Quarantine

Quarantine is the two-week detention the Antin family endures in Hamburg before their Atlantic crossing, a liminal state of confinement that transforms the emigrant experience into an epoch of anxiety, longing, and bureaucratic indignity. It marks the threshold between the Old World's oppression and the New World's promise, foreshadowing the Americanization that will redefine the family's identity.

The Ordeal of Detention

The quarantine was a prison in all but name, a place of high brick walls and barred windows that shut out the free world. Several hundred emigrants were herded into half a dozen numbered compartments, sleeping in rows like sick people in a hospital, with roll-call morning and night and short rations three times a day. The fortnight was not an episode but an epoch, divisible into eras, periods, and events, each day stretching with the unfamiliar voice of the invisible ocean, which drew and repelled the detainees at once. The greatest event was the arrival of a ship to take some of the waiting passengers; when the gates opened and the lucky ones said good-bye, those left behind felt hopeless of ever escaping, though they rejoiced in each other's fortune with regretful envy.

The Indignity of Fees and Searches

The quarantine was one of the occasions when the family suspected they were victims of a conspiracy to extort money, for a fee was levied on each person at every repetition of the purifying operations. Mary's mother, seeing her tiny hoard melting away, had sold some articles from their baggage to a fellow passenger richer than she, but even so she did not have enough to pay the fee demanded in Hamburg. Her statement was not accepted, and the family suffered the last indignity of having their persons searched. This bureaucratic humiliation echoed the taxes and fines of the Pale of Settlement, where the Czar always got his dues, and where the police could attach a poor locksmith's household goods, including his young bride's trousseau, for a brother's unpaid conscription fine.

The Threshold to the New World

When their turn came at last, the family was conducted through the gate of departure, and after hours of bewildering manoeuvres, they found themselves—five frightened pilgrims from Polotzk—on the deck of a great steamship afloat on the strange big waters of the ocean. For sixteen days the ship was their world, with seasickness, rough nights when people were thrown from their berths, and dense fogs, but also happy hours on deck with band music and dancing. The quarantine thus stood as the final barrier before the ocean crossing, a state of suspension that intensified the contrast with the freedom they would find in America, where the streets were as bright as a synagogue on a holy day and light was free.

The Legacy of Confinement

The quarantine's memory lingered as a symbol of the emigrant's vulnerability, a prelude to the many transitions the family would undergo. In America, Mary would learn to see justice administered in a courtroom where nobody cringed and nobody was bullied, a stark contrast to the arbitrary searches and fees of Hamburg. The family's moves from Arlington Street to Wheeler Street and then to Dover Street, each a new beginning, echoed the dislocation of quarantine, but in America they could feel at home, with a new baby in a borrowed crib and a school three blocks away where "America" was sung. The quarantine thus became a touchstone for the transformation from prisoner to citizen, from the Pale's fences to the Constitution's protections, a journey that Mary would later describe as being made over.