an American girlhood; had she been two years younger, Mary reflects, she might have dodged her circumstances and evaded her Old-World fate. She would have gone to school and imbibed American ideas, clung to her girlhood longer instead of marrying at seventeen. Mary, so fond of the American way, always saw it as a pitiful accident that her sister should have come so near and missed by so little the fulfilment of her country's promise to women. A long girlhood, a free choice in marriage, and a brimful womanhood were, in Mary's eyes, the precious rights of an American woman — rights Frieda would never fully possess.

The Old-World Fate and the Father's Decision

Frieda's engagement was the culmination of a destiny fixed long before the family reached Boston. In the Pale of Settlement, a girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen, where she learned to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider, and where her mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household and the conduct proper for a Jewish wife. A girl was born for no other purpose than to be a wife. Marriage was a sacrament among the Jews of the Pale; to rear a family of children was to serve God, and parenthood was the great career. While men might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood, and to be left an old maid was the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl. Frieda's path had been set by these traditions, and America could not entirely undo them.

Mary's father was too recently from the Old World to be entirely free from the influence of its social traditions. He had put Frieda to work out of necessity, and the necessity was hardly lifted when she had an offer of marriage. He would not stand in the way of what he considered her welfare. Let her escape from the workshop, he reasoned, while the roses were still in her cheeks; if she remained for ten years more bent over the needle, what would she gain? Not even her personal comfort, for Frieda never called her earnings her own, spending everything on the family and denying herself all but necessities. The young man who sued for her was a good workman, earning fair wages, of irreproachable character, and refined manners, and Mary's father had known him for years. The act of releasing Frieda was really in the nature of a sacrifice on the father's part, for he was still in the woods financially and would sorely miss her wages. The greater the pity, therefore, that there was no one to counsel him to give America more time with his daughter. She attended the night school and was fond of reading; in books, in a slowly ripening experience, she might have found a better answer to the riddle of a girl's life than a premature marriage.

The Sister's Devotion and the Wedding Preparations

Mary's sister's engagement pleased her very well. Their confidences were not interrupted, and Mary understood that Frieda was happy. Mary was very fond of Moses Rifkin herself; he was the nicest young man of her acquaintance, not at all like other workmen. He was very kind to the children, bringing them presents and taking them out for excursions. He had a sense of humor, and he was going to marry Frieda. How could Mary help being pleased? The marriage was not to take place for some time, and in the interval Frieda remained in the shop, continuing to bring home all her wages. If she was going to desert the family, she would not let them feel it sooner than she must.

Then all of a sudden Frieda turned spendthrift. She appropriated fabulous sums to spend just as she pleased, for once. She attended bargain sales and brought away such finery as had never graced the family's flat before. Home from work in the evening, after a hurried supper, she shut herself up in the parlor and cut and snipped and measured and basted and stitched as if there were nothing else in the world to do. It was early summer, and the air had a wooing touch, even on Wheeler Street, where the family then lived in the lower South End of Boston. Moses Rifkin came, and he also had a wooing touch. But Frieda only smiled and shook her head; and as her mouth was full of pins, it was physically impossible for Moses to argue. She remained all evening in a white disorder of tucked breadths, curled ruffles, dismembered sleeves, and swirls of fresh lace, her needle glancing in the lamplight, and poor Moses picking up her spools.

The Aftermath: A Family Reordered

Frieda was married before the family came to Dover Street, and went to live in East Boston. This left Mary the eldest of the children at home. Whether on this account, or because she was outgrowing her childish carelessness, or because she began to believe, on the cumulative evidence of the Crescent Beach, Chelsea, and Wheeler Street adventures, that America, after all, was not going to provide for her father's family, Mary began at this time to take bread-and-butter matters more to heart and to ponder ways and means of getting rich. Her father sought employment wherever work was going on; his health was poor and he aged very fast. Nevertheless he offered himself for every kind of labor, even for a boy's wages. Here he was found too weak, here too old; here his imperfect English was in the way, here his Jewish appearance. He had a few short terms of work at this or that, but all told he did not earn enough to pay the rent in full and buy a bone for the soup. The only steady source of income, for years, was Mary's brother's earnings from his newspapers. Surely, Mary reflected, this was the time for her to take her sister's place in the workshop. She had had every fair chance until now: school, her time to herself, liberty to run and play and make friends. She had graduated from grammar school and was of legal age to go to work. What was she doing, sitting at home and dreaming?

The marriage thus stands as the hinge between two sisters' fates. Frieda's departure for East Boston and her own household removed the family's breadwinner and left Mary, the scholar, to confront the question of whether she too must sacrifice her education to the family's need. The division had been sealed even before they reached Boston: Frieda would go to work and Mary to school. It was understood, in view of the family prejudices, that this was the inevitable course, and no injustice was intended. Mary's father sent them hand in hand to school before he had ever thought of America; if in America he had been able to support his family unaided, it would have been the culmination of his best hopes to see all his children at school with equal advantages at home. But when he had done his best and was still unable to provide even bread and shelter for them all, he was compelled to make the children self-supporting as fast as it was practicable. There was no choosing possible; Frieda was the oldest, the strongest, the best prepared, and the only one who was of legal age to be put to work.

The Price of the Old Dispensation

The marriage also exemplifies the price paid for the disorganization of family life in immigrant Jewish households where the first generation clings to the traditions of the Old World while the second generation leads the life of the New. Mary called nothing more pitiful, nothing more inevitable, nothing more hopeful than this struggle. The father's headlong and strenuous methods of making Americans of his children had their limits; he could send the children to school on the holy days and keep the store open until Sunday morning, but he could not entirely free his eldest daughter from the fate her girlhood in the Pale had prepared for her. Frieda's marriage was the one area where the old dispensation held firm against the American current. Mary, who would go on to college and to a career as a writer, was the beneficiary of the very freedom her sister missed by so little. The marriage of Frieda Antin and Moses Rifkin is thus the event that most clearly marks the boundary between the two sisters' American experiences — one bound to the workshop and an early wedding, the other bound for the Latin School and beyond.