Odessa

Odessa, the Black Sea port city in the Russian Empire, enters Mary Antin's memoir not as a place she ever visited, but as the farthest eastern reach of her father's three-year exile from Polotzk, and the crucible in which his modern convictions were forged. It stands in the narrative as the geographic and spiritual opposite of the Pale of Settlement's constriction, the place where Pinchus Antin discovered a way of being Jewish that did not demand the surrender of the intellect, and where he found the ideas that would eventually propel his family across the Atlantic. The city's significance is thus less topographical than ideological: it is the seedbed of the Americanization that the rest of the book celebrates, the place where the father's restless dissatisfaction with orthodox life first found a name and a program.

A Father's Journey to the Edge of the Empire

Odessa appears in the narrative as the southern terminus of Pinchus's wanderings after his failure as a storekeeper in Polotzk. With his wife Hannah Hayye expecting their first child, the couple had tried keeping a wayside inn, only to abandon it because the life was too rough for a pregnant woman, and then failed at storekeeping on their own account, with the second child arriving within two years and deepening their need for a reliable income. It was then decided that the father should seek his fortune elsewhere, and he travelled as far east as Tchistopol on the Volga and as far south as Odessa on the Black Sea, trying his luck at various occupations within the usual Jewish restrictions. The journey was a long one, nearly three years in total, and it ended not in Odessa but in a distillery where he reached the position of assistant superintendent with a salary of thirty rubles a month, a fair income for those days. He was planning to have his family join him when the death of his father-in-law, Raphael, left his wife heir to a good business, and he returned to Polotzk. The journey itself, however, had already accomplished its most important work: it had made the father.

The Discovery of a New World

The true significance of Odessa lies in what Pinchus found there. In the large cities of the east and south, he discovered a new world and found himself at home in it. The Jews among whom he lived in those parts were faithful to the essence of the religion, but they allowed themselves more latitude in practice and observance than the people of Polotzk. Instead of bribing government officials to relax the law of compulsory education for boys, these people pushed in numbers at every open door of culture and enlightenment. Most strikingly, even the girls were given books in Odessa and Kherson, as the rock to build their lives on, and not as an ornament for idleness. This was a revelation to a man who had never been heartily devoted to the religious ideals of the Hebrew scholar and had become more and more a dissenter as he matured, without knowing what he wanted to embrace in place of the ideals he rejected. The rigid scheme of orthodox Jewish life in the Pale offered no opening to any other mode of life, but Odessa did. His mind was ready for the reception of such ideas, and he was inspired by the new view of the world which they afforded him.

The Return and the Program of Redemption

When Pinchus returned to Polotzk, he knew what had been wrong with his life before, and he proceeded to remedy it. He resolved to live, as far as the conditions of existence in Polotzk permitted, the life of a modern man, and he saw no better place to begin than with the education of his children. Outwardly he must conform to the ways of his neighbors, just as he must pay tribute to the policeman on the beat, for standing room is necessary to all operations, and social ostracism could ruin him as easily as police persecution. But his children, if he started them right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children's children might even be free men. And education was the one means to redemption. The program bore immediate fruit: his daughters Fetchke and Mary were started with a rebbe in the orthodox way, but they were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and they had a secular teacher besides. The ideal of a modern education was the priceless ware that the father brought back with him from his travels in distant parts, and Odessa was its chief market.

The Contrast with the Pale

The city's role in the memoir is sharpened by the contrast with the world it stood outside of. The Pale of Settlement, which grouped Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other places into a single area within which the Czar commanded the Jews to stay, was a prison whose shackles grew familiar to the flesh. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and the knowledge of this division trickled into a child's consciousness drop by drop. Odessa, by contrast, represented a place where the boundaries of the Pale were, if not abolished, at least stretched to admit a more generous conception of Jewish life. The city was also a reminder of the reach of the Czar's power: even a Jewish recruit returning from military service, stripped of his good uniform and sent home with a free ticket and a few kopecks a day, was hurried back into the Pale like an escaped prisoner, and if found outside it within a limited time, would be seized and sent home in chains. Odessa, for all its liberality, was still within the empire's grasp, and the taxes that burdened the Jews of Polotzk, on houses, rents, business, profits, and even the tobacco that was taxed at every step of its process, were the same taxes that shadowed the southern port. The city's promise was thus always qualified by the reality of the Russian state.

The Legacy of the Southern Journey

The journey that touched Odessa became the hinge of the family's fate. It was the father's travels that made him, transforming a man unfit for the life he led, out of harmony with his surroundings, at odds with his neighbors, into a man with a program. When he finally landed in America, almost his first act on landing was his application for naturalization, and he took the remaining steps with eager promptness, becoming a citizen at the earliest moment allowed by the law. 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 hunger had been whetted in Odessa, where he had first tasted the possibility of a different life. The city thus stands at the beginning of the chain of transformations that the memoir records: the father's journey to the Black Sea, his return with the ideal of modern education, the education of his daughters, and the eventual emigration that made Mary Antin an American writer. Odessa is the place where the future was first imagined, and for that reason it haunts the narrative as a kind of promised land before the Promised Land, a preview of the freedom that America would finally deliver.