Military conscription in the Russian Empire

Military conscription in the Russian Empire was far more than a routine obligation of citizenship for the Jews of the Pale of Settlement; it was a dreaded institution that fused the Czar's demand for soldiers with a systematic assault on Jewish religious life. Within the closed world of Polotzk, where the Czar commanded Jews to remain within the Pale, the draft was a recurring threat that shaped family fortunes, drove men to self-inflicted injury, and left permanent scars on those who served. The system's power lay not only in the physical hardships of army life but in its capacity to force a Jew into an "unholy life," breaking the laws of daily religious observance and branding the recruit with a stigma that outlasted his term of service. For the Antin family and their neighbors, conscription was a central fact of existence under the Czar, a measure of the tyranny they fled and a point of stark contrast with the freedoms of their new American home.

The Burden of Service and Its Religious Violations

At the age of twenty-one, the age of conscription, most Jewish men were already married and had children, making the call to service a rupture of family life as well as a personal ordeal. The four-year term of service was not merely a period of hardship but a forced immersion in Gentile life that violated the most fundamental Jewish laws. A soldier often had to eat trefah, food forbidden by dietary law, and to work on the Sabbath, desecrating the holy day. He was compelled to shave his beard, a mark of piety, and to do reverence to Christian things, acts that struck at the core of his religious identity. Unable to attend daily services at the synagogue, his private devotions were further disturbed by the jeers and insults of his coarse Gentile comrades. Though he might resort to tricks and shams to mitigate his transgressions, he was ultimately obliged to violate Jewish law. When he returned home at the end of his term, he could not rid himself of the stigma of those enforced sins; for four years he had led the life of a Gentile, and the community remembered.

The economic consequences were as devastating as the spiritual ones. During the recruit's absence, his family suffered and his business was often ruined, so that at the end of his term he returned a beggar. The state's indifference to his fate was complete: if he happened to have a good uniform at the time of his dismissal, it was stripped from him and replaced by a shabby one. He received a free ticket for the return journey and a few kopecks a day for expenses, and in this fashion he was hurried back into the Pale, like an escaped prisoner. The Czar was done with him, and if within a limited time he was found outside the Pale, he would be seized and sent home in chains. The system thus treated the Jewish veteran as a perpetual suspect, a man whose service had earned him nothing but the right to return to his prison.

Evasion, Self-Mutilation, and Bribery

So great was the dread of conscription that Jewish families resorted to desperate measures to save their sons. There were certain exceptions to the rule of compulsory service: the only son of a family was exempt, and others might be rejected on account of various faults discovered in the physical examination preceding conscription. This gave the people the idea of inflicting injuries on themselves to produce temporary deformities that would lead to rejection. Men would submit to operations on their eyes, ears, or limbs, causing horrible sufferings, in the hope of escaping the service. If the operation was successful, the patient was rejected by the examining officers and, in a short time, was well and a free man. Often, however, the deformity intended to be temporary proved incurable, so that there were many men in Polotzk blind of one eye, hard of hearing, or lame as a result of these secret practices. Yet these permanent maimings were easier to bear than the memory of four years in the Czar's service.

For those with means, there was another path: bribery. Sons of rich fathers could escape service without leaving any marks on their persons, for it was always possible to bribe conscription officers. This was a dangerous practice, and it was not the officers who suffered most in case the negotiations leaked out, but no respectable family would let a son be taken as a recruit until it had made every effort to save him. The narrator's grandfather nearly ruined himself to buy his sons out of service, and her mother told thrilling anecdotes of her younger brother, who for years lived in hiding under assumed names and in various disguises until he had passed the age of liability for service. The narrator's own cousin was not so fortunate. Everything had been done to save him: money had been spent freely, with the uncle not stopping even at his unmarried daughter's portion when everything else was gone. The cousin had also submitted to secret treatment, a devastating drug administered for months before the examination, but the effects were not pronounced enough, and he was passed. For the first few weeks his company was stationed in Polotzk, and the narrator saw her cousin drill on the square, carrying a gun, on a Sabbath. She felt unholy, as if she had sinned the sin in her own person, and she understood why mothers of conscript sons fasted and wept and prayed and worried themselves to their graves.

The narrator insists that neither cowardice nor avarice drove these desperate acts. If it were cowardice, men would not inflict on themselves physical tortures greater than any that threatened them in the army, tortures that often left them maimed for life. If it were avarice, they would not empty their pockets and sell their houses and sink into debt on the chance of successfully bribing the Czar's agents. The Jewish recruit dreaded, indeed, brutality and injustice at the hands of officers and comrades, and he feared for his family, which he left often enough as dependents on the charity of relatives, but the fear of an unholy life was greater than all other fears. The system's true cruelty was its power to force a choice between physical suffering and spiritual damnation, and the community's response revealed which it considered the greater evil.

The Reach of the System Beyond the Recruit

The conscription system's reach extended far beyond the individual soldier, entangling entire families in its web of obligations and punishments. The Czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family. There was a poor locksmith who owed the Czar three hundred rubles because his brother had escaped from Russia before serving his term in the army. There was no such fine for Gentiles, only for Jews, and the whole family was liable. The locksmith could never have so much money, and he had no valuables to pawn. The police came and attached his household goods, everything he had, including his young bride's trousseau, and the sale of the goods brought thirty-five rubles. After a year's time the police came again, looking for the balance of the Czar's dues. They put their seal on everything they found. The bride was in bed with her first baby, a boy, and the circumcision was to be the next day. The police did not leave a sheet to wrap the child in when he was handed up for the operation.

This fine of three hundred rubles was a sentence of lifelong slavery for the poor locksmith, unless he freed himself by some trick. As fast as he could collect a few rags and sticks, the police would be after them. He might hide under a false name if he could get away from Polotzk on a false passport, or he might bribe the proper officials to issue a false certificate of the missing brother's death. Only by false means could he secure peace for himself and his family as long as the Czar was after his dues. The system thus forced its victims into a life of deception and crime, making lawbreakers of men whose only offense was a relative's flight from an intolerable obligation. The bitter sayings of the Pale captured this reality: "It is a false world," the people said, looking at the Czar's portrait and at the flags, and "Never tell a police officer the truth" was good advice.

Conscription and the Contrast with American Freedom

The conscription system was one of the defining oppressions of the Old World, and its memory sharpened the Antin family's appreciation of American liberty. The narrator's father, who had himself been bound by the constraints of the Pale, made almost his first act on landing on American soil, three years before the family joined him, his application for naturalization. He took the remaining steps in the process with eager promptness, and at the earliest moment allowed by the law, he became a citizen of the United States. The boasted freedom of the New World meant to him far more than the right to reside, travel, and work wherever he pleased; it meant the freedom to speak his thoughts, to throw off the shackles of superstition, to test his own fate, unhindered by political or religious tyranny. He was only thirty-two when he landed, and most of his life he had been held in leading-strings; he was hungry for his untasted manhood. The contrast between the Czar's claim on a young man's body and soul and the American promise of self-determination could not have been starker.

This contrast extended to the narrator's own experience of American institutions. When she was challenged in the schoolyard for her father's atheistic views, she held her ground as befitted the defender of a cause, declaring that the persecution of a Fellow Citizen for her choice of God was contrary to the Constitution of the United States. "This is a free country," she reminded her tormentors, invoking George Washington as a standard of justice that Rachel Goldstein and Kitty Maloney failed to meet. The teacher who later took her aside made her understand that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory, initiating her into the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Where the Russian system compelled religious violation, the American system protected religious freedom; where the Czar's conscription seized a man for four years of unholy life, the American Constitution guaranteed the right to any kind of God one chose. The conscription system of the Russian Empire thus served as the dark backdrop against which the promise of America shone, a measure of the tyranny that the Antins and countless others fled and the freedom they found.

The system's legacy was not merely personal but communal, a wall within the wall of the Pale that the Jews built in defiance of their jailers. The religious integrity of the Jews, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale, was a stronghold built of the ruins of their pillaged homes and cemented with the blood of their murdered children. Harassed on every side, thwarted in every normal effort, pent up within narrow limits, the Russian Jew fell back upon the only thing that never failed him, his hereditary faith in God. In the study of the Torah he found the balm for all his wounds; the minute observance of traditional rites became the expression of his spiritual cravings. The conscription system, which sought to break this faith by forcing its violation, instead became one more proof of the world's falsehood and one more reason to dream of deliverance. It was a system that defined the Old World's cruelty, and its memory gave urgency to the narrator's embrace of the New.