In the memoir of Mary Antin, New York exists in two distinct registers: as a legendary and somewhat ominous endpoint in the folk geography of Russian Jewish emigration, and as the concrete, personal destination of the author's own intellectual coming-of-age. The city first enters the narrative not as a place on a map but as a name spoken with awe and anxiety in the streets of Polotzk, a place where fortunes were made and where people could also disappear without a word. It is only at the very end of the book that New York becomes Mary's own address, the site of her college years at Barnard, where the long arc of her Americanization reaches its culmination. The city thus frames the entire emigration story, standing at once as the feared terminus of the old world's losses and the proud gateway to the new world's achievements.

New York in the Folk Imagination of Polotzk

Long before Mary Antin ever set foot in America, New York was already a charged name in the collective consciousness of her hometown. When the news spread that her mother, Hannah Hayye, had received a steamer ticket for America, the stream of visitors who poured into the house brought with them a store of cautionary tales and practical warnings about the New World, and New York figured prominently in their lore. One neighbor, Haveh Mirel, the daughter of Yachne the dressmaker, had emigrated to New York two years earlier, and her reported experience was cited as a warning about American discomforts: she wrote her mother that she got up from childbed with sore sides because she had no featherbed. The advice that followed was equally specific and fearful. Mother must not carry her money in a pocketbook but must sew it into the lining of her jacket, because the policemen in Castle Garden, the immigrant landing depot in New York harbor, would take all the passengers' money as they landed unless the travelers denied having any. In these warnings, New York was not a city of opportunity but a place of hard mattresses and predatory officials, a testing ground where the unprepared would suffer.

The most haunting image of New York in these Polotzk conversations comes from Hayye Dvoshe, the wig-maker, who for the eleventh time repeated to Mary's mother the story of her vanished son. He had emigrated to America eighteen months earlier, fresh and well and strong, with twenty-five rubles in his pocket, a steamer ticket, new phylacteries, a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as new. He had written one letter describing his arrival at 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, and how his relative, a clothing merchant who "makes gold," promised him a position in his business. And then, nothing: not a postal card, not a word, "just as if he had vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him." Three letters had been sent, the last one written by Hannah Hayye herself, and still no answer. "Lost, as if in the sea!" the wig-maker lamented. In this telling, New York is the place where a man with every advantage—money, connections, a promised position—could be swallowed whole, a city that received the hopeful and returned nothing. The story hangs over the Antins' own departure as a warning of what America might hold, and it gives New York a shadowy, almost supernatural quality in the folk imagination of the shtetl.

The City as a Benchmark of American Justice

New York also appears, more obliquely, as a benchmark in Mary's developing understanding of American civic life. During her childhood in Chelsea, a great, hulky colored boy who was the torment of the neighborhood treated her roughly while she was playing on the street. Her father, Joseph Antin, determined to teach the rascal a lesson, had him arrested and brought to court. The boy was locked up overnight and emerged with a respect for the rights and persons of his neighbors. But what interested Mary more than her revenge on a bully was the spectacle of justice being administered in the United States: in the little courtroom, "bearded Arlington Street against wool-headed Arlington Street," accused and accuser, witnesses, sympathizers, and sight-seers all gathered as equals. "Nobody cringed, nobody was bullied, nobody lied who didn't want to. We were all free, and all treated equally, just as it said in the Constitution!" The evil-doer was actually punished, and not the victim, as might very easily have happened in a similar case in Russia. This lesson in American equality is not explicitly tied to New York, but it belongs to the same imaginative geography in which the city of Castle Garden looms as the nation's front door, the place where the promises of the Constitution were supposed to be tested against the reality of immigrant arrival. The contrast between the feared New York of the Polotzk warnings and the actual New York of Mary's later life is part of the larger transformation the memoir records.

The Move to Wheeler Street and the Persistence of the Old World

The family's own journey through America's urban landscape kept New York in the background as a point of reference. After their time in Chelsea, the family moved to Wheeler Street in the lower South End of Boston, a neighborhood with more Negroes than Arlington Street had, which promised more numerous outstanding accounts for the family's basement grocery. The Wheeler Street neighborhood was not a place where a refined young lady would care to find herself alone; the delicate damsel would hasten home to wash and purify herself till the foul contact of the street was eradicated. The family's home gave them little besides meals in the kitchen and beds in the dark, and they were glad to join the clubs to which their young neighbors introduced them. The household was crowded with the six of them, the store, the baby, and sometimes a "greener" or two from Polotzk, whom they lodged as a matter of course till they found a permanent home. In this crowded, transitional world, the memory of the old country and the dream of the new remained intertwined, and New York—the great receiving city—was part of the mental map that connected the two.

The South End Ghetto and the Limits of American Promise

The family's later move to Dover Street, near its intersection with Harrison Avenue, deepened Mary's understanding of the urban landscape that New York epitomized. Harrison Avenue, she writes, is to the South End what Salem Street is to the North End: 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, and the street itself in pushcarts and open-air stands; its multitudinous population floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, and the side streets, pushing in and out among the pushcarts all day long and half the night besides. 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, and even Passover cannot quite accomplish the feat, for the cleansing stops at the curbstone. 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. This is the America that the Polotzk emigrants found, and it is the same America that New York, with its Castle Garden and its vanished sons, had promised and withheld.

Barnard College and the Fulfillment of the American Dream

It is against this backdrop of urban squalor and limited promise that Mary's own New York story must be read. At the end of the memoir, she reports that she went to college as she had proposed, though not to Radcliffe. Receiving an invitation to live in New York that she did not like to refuse, she went to Barnard College instead. There she took all the honors that she deserved; and if she did not learn to write poetry, as she once supposed she should, she learned at least to think in English without an accent. The city that had swallowed Hayye Dvoshe's son without a trace became the place where Mary Antin completed her transformation from a greenhorn immigrant into an American intellectual. The contrast could not be more complete: the New York of the wig-maker's lament was a place of disappearance and loss, while the New York of Barnard College was a place of achievement and recognition. The city thus serves as the final proof of the memoir's central argument—that America, for all its slums and its hard mattresses, offered the immigrant a chance to remake herself. New York, the feared and the hoped-for, the city of vanished sons and of college honors, brackets the entire emigration story, from the anxious preparations in Polotzk to the triumphant arrival at the college gate.

The memoir closes with Mary reflecting on the double life she led after leaving the slums, moving 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. She might have filled another book with anecdotes of how she took possession of Beacon Street and learned to distinguish the lord of the manor from the butler in full dress. But the arc of her story, from the darkened room in Polotzk where her father's letter first made "America" her dream, to the college halls of New York where she learned to think without an accent, is complete. New York, in the end, is not the place where emigrants vanish but the place where one emigrant, at least, found herself.