St. Petersburg, the imperial capital of the Russian Empire, looms over Mary Antin's memoir as the distant, forbidding seat of the Czar's authority. For the Jews of the Pale of Settlement, it was not a city of opportunity or culture but a place of prohibition and peril. The narrative consistently presents St. Petersburg as the ultimate expression of the Russian state's power to control, punish, and expel its Jewish population, a dark counterpoint to the liberty that Mary would later find in America. Its name recurs in the text not as a destination but as a warning, a symbol of the bureaucratic and police machinery that governed every aspect of Jewish life in the old country.

The Forbidden City and the Pale

St. Petersburg was one of the cities where Jews from the Pale of Settlement were absolutely forbidden to go. Mary learned that there were certain places in Russia—St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev—where her father, her uncle, or her neighbor must never come at all, no matter what important matters invited them. The police would seize them and send them back to Polotzk, like wicked criminals, although they had never done any wrong. This prohibition was part of the larger system that confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, a designated area that included Polotzk, Vitebsk, Vilna, and other places. Within this area, the Czar commanded the Jews to stay, and they must not be found outside the Pale because they were Jews. The city thus represented the hard boundary of the Jewish world, a place that was geographically part of Russia but legally sealed off from its Jewish inhabitants.

The exclusion was not merely a matter of geography but of identity. The world was divided into Jews and Gentiles, and St. Petersburg belonged emphatically to the Gentile realm. The knowledge of this division came gradually to Mary, trickling into her consciousness drop by drop, so that by the time she fully understood that she was a prisoner, the shackles had grown familiar to her flesh. St. Petersburg was the most glittering symbol of that prison's walls, a place where the Czar and the police wanted all Russia for themselves, a country so big that it took many days for a letter to reach one's father, yet a place where Jews were not welcome.

The Bureaucratic Nightmare

For those few Jews who managed to gain a precarious right to reside outside the Pale, St. Petersburg was the scene of a bureaucratic nightmare. The narrative recounts the story of a capmaker who had duly qualified, by passing an examination and paying for his trade papers, to live in a certain city. When the chief of police suddenly took it into his head to impeach the genuineness of his papers, the capmaker was obliged to travel to St. Petersburg, where he had qualified in the first place, to repeat the examination. He spent the savings of years in petty bribes, trying to hasten the process, but was detained ten months by bureaucratic red tape. When at length he returned to his home town, he found a new chief of police, installed during his absence, who discovered a new flaw in the papers he had just obtained, and expelled him from the city. St. Petersburg was thus not merely a forbidden city but also a place of futile journeys and endless delays, where even the most legitimate claims could be overturned by the arbitrary whims of officials.

The city also served as the origin of some of the cultural innovations that reached the Pale. The fad for "Russian lace" was introduced into Polotzk by a family of sisters who had been expelled from St. Petersburg. These sisters charged enormous fees for lessons and made a fortune out of the sale of patterns while they held the monopoly. Their expulsion from the capital, a sign of the state's cruelty, paradoxically brought a new art to the provinces, and Mary herself mastered the intricate craft, crossing the frozen river with a lace pillow as big as herself to learn from a teacher who lived on the other side. The city's reach thus extended even into the domestic lives of the Pale, its exiles carrying with them the skills and fashions of the capital they were forced to leave.

The Contrast with America

The significance of St. Petersburg in the memoir is sharpened by its contrast with America. When Mary's father landed on American soil, almost his first act was his application for naturalization, 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. This was the direct opposite of the world that St. Petersburg represented, where a Jew's right to reside was bought with bribes and revoked at a policeman's whim.

In America, Mary witnessed the administration of justice in a way that was unimaginable in the Russia of St. Petersburg. When a great, hulky colored boy treated her roughly while she was playing on the street, her father had him arrested and brought to court. In the little courtroom, nobody cringed, nobody was bullied, nobody lied who didn't want to. They 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 happen in a similar case in Russia. The contrast between the arbitrary power of St. Petersburg and the equal justice of the American courtroom was the moral core of her Americanization.

The City's Enduring Shadow

Even after Mary's family settled in America, the shadow of St. Petersburg and the Russian state it represented continued to shape their lives. The family moved from Arlington Street to Wheeler Street in the lower South End of Boston, and then to Dover Street, where Harrison Avenue formed the heart of the South End ghetto. These American streets, with their own forms of poverty and congestion, were a far cry from the imperial capital, yet they carried their own burdens. The narrative's final chapters trace Mary's rise from the slums to the satin drawing-rooms of the Back Bay, where she drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies. She took possession of Beacon Street and learned to distinguish the lord of the manor from the butler in full dress, a journey that would have been unthinkable for a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg. The city thus remains a permanent point of reference, the embodiment of the old world that she left behind, against which her American triumph is measured. The romance of Dover Street, as she calls it, is left largely untold, but the contrast between the reeking slums and the gilded drawing-rooms, between the Russia of St. Petersburg and the America of her citizenship, is the enduring theme of her life.